“I believe we are already watching the beginning of this cooling, southeast of Greenland,” Hansen says. “In that case, extra cooling and extra warming along the United States East Coast are not natural fluctuations. The warm water is the reason that [Hurricane] Sandy retained hurricane-force winds up to the New York City area.”

“Have we passed a point of no return? I doubt it, but it’s conceivable,” he adds. “But if we wait until the real world reveals itself clearly, it may be too late to avoid sea-level rise of several meters and loss of all coastal cities.”

The haste that Hansen is calling for here feels like a major change in how experts talk about climate to the public—a change perhaps as significant as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, 10 years old this May. It’s in line with how the Syrian civil war has been increasingly tied to the consequences of climate change; or the ways that public figures—including Miami’s Republican mayor—speak about global warming as a thing happening now instead of in the future. Hansen is trying to wage a public campaign on behalf of science, using scientific events as news pegs.

I think that is indispensable, noble work. It’s the work that Hansen left NASA to do. But as a public consumer of science, it’s important to recognize that this study represents just one scientific finding. Now that Hansen’s findings have been published, they will be tested and vetted and re-checked. Notably, they do not carry the imprimatur of, say, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which releases consensus reports about the best available science. In fact, that is part of the point: Hansen and his team believe they’ve found mechanisms that more popular climate models, including those used by UN teams, don’t take into account.

As such, there is a public responsibility to communicate them clearly. If some of Hansen’s most ambitious arguments prove wrong, it will not invalidate the entire global-warming mechanism. It will not make the need to reduce fossil-fuel use any less dire. It will just mean that the near-term timeline looks somewhat different.

So it was odd to see Slate’s in-house meteorologist, Eric Holthaus, describe Hansen’s findings as pat, in a piece headlined “James Hansen’s Bombshell Climate Warning Is Now Part of the Scientific Canon”:

The world Hansen and his colleagues describe reads like a sci-fi plot synopsis—and it’s now officially part of the scientific canon (though peer review doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a paper is infallible). If Hansen and his colleagues are correct, this paper is likely one of the most important scientific contributions in history—and a stark warning to world governments to speed up the transition to carbon-free energy.

Hansen’s paper does read like science fiction—in fact, more than one journalist has compared it to The Day After Tomorrow. But to describe it as “officially part of the scientific canon” is so overstated as to tend toward meaninglessness. Hansen’s paper is scary, ambitious, fascinating, wide-ranging, well-sourced, and very newsworthy—but it’s just another peer-reviewed scientific paper. The peer review and publication process catches many errors, but it does not guarantee anything close to infallibility. (Consider the “replication crisis” now ripping through academic psychology: a controversy entirely about all the errors allowed to seep through peer review.) Right now, Hansen’s paper is exactly “officially” as much a part of “the scientific canon” as this paper on “feminist glaciology” or this more serious one on murderous prairie dogs.