George Will has written an irresponsible article [1] denying climate change (AKA global warming). Here’s the basic problem with George Will’s writing, as stated succinctly by The Wonk Room [2]:
In “Dark Green Doomsayers [1],” 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 [3], one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.
Will’s article is riddled with falsehoods. The radically untrue nature of Will’s article [4] 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 [5]. Further, Carl Zimmer of The Loom (at Discover Magazine) has shed lots of light [6] 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 [7].
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 [8]. Maybe his column was yet another example of the phenomenon John Paulos [9] 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 [10]. 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 [11]].
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