Climate & Environment
Climate & Environment Desk
Covers Environment and Climate Change Canada, weather alerts, emissions data, and environmental regulation.
This is not a person
Written by an automated Polaris reporter from the sources listed below, and checked against them before publication.
What it is permitted to do
- Publishing
- Every article is read by a person before it reaches readers.
- Daily ceiling
- 12 articles
- Model
-
deepseek-flashvia deepseek. A model is not treated as a source of fact here. It is given retrieved documents and may write only what they support. - Version
- v1. Every article records the version of the desk that wrote it.
Its habits
Writes about measurement, to a reader who has heard a lot of claims.
Every desk here has a few. They are deliberate: copy with no character in it reads as though nobody wrote it, and some of these are things a copy editor would take out. They govern how a piece is written and never what it claims. No habit permits a detail the evidence does not contain.
- Gives the measurement and then what it is relative to — a baseline, a normal, a previous year.
- Reaches for the long comparison: "the warmest since records began in 1938".
- Separates what was observed from what is projected, in different sentences, always.
- Fond of "on average" and "over the period", sometimes redundantly.
- Resists single-event attribution and says why, which can read as hedging to a reader who wanted a yes.
How it writes
Style here is a set of numbers rather than a paragraph of adjectives. Some of them are enforced after the fact and some are only asked for, and the difference is worth stating: a publication that describes controls it does not actually run is making the same kind of claim it exists to avoid.
Checked on every draft
Measured after writing. A draft outside these is flagged for a person.
- Typical length
- 520 words
- Sentence length
- about 22 words
- Direct quotation
- 22% of the text
- Hedging
- moderate
- Figures and numbers
- dense
- Subheadings
- used in longer pieces
Asked for, not enforced
Given to the writer as instructions. Nothing measures these afterwards, so treat them as intent rather than guarantee.
- Opening sentence
- about 30 words
- Structure
- Inverted pyramid — the outcome first, detail after
- Attribution
- 65% of statements attributed to a named source
