Showing posts with label George F. Will. Show all posts

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Carl Zimmer: George Will’s crack fact-checkers at the Washington Post continue their nap

George Will’s Crack Fact-Checkers Continue Their Nap

by Carl Zimmer, The Loom, a Discover blog, July 23, 2009

There is no way to keep up with all the bad reporting on science these days, but I cannot resist certain egregious cases. As Loom readers know, George Will writing about global warming is one. This morning brings fresh evidence of his trouble with the facts–and, more importantly–the empty claims of the Washington Post’s editorial page that they respect the time-honored art of fact-checking.

In a nutshell, George Will wrote some columns starting in February 2009 in which he claimed that scientific evidence shows that all the heat-trapping carbon dioxide we’re putting in the atmosphere is having no effect on the planet. He claimed as proof that global ice levels had not changed in thirty years and that in fact there has been no global warming since 1998, just to name two.

giss440.jpgThe Loom and many other blogs pointed out why these claims were in error. Will ignores the fact that climate change is a noisy, long-term process. Today it is cooler at my house than it was yesterday. That does not mean that next week I will wake up to find snow on my doorstep. If you look at the annual mean temperature of the planet, you can cherry-pick one year, such as 1998, in order to make the false claim that there is no global warming. Of course, you could just as easily pick 1999, in which case the same logic would force you to conclude that there has been a staggering increase in temperature. But that’s not how climate scientists actually study global warming. They look at long term patterns, such as the red line in this graph from NASA, which represents the five-year mean since 1880. And when they do, they recognize a long-term trend of rising temperatures.

This somehow slipped through the multiple levels of fact-checking carried out by the editorial page staff at the Washington Post. Nor could they catch the other errors Will made on the science. So my fellow blogger Chris Mooney and the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization made it easy for them, by writing a column and a letter respectively, to set things straight. The Post even saw fit to run both.

They did not, however, issue any correction on Will’s claims. Ombudsman Andrew Alexander, who claimed that there had been fact-checking on multiple levels, did acknowledge things might have been handled a wee bit better, and then offered this sunny thought for the future:

On its news pages, it can recommit to reporting on climate change that is authoritative and deep. On the editorial pages, it can present a mix of respected and informed viewpoints. And online, it can encourage dialogue that is robust, even if it becomes bellicose. [Emphasis mine]

As far as I can tell, Alexander’s wish is being ignored. Today Will has published a column about recent negotiations on controlling carbon emissions. He considers them a bunch of empty promises, which seems to be just fine with Will, because there is no global warming to control anyway. Here’s how Will closes his latest piece:

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.

In earlier days, Will liked to claim the World Meteorological Organization as an authority when he wrote that there has been no global warming since 1998. Now that the World Meteorological Organization has set things straight, he’s claiming a columnist at National Review as his authority. That’s quite an upgrade.

The most urgent question today’s column raises is not about Will, but about how media organizations decide how to present science to the public. If the Post’s editorial page editors really do believe in fact-checking and in “respected and informed viewpoints,” I can only conclude that they slept in very late this morning.

Update: A commenter below accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for not showing a graph with a longer time-scale, which, I guess, would show that there’s no link between between carbon and climate. Ummm…like this one? (CO2 levels as black curve, temperature grey. Source pdf.)

rahmsdorf.jpg

July 23rd, 2009 10:24 AM by Carl Zimmer in Meta, The George Will On Ice Affair | 28 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Link to blog post: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/07/23/george-wills-crack-fact-checkers-continue-their-nap/

Written by fatih al-farahat in , , , ,


Washington Post is blasted again by Joseph Romm and with good reason

Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie

Posted: 23 Jul 2009 10:11 AM PDT

NOAA NCDC Temperature Record

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

There are lies, damn lies, Breakthrough Institute statistics, and then — at the very bottom, where you find the crap that is really hard to scrape off – George Will columns, like the one quoted above. Since the senior editors at the Washington Post continue to publish his long-debunked falsehoods with no caveat whatsoever, one can only assume that they mindlessly endorse every single word of bullshit he writes — and that they hold their readers and letter writers in utter disdain.

When we last left Will and the Post in April, they were once again repeating the disinformation that the globe hasn’t warmed in over a decade — even though they had just published a letter from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) blasting them for this very “misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge” (see “The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages“).

Will is not inaccurately quoting WMO this time — he is just accurately quoting disinformation from the National Review, repeating the long-debunked myth that “there has been no global warming” for 11 years. Yet the definitive global temperature record from U.S. climate experts would be that of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which says the warmest year on record was 2005 — not 1998 (see here). See also “Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far.”

