Gavin’s “naive optimism” is charming, but I think he has spent too much time around scientists and not enough around propagandists if he expects George Will or The Washington Post to issue anything resembling a substantive correction of Will’s so-called “errors.”

George Will was not “mislead” and did not make any “errors” in his recent column. On the contrary, George Will is a deliberate liar who is knowingly seeking to deceive his readers.

As Gavin notes, The Washington Post has published two previous columns by George Will on anthropogenic global warming — in which Will made some of the same false claims (e.g., the nonexistent 1970s “scientific consensus” for “global cooling” and an imminent ice age) that he recycled nearly verbatim in this column. Those claims were thoroughly and widely debunked at the time, so both George Will and Fred Hiatt, head of the Post’s editorial page, were aware that they were false. They reprinted them anyway.

Fred Hiatt’s response to criticisms of George Will’s deliberately deceptive column, in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, is to assert that it is “healthy” for one of the Post’s columnists to “challenge” the “consensus.”

My question for Mr. Hiatt is, why does he think it is “healthy” for a second-rate sports writer and partisan Republican propagandist with absolutely no scientific credentials whatsoever to “challenge” the overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientific community with deliberate lies and distortions?

The answer is that it is “healthy” for the Post’s bottom line at a time when newspapers everywhere are struggling to stay in business.

Now that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are no longer around to run the Executive Branch as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ExxonMobil, and now that the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress are moving to take action — however inadequate — to reduce CO2 emissions, the fossil fuel corporations will kick their campaign of disinformation into overdrive, in order to undermine public support for any such action.

As the effects of AGW become ever more extreme, frightening and undeniable, and as momentum towards action builds, climate change denialist propaganda will become more aggressive and pervasive, not less so. This can already be seen everywhere the issue is discussed online, with innumerable commenters posting their scripted, programmed, “Climate Science According To Rush Limbaugh” talking points. And as is well documented, the fossil fuel corporations do not balk at spending tens of millions of dollars (small change from their tens of billions of dollars in annual profits) to fund such efforts.

Clearly, Mr. Hiatt has determined that it is in the best business interests of The Washington Post for its editorial page to join the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal as an aggressive purveyor of the fossil fuel corporations’ campaign of deliberate deceit on the subject of anthropogenic global warming.

Neither Fred Hiatt nor George Will are going to acknowledge or correct Will’s “errors” because they were not “errors,” they were deliberate malicious lies, and they both know it.