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In about year 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer - yes, the poet - wrote a step-by-step guide, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, where he described in a clear, technical prose the use of the instrument, to his 10 years old son! A Treatise on the Astrolabe (chirurgeon.org)

My pleasure. Watching the bias train for too long makes me want to comment, I gotta work on that.

A few things here. I think as a whole society has lost the ability (not sure how much there was before, but now it is definitely less) to discuss nuance. The example you mentioned is pretty bad to make your point though, as the 12 year discussion has far more nuance at least in academia and left-leaning areas than on the right wing. Just to make sure we are on the same page, the 12 year deadline was part of an IPCC special report and it was not referring to the demise of the human species, but it was referring to the limiting global warming to 1.5 C which was a seen as a critical factor. In the report we will find quotes such as This is what is part of the discussion in academia and policy and you will note that not even very left leaning governments at any point mentioned death within a decade. I am actually not sure where your claim of a 12 year death deadline came from, but it really sounds like distortion from right wing pundits. Even in left- I am not saying that the left is free from those mistakes, but the example you picked out does not really help your point. But to get back to my earlier point, it is true that outside (and sometimes also within) academia these things are almost never discussed with the necessary detail , and it is quite obvious why. Folks do not want to think. I get that, though in the past there was at least some level of perceived accountability with regard to falsehoods. But also folks were not as easily distracted by social media. We also see it with things which have immediate impact or are just simple facts (Sandy Hook shootings, COVID-19 pandemic) where folks increasingly just design their own reality. Of course this changes the whole discourse as we now have a whole generation of kids growing up with cell phones and social media, and many of those will be in the positions were said nuance would have been important. Yet modern politics demonstrated that facts don't matter, so why shouldn't they choose the easier road?

I often notice ambiguous phrasing and find it very entertaining. Headlines like... Kids make nutritious snacks Miners refuse to work after death Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over Old school pillars are replaced by alumni ...make me wonder if some languages have a syntactical structure that makes such phrases more common. (For another thread, perhaps)

Was the drone wearing a protective tinfoil helmet?

Are there extremes on both sides of the political aisle? Yes, of course. Are they equivalent? No, absolutely not, and anyone suggesting otherwise is arguing a false equivalence. The extremes in the right try kidnapping state governors, think there’s a secret child sex ring running the government and that teachers who let kids read books about slavery should be jailed, and ignore election results by rising up fully armed in a coup or insurrection, whereas extremes on the left try getting us to please address climate change, offer healthcare to poor people, and get the police to stop murder our black citizens in the streets without any consequences.

Understood now.

It can be interpreted - as intended - that Navy used laser to shoot down drone. But it also can be interpreted that Navy shoots down drone which had a laser on it. Here is a snapshot from an MIT lecture with a similar example.

Too late, you did that when you chose to link to politically biased reports. It's quite clear to me he DID read the assessments, and used the erroneous stances and faulty conclusions to form his opinion, not simply because the researchers use scare tactic language and GOP talking points.

The metrics to measure the impact of countermeasures (lockdown is a political scare term)will be things like ICU occupancy rate and rate of change of R number.