George Will has written an irresponsible article denying climate change (AKA global warming). Here’s the basic problem with George Will’s writing, as stated succinctly by The Wonk Room:
In “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will attacked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for discussing a worst-case scenario of California drought caused by the decimation of Sierra snowpack, falsely claiming Chu predicted this will come to pass “no later than 10 years away.” Will also incorrectly claimed that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ — based on a 45-day-old blog post by Daily Tech’s Michael Asher, one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.
Will’s article is riddled with falsehoods. The radically untrue nature of Will’s article is beyond dispute.
Confronted with Will’s cauldron of conservative climate denial propaganda, the Washington Post was faced with a stark choice. It could either A) confess that it failed to do any competent fact-checking or B) compound Will’s lies with its own by claiming that it did real fact-checking. It chose “B.” Here is a description of the WaPo’s pack of lies. Further, Carl Zimmer of The Loom (at Discover Magazine) has shed lots of light on the WaPo’s decision to compound Will’s lies rather than come clean. 
The Wonk Room has now brought the focus razor sharp by publishing the elaborate throw-yourself-on-the-sword correction that the Washington Post should have published.
Here’s the basic problem with people like George Will. He’s one of the many too-comfortable celebrities who treat journalism like a game, not a sincere and self-critical search for knowledge. For many of the celebrity-journalists, writing is a game whereby they consciously decide to parlay their prominent names into cash by pumping drivel into empty column-inches that would all-too-often be better off empty. Remember that George Will is a guy who could barely summon the courage to speak up prior to the election that Obama’s team was more competent than McCain/Palin. He finally blurted out enough clues on that issue to let us know where he was leaning, but he had great difficulty holding his head up and saying the obvious. He is much like a traditional politician in that he is ultra-concerned about offending his “constituents.”
Of course, maybe it wasn’t a desire to placate his right-leaning readers this time. Maybe, this time, the problem was that Will was exceedingly lazy and sloppy. From his article, it’s clear that Will barely dabbles in science; perhaps he doesn’t know enough to know that he doesn’t know enough. Maybe his column was yet another example of the phenomenon John Paulos terms “innumeracy,” the widespread inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, a problem that afflicts even knowledgeable citizens. Maybe it’s all of the above.
There are two entirely independent problems here. Nothing about George Will’s conduct explains the entirely independent journalistic malpractice committed by The Washington Post, which, to this day, claims that it actually fact-checked Will’s article, even though this “fact-checking” could have been done better by many fourth graders. Doesn’t the Washington Post understand that this issue of climate change has immense consequences? Doesn’t the newspaper care that thousands or millions of lives could be ruined or lost and that trillions of dollars of homes and businesses could be at risk if we get this issue wrong?
The problem with George Will and the Washington Post “fact-checkers” can be spotted in all global warming deniers. We call them “deniers” because they work hard to cherry pick their evidence and then they consciously misconstrue it. They are also “deniers” in another sense: they won’t consider the potential consequences of the course they are trying to steer. What if they are wrong? Really and truly. Why can’t they bear to even consider the possibility of half of Florida being under a foot of water. When faced with even a small risk of immense harm, rational people take precautions. That’s why we carry spare tires in our trunks. That’s why rational people don’t let infants play with guns that are “probably” not loaded.
We’ve run into climate change deniers here at Dangerous Intersection. Here’s a recent example. When they shovel out their conservative propaganda, we have referred them to the work of serious scientists. When they have obfuscated and outright lied and we’ve called them on their lies. We all have full time jobs that divert our energies from this website and we operate this site with a budget of $0 (we’ve only recently incorporated advertising which merely offsets some of the cost of hosting).
Compare that to The Washington Post, arguably one of America’s premier newspapers. The WaPo employs full-time professionals to do fact-checking. If those fact-checkers are over their heads, scientifically speaking, they can get world-class scientists on the phone in the blink of an eye. Unless, of course, The Washington Post would rather not know, which is what really happened in this case involved George Will. It would rather not know because it doesn’t have the cojones to confront and thereby embarrass a writer who draws considerable traffic, even when that writer is way out of line. That’s how I see it.
The Washington Post can do better than it did regarding George Will’s decision to serve as a megaphone for the many climate change deniers out there. The Washington Post can do much better. It’s time for the Washington Post to have pride in what it allows to be published on its pages. It can start by publishing the Wonk Room’s correction and signing it.
[Photo of Earth’s thin atmosphere from NASA’s archives].
George Will is not off his rocker, He admits what needs to be admitted when the evidence is or is not present. Call him what you will but his media image has been more correct than most for many years.
Karl. Well-stated for a guy who was at his most dishonest on this exact same issue. You are, in fact, the poster boy, for dishonest climate change denial. Follow the linked example from this post and there you are desperately trying to misrepresent the findings from other sites and trying to pawn off the information from other deniers.
