Informant38

Fact
The Climate of Man, Part 1

"Midway through it, Zwally told me that he had once seen spy-satellite photos of the region we were crossing, and that they had shown that underneath the snow it was full of crevasses. Later, when I asked Steffen about this, he told me that he had had the whole area surveyed with bottom-seeking radar, and no crevasses of any note had been found. I was never sure which one of them to believe."

Elizabeth Kolbert/New Yorker 18.04.05
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Given the subject, and the message, and the inevitable effect it will have on most of those who read it - global warming, it's here, oh no - and given the intellectual prestige, earned by decades of journalistic integrity and diligent reverence for the written language that's still enjoyed by the magazine, that will give that message a weight it wouldn't get anywhere else - it seems odd that that paragraph was important enough to make it through the editorial process, which one assumes is still fairly rigorous at the New Yorker, even now.
Why throw that much ambiguity into it, when the tone of the rest of the article is so emphatically unambiguous? It's jarring, pernicious, it feeds the paranoia it seems no one can leave home without these days.
Maybe there is no global warming at all, maybe we've forgotten what the weather was like, last year or ten years ago, or when we were children. Maybe it's always been changing, and that's all it is - we're looking up from the narrow rows of our short lives and glimpsing the greater cycle of constant change and balance the seasons and the weather really are.
I don't think so. I think it really is changing, and fast and hard, and that there's a quality to the sunlight now - piercing, harsh, a shallowness almost, something not as warm as before even as it burns more quickly. It's not as yellow as it used to be.