Why though? Why are we so afraid of accountability? Because this is what people point to when trying to deny things are true: ThErE iS NO EviDeNce, sHoW Me THe StUdY, etc. etc.
> Available evidence rules out natural phenomena as likely drivers, suggesting a large-scale pollution event and its associated mitigation measures most likely precipitated the declines...That the declines began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill points to that event as the most parsimonious explanation. These findings suggest that despite its immense size the deep-pelagic biome is vulnerable to human-induced disturbance and possesses limited resilience to facilitate recovery.
This means "the oil spill caused the declines". That is what this means in English.
The problem is that bad-faith actors weaponize this language to fight against science, facts, and reality. At some point, the evidence is strong enough that it's fine to just plainly say "x caused y" even if there is a 0.0000000000001% probability that by random chance, y would have happened regardless.
This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.
I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.
But as long as we're bringing up general social woes, I'll point out that those misleading statements are pretty tame by today's standards. The more popular strategy now is to just lie outright.
Scientists write for other scientists who already know why they use the language they use. Compromising that language to try to cater to fools who couldn't care less about the truth would just make the scientist a greater fool for trying.
This is a better version of the point I was trying to make, thanks. The framing / who is the audience makes the biggest difference. Had fun watching Digger.
Scientists should not change the scientific method so morons can continue to ignore or cherrypick their studies.
Humans don’t operate at a scientific level in our day to day.
Politicians need to make decisions about the economy with little to no data, and the legal system convicts people at a much lower standard than that science requires us to meet.
And we run our lives at an incredibly lower standard than what science needs to maintain.
It’s fairly easy to see that the Deep Horizon incident should have easily met any of those non science standards (it may have possibly fallen short of the legal standard), to actually enact changes in terms of regulations, or punishment.
Unfortunately, on one side you have an indifferent public that largely depends on activists that it maligns to protect its interests, and on the other side you have billion dollar industries that can buy out the decision makers.