IMO at COP15: Rhetoric opens with a whimper

IMO's opening words to the meeting of the century an exercise in clumsy committee-speak

By Ryan Skinner (email)

It's the organization that I love to hammer, but they make it so darn easy. As COP15 opens with pomp and circumstance, the IMO issued three documents, and first among them a position note, which presumably sums up the IMO's thinking and policy entering this momentous event.

Drum roll. The first words set the tone for the whole thing. Here we go!

"Despite the inertia that characterized mankind's initial reaction to early warnings concerning global warming and ocean acidification, it is encouraging that, albeit belatedly, the world community has now come to acknowledge that increased concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and resulting increases in global temperatures and pH values are altering the complex web of systems that allow life to thrive."

Shazam! Did they really start their grand statement with the phrase "despite the inertia"? Did they really say "the complex web of systems that allow life to thrive"? And I can see some grey suit deep in IMO headquarters scribbling in that "albeit belatedly" in the draft, then looking over his shoulder.

I'm not a nit-picking person. I love errors, malapropisms, mixed metaphors - as long as the gist and thrust are good. But when you're put on the big stage and you sound like a first-year college student who's determined to outdo his professors in wordy befuddledness (and fails), it's a tragedy.

Comments

[Sean Hogue]

Shazam!
I think I nodded off half way through reading that opening statement...
S.

[Clay Maitland]

Well, for many IMO-ers, English is not their first language, and they have to watch what they say! Obscurity is safety...

[Ryan Skinner]

Thoughtful point. Presumably English is one of their first languages. If English isn't the readers' first language, then writing so opaquely certainly doesn't aid comprehension. But maybe that's the point, as you suggest. Either way, doesn't help IMO much...