The Word "Within-Model" Is Doing a Great Deal of Work

There is a phrase that has become the load-bearing wall of our public calm, and this week it held up the Polar Cryosphere Survey's Antarctic bulletin: "within-model." It means the ice is behaving as our equations expected. It does not mean the ice is behaving well. I do not write to dispute Dr. Ada Adeyemi's careful science; I write to notice how comfortably a technical term migrates into a civic sedative. A model is a promise about the future built from the past, and every model carries error bars that this quarter, by the Survey's own account, ticked wider. Meanwhile the human numbers do not equivocate: registered migrants past 112 million, water lines lengthening from Phoenix to Lagos, a global mean still parked at 2.8 degrees. "Within-model" is true and it is not the same as "under control." The honest reader holds both. We are not living inside a forecast. We are living inside a summer, and the summer is hot.