Annoying Sciency Tropes: Big effing number

Here's a really annoying pattern that comes up in science journalism (OK really any news story that involves a number) and it involves so many fallacies and misdirections and insults to intelligence that I can't over underestimate it. It is the presence of a Big Number.

The yearly output of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere is 50 bajillion tons. Wow, that must be bad because a bajillion is a lot. (Also 'tons'. You can have a ton of air? (of course you can that's physics, but it is counterintuitive enough to simply leave the reader with the simple incoherent feeling of 'wow').

The number of deaths due to the Iraq War of 2003 was approximated at 600,000. Of course that is terrible (any such death is terrible). But is it reliable? Is the scale right? How was the number arrived at? What groups are in that number? Is it overcounted? Undercounted? Adding a zero hardly changes the impact of the story but is still wildly inaccurate.

Million, billion, trillion are hard to distinguish. They're mostly 'really a lot', 'really really a lot', 'that sounds like a lot'.

I realize I'm giving these without context, but the point is that often news stories lack all context too.

There's a little bit of technical obscurantism going on (is a nanometer bigger or smaller than a picometer?) which expects education; that is, it is questionable whose fault this is, the one using the technical term or the one reading it. If the reader were educated, this is the best most accurate communication, what technical language nuances are created for. If the reader is not educated in these nuances (which are not nuances to the initiated), then what?

Part of the annoyance is that this is usually combined with a Base Rate Fallacy; usually no comparison data is given - no comparison with the total or comparable items, no context. For example, the debt of the US government is given (latest number) in news stories as $14 trillion. Obviously this is a big unfathomable number, but also there is nothing to compare it with, either the historical debt (what the trend has been over the past few years, what the debt in other countries is like).

What's the solution? For the reader, look outside the article for the base rate or trend. For the writer, supply that! Give something to compare with.