Today we’re humbled with pride to announce what scientists say will be a game-changing feature at the Berg, offering faster elimination of your lingering questions than ever. And don’t worry: CN’s new Rapid Fire Zone will learn from, and build on, the mistakes of the abortive CN Explainer—now deleted—a format we really should have known was overambitious. (The clue is in the name, der freds.)

After that episode—of which let us never speak again—we turned to our readers for ideas. You. The people. The 99% of Internet users who trust Climate Nuremberg, not Breitbart, for their daily science.

And one consistent message came through, right from the day our reader survey opened in 2003. What you’ve been telling us, year after year, is that you don’t care about the Whys and Wherefores—that’s “troll catnip,” “pandering to the immoral minority” and “false balance,” in the words of one courageous young reader, ‘Mikeman,’ from PA., USA.

What you want is the Whats, How Bads, How Fasts and Therefores.

When do you want it? Now.

Well, we listened. That’s what we do to you here at the Berg. We be agile.

After all, sitting around waiting for some evidence is so… Anthropocene. These days, the Days of Thunberg, #We simply #DontHaveTime (as my 16-year-old granddaughter keeps reminding me) for such indulgences.

Just ask any industry-free scientist: by the time the science comes true, it’ll be too late to falsify it, no matter what level of carbon austerity we submit to. The people who publish on the theory of tipping points have been in indefeasible consensus about this since 1850, and what they tell us reads more like the New Testament than a sober IPCC meta-analysis: the shit, they say, shall hit the fan like a thief in the night. And the picture in the crystal ball’s only getting more turbid. It’s as if the more we know about how uncertainty works, the less we know we know (and the more we know we don’t) about the tripwires for explosive climate derealization.

The latest scientists are now putting it like this, in private, after a few drinks: “In the climate-change world—unlike the real world—you can’t always count on getting a trigger warning.”

Michael Mann studies historical trends in tree temperatures, a question we’ve known the answer to since Victorian times. He says the junior scientists who queue outside his office for mentoring are young and—in various cases—diverse, and therefore grasp the urgency of the war on our broken climate better than the dead white geriatrics who occupy the Professorial Chairs ever could.

For Mann’s conga-line of protégés it’s no longer a science, it’s an arms race. And they’ve got no patience for the language of background checks, references, mental health screening, and other dilatory cunctations so beloved by climate delayers.

“‘Cooling-off period’ isn’t even in the vocabulary of tomorrow’s researcher superstars,” he explains, authoritatively but without falling into the easy trap of mannsplaining. “And if it is, it belongs in the same sentence as ‘phlogiston’ and ‘Little Ice Age.'”

Isn’t it time we learnt from them?

So say goodbye to step-by-step walking-you-throughs down tortuous, and often tendentious, garden paths of premise and inference that are all-too-seldom convincing—if they’re even intelligible.

From now on we’re cutting straight to the take-home point[s]. Because people—like you, for example—respond to bullets, not numbers. Climate psychologists were perfectly aware of this when Arrhenius was just a spermatozoon in his father’s eye.

Isn’t it time we learnt from them?

Without further ado, let’s answer your most burning, acidifying questions already. All that and little more when Climate Nuremberg returns with the inaugural Rapid Fire Zone, in a fortnight or so.

Shoot. ■