For decades now, there have been few things with a worse reputation than “alarmism” among those studying climate change. For a concerned class, this was somewhat strange; you don’t typically hear from public health experts about the need for circumspection in describing the risks of carcinogens, for instance. James Hansen, who first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, has named the phenomenon “scientific reticence,” and in 2007 chastised his colleagues for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was. That
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