The problem with trying to alter the meaning of words to suit your political programme is twofold. Firstly, ordinary people don't have a flaming clue what you're talking about. Secondly, you can get yourself in a right pickle.
You remember that there was a bit of a kerfuffle some months back when an opinion poll of published climate scientists found that a quarter of them reckoned the whole global warming thing was being overstated. Lots of people on the sceptical side of the debate then started jumping up and down and hooting like lovelorn monkeys (I include myself in this), and asking "where's your consensus now, greenies?"
To which the inevitable response was that, although the greens had for years been talking as if there were only two or three scientists on the whole planet who disagreed with the AGW theory and that they had been sectioned in 1968, the word consensus actually didn't in any way imply anything like unanimity and so their new position (that some scientists disagreed) was entirely consistent with the old one (there's a consensus).
Got that? It's nonsense of course. But wait for this: they're at it again!
Today's linguistic gymnastics revolves around the meaning of the word "most". A pretty simple word, you might think; one that a moderately literate schoolchild could use with ease? You'd be wrong. According to our green friends, "most" is a (ahem) most interesting word, full of subtlety and nuance.
First a little background. In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I wrote about the shenanigans around the American Physical Society's invitation to Lord Monckton to write a piece supporting the sceptical position on AGW. Today, a chap called Arthur Smith has written a rebuttal of the Monckton piece which he has posted at his website here. He has many criticisms of Monckton, but the one that concerns us relates to Monckton's statement that:
[IPCC, 2007] concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the global warming of the past 50 years
His objections to this statement are as follows:
The relevant statement from the IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM is "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." (p. 10). Note Monckton has substituted "more than half" for "most" (English language implication is a lesser amount), "CO2" for "greenhouse gas" (incorrect but irrelevant), "probably" for "very likely" (strong reduction in implied certainty), "past 50 years" for "since the mid-20th century" (inconsequential) and "global warming" in scare-quotes for "observed increased in global average temperatures" (appears to discredit the observations of warming).
(My emphasis)
The statement I've bolded is simply not correct. "Most" can mean less than half, but when it is used in this alternate sense, the usage is quite different to the way the IPCC have used it.
By way of a non-climate example, we might say,
Tony Blair won the most votes in the 2005 election.
a statement which is true, and psephological nerds will also know that TB secured a share of the vote which was well short of half. But we'd also say of the same election (and again, quite correctly) that,
Most people didn't vote for Tony Blair.
The difference in usage is quite different. When used as a pronoun at the start of a sentence, the word "most" only ever implies more than half. The implications of a contrary view are amusing. Let's look at Arthur Smith's own rebuttal of Lord Monckton. He criticises Monckton's statement that climate models don't predict El Nino, La Nina, and so on, saying.
most of the models used by the IPCC exhibit significant oceanic oscillations of these sorts
[Not that many of them, eh? Less than half?]
He also tells us along the way that
I have recently been closely involved in several email and online discussions on climate and thus have become quite familiar with most of the issues involved.
[Doesn't he think he should be familiar with more than half of the issues before launching his rebuttal?]
Really, guys - with the best will in the world, you'll find life so much easier if you just stick to the everyday meaning of words.