Mea Culpa: One hell equals about 58,000 Olympic swimming pools

John Rentoul minds our language in last week’s Independent

This model may not be to scale (AFP/Getty)

An underwater volcanic eruption in the Pacific this year put a lot of water into the atmosphere, and we wrote about attempts to analyse what this did to the climate. Our sub-headline said: “Tonga eruption threw so much water vapour into the upper atmosphere it may cause temporary global warming and effect the ozone layer.” Thanks to Julian Self, who wrote to say that this should be “affect”. Affect is the verb, and effect is the noun.

Julian and I then got into a discussion about the main headline: “Tonga volcanic eruption in January blew 58,000 swimming pools of water into the atmosphere, enough to potentially change ozone layer chemistry.” I thought this was an unhelpful comparison, conjuring up in my mind an image of entire swimming pools, with tiles and diving boards intact, being sent into the sky. He thought it “did give it some sense of scale”, reading it, of course, as the amount of water that would fill that many swimming pools – Olympic-sized, as the article itself said – which “immediately screamed one hell of a lot of water”.

The article specified that the quantity of water was estimated at “38 billion or more gallons”. Again, I thought this unhelpful for those trying to grasp the scale – and the “or more” is completely useless. If it is an estimate, it could be more or it could be less: we don’t need the extra words unless we are giving more information about the degree of uncertainty around the central figure.