Back in August, Bob Ward took a pop at Matt Ridley, berating him among other things for an alleged misrepresentation of the global record on drought. Matt's argument was, he claimed "grossly misleading". Much amusement was had when I flagged up the evidence that Matt had cited and Bob mumbled and shuffled before suggesting that the decline wasn't statistically significant. We determined that "grossly misleading" means "correct" in retwardian.
Today Bob is on the case again, spending his tax-funded time to berate...Matt Ridley. This time he is arguing about Matt's case that transient climate response - the amount of warming we will get in the short-term - might be as low as 1.35°C per doubling of carbon dioxide. This figure is sourced from the Lewis and Crok report on climate sensitivity.
Bob first tweeted that the 1.35°C was no more than an assumption. I pointed out to him that the figure was in fact the culmination of 50-odd pages of argument about climate sensitivity. At this point he backed down and said:
You mean 49 pages trying to justify the exclusion of any uncertainty!
So I think we must conclude that in retwardian, "assumes" has roughly the same meaning as "derived" in everyday English.