Mea Culpa: northern lights and contrasting conditions

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, refereed by John Rentoul

Trainspotting: the Eurostar and Eurotunnel shuttle are not the same thing (PA)

In an article about the ways in which the El Nino and La Nina climate patterns might affect world temperatures in the next few years, we used the phrase “boreal summer”. Quite right, too. We said: “The current La Nina began in September 2020 with a brief break in the boreal summer of 2021.” Most readers might have been unsure what it meant, but could guess that it referred to the northern hemisphere – Aurora Borealis and all that.

I am all for using rare words if they sound good and enlarge my vocabulary, but the article also used some rather deadening language that muffled what might otherwise have been a display of scientific virtuosity. We said: “La Nina refers to the largescale cooling of the ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.” There is no excuse for “largescale”, which could safely be deleted as it adds nothing. The scale is apparent from reference to whole regions of the Pacific.

The report went on: “It usually has the opposite effect on weather and climate as El Nino.” That should be “opposite … to”.