As has been pointed out in other posts, the problem is one of identifying causes. That global warming is occurring is indisputable. Whether what humans are pumping into the atmosphere is the cause or merely exacerbating an otherwise natural cyclic phenomenon is still (marginally) debatable. The question then arises: would curtailing our own emissions do anything to roll back global warming?
There are two ways to look at this. (A) To declare a failure to try is morally culpable or (B) accept that it might do nothing at all and continue on as we have been.
To do (A) would engender huge and expensive effort that, best intentions notwithstanding, will cause enormous convulsions in the industries that supply us with many of the things we've come to rely on to live, not least of which would be Jobs. How much is your morality worth?
To go with (B) however is to ignore all the other problems that attend unbridled emissions which we have known about for many decades. We must not forget that global warming is only the latest in a catalogue of problems connected to how we supply ourselves with energy and equip our lives. We threaten to poison ourselves slowly over time, regardless of the causal connection to global warming.
Will, like most conservatives, is leery of convulsive society-wide changes, and he's not off his rocker to be that way. Revolutions—and the size of the problem in fact calls for revolution if it is to be seriously dealt with—create victims. You might rightly say that doing nothing also creates victims, but for now of a wholly known quantity and type.
So he cherry picks his facts—as do most of us depending on the topic. The problem is that he has a pulpit. People credit his words more than most. But it was probably not laziness. Rather, he's patting the air with both hands, palms downward, and saying "Now, let's not panic, it's not so bad."
He's wrong about that, of course, but consider how much worse a situation might be made by feeding any kind of panic. To someone like Will, jobs may seem more important to preserve—especially now—than the dubious possibility of turning back something that might not be within our power to address.
Mark: You've nailed George Will's thought process, I do believe. Non3theless, he is a conscious liar and I detest that. Climate change is an important issue where smart people like George Will shouldn't conflate their hopes with the facts. If Will wants to communicate more responsibly, he should have written something like this:
I'm going to tell you a bunch of lies about climate change in order to convince you to not make any drastic changes to our economic system because the ensuing stress (and potentially, panic) will result in short term job losses and other bad things, I believe.
Therefore, here are my lies that I am using to obfuscate inconvenient facts . . .
Carl Zimmer has taken the time to respond further regarding George Will's despicable op-ed. Despicable because he is a prominent writer who has deliberately lied or chosen to not be informed before weighing in on a critically important topic. Here's Zimmer's meaty post. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/03/04…
Seeing the energy required to correct the lies reminds me how easy it is spread ignorant populism compared to taking the time to communicate hard-earned scientific results. I really appreciate Carl's energy and dedication to exposing Will's effort to correct the record.
On further thought about Will, I'm wondering further about his motives. He probably took quite a few hits when he refused to support McCain. I'm suspecting that his awful op-ed about climate change is a conscious attempt to win back some of his conservative audience.
Mr. Will no longer has my support for Commissioner of Baseball. Shame on you George Will! Shame!
The Washington Post is starting to get the facts right. That's a step in the right direction.
Now they need to fact check George Will's future columns.
It's not all just jabber. There is some real science in climate science, as Chris Mooney points out.
The Washington Post still doesn't get it. George Will misstated facts, and neither Will nor the Washington Post has been willing to own up to it.
The Washington Post apparently loves the ad revenue it generates when it publishes junk science. The most recent incident is an op-ed piece by climatologist Sarah Palin. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/the_washi…
The climate deniers need to look at the graph that is part of this post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/the-…
I must admit that I have not read either Will’s article nor WaPo’s allegedly bad fact-checking. I have been following the topic since about 1990 in scientific journals. I do not know what source Will cited for the claim about North Atlantic Sea Ice; I saw the information in late January 2009 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, reporting the results of a NOAA satellite study that showed the sea ice unchanged since 1979. The article was taken down within 24 hours; it is my understanding that the order to do so came from the White House.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m a scientist and for the past nearly thirty years my specialty has been complex systems. The most complex system I know in which humans are an actor is the global climate. We affect the system and are affected by the system by definition. I am not a denier, because that would imply that I have a relevant belief. I neither believe nor disbelieve anything about science. I either know or I don’t. Climate changes constantly and that is indisputable. What causes short-term changes, on, say, a scale of a few million years, is not well understood. I have never seen a model of the climate that identifies the 10,000 most consequential actors in the system. If I have learned one thing, it is to approach complex systems with humility, not hubris. And, getting emotional about the subject is not helpful.
I support major reductions in the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and elimination of their use as soon as practicable. In fact, I can make a compelling case for this without ever mentioning global warming or climate change. So, my question is, why haven’t AGW enthusiasts made that simple compelling case, avoiding emotion and dispute if the desire is to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuel? I ask the question and get emotional responses and accusations of denying science, of not caring about (fill in the blank), everything except a straightforward answer. This is the third time I’ve seen groups take positions in which they claim to be the only ones who care and attempt to shame those who are insufficiently zealous into agreeing. In the first two cases the activists were appeased at great cost to others, and the activists got to feel vindicated. I don’t care who is vindicated.