So by failing to put in any caveats or explanation, the Washington Post has managed to let George Will publish the same two outrageous lies in one sentence that two previous letters to the editor had already debunked (see “Washington Post publishes two strong debunkings of George Will’s double dose of disinformation“) — a journalistic first that editorial page editor Fred Hiatt can be proud of, if no one else. Perhaps Hiatt will now publish three letters debunking Will, and then let Will publish three versions of the falsehood.

Let me come back to the caveats. First, let’s note another falsehood that Will and the Post publish in the final paragraph:

Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.

[Note to young folks: George Will and Fred Hiatt and the WashPost would seem to be mocking your commitment to climate action.]

Hmm. Seems like the pantaloons-wearing George Will and Fred Hiatt and the WashPost have never heard of something called the Kyoto protocol, in which all the other rich countries in the world agreed to “unilaterally” impose emissions reductions on themselves — indeed, they went forward with the reductions even after the United States refused to do anything. And the Europeans in particular “unilaterally” imposed a cap-and-trade system on themselves to meet the target (see “Europe poised to meet Kyoto target: Does this mean the much-maligned European Trading System is a success?“). And yet this article explicitly states “On to Copenhagen!” — whose goal is a followup to Kyoto — so it would seem the author does know he’s spreading falsehoods.

But the disinformation machine that goes by the name of the Washington Post editorial page doesn’t mind letting its hundreds of thousands of readers believe the United States is the only country in the planet doing anything (or, in this case, thinking of doing something). Nor does it mind letting its readers believe that public posturing by developing countries like China actually represents an accurate statement of what they are doing or are prepared to do.

But given the many self-inflicted wounds that Hiatt and Will have delivered to the Washington Post, I guess the other senior editors at the paper are suffering from some version of battered spouse syndrome, whereby they just can’t bear to let go of those who are slowly crushing the life out of their journalistic integrity.

I will end by reposting what the Post itself published from the WMO Secretary General (here):

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record — as was done in a recent Post column [by Will] — and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 °F.

Evidence of global warming has been documented in widespread decreases in snow cover, sea ice and glaciers. The 11 warmest years on record occurred in the past 13 years.

While variations occur throughout the temperature record, shorter-term variations do not contradict the overwhelming long-term increase in global surface temperatures since 1850, when reliable meteorological recordkeeping began. Year to year, we may observe in some parts of the world colder or warmer episodes than in other parts, leading to record low or high temperatures. This regional climate variability does not disprove long-term climate change. While 2008 was slightly cooler than 2007, partially due to a La Niña event, it was nonetheless the 10th-warmest year on record.

Duh.

The question is — why did the Post publish this letter in the first place, if it was going to let Will keep republishing again and again and again the same exact “misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge.“ Were they just trying to humor the WMO? Is their letters column just a placebo that readers should ignore along with the rest of the editorial page? Some questionss do answer themselves.

I would say “shame on the Post,” but they are obviously shameless.

Written by fatih al-farahat in , , , ,


Joseph Romm: George Will and WattsUpWithThat embrace a proud former shill for Ken Lay of Enron, a man convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges

George Will and WattsUpWithThat embrace a proud former shill for a man convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges

by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, June 28th, 2009

Denial makes strange bedfellows.

Two of the leading sources of anti-scientific disinformation on global warming — George Will and Anthony Watts’ blog WattsUpWithThat — have embraced a man, Robert Bradley, who proudly shilled for Enron CEO Ken Lay, who was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in 2006.

Watts and I, you may recall, got into a tiny dustup a couple weeks ago (see Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat and here). Since then, Watts has been throwing everything at me including the kitchen stink, with four full posts attacking me this month. I was planning to ignore him, until two things happened.

First, Watts ran a truly nonsensical piece (here) by Bradley, who is now President of the Institute for Energy Research, which “has received $307,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.” Bradley is one of the Denier-Industrial-Complex Kooks (DICKs) — see, for instance, “Mysterious industry front-group affiliated with Ken Lay’s former speechwriter launches anti-Waxman-Markey ads with phony MIT cost figures.”

Second, George Will published a piece, “Tilting at Green Windmills” in which he uses a discredited Spanish “study” to claim clean energy investments don’t create jobs (for debunking by CP and the Regional Minister of Innovation, Enterprise and Employment for the Government of Navarre, see here and here and here). Will’s piece is noteworthy for this remarkable admission:

[This] study was supported by a like-minded U.S. think tank (the Institute for Energy Research, for which this columnist has given a paid speech.

That’s right, George Will published an entire piece based on disinformation bought and paid for by a think tank that is bought and paid for by ExxonMobil and run by Ken Lay’s former top shill — and Will also took money from that think tank. At least editorial page editor Fred Hiatt required that much in return for letting Will publish his umpteenth article full of misleading and inaccurate statements.

Now you may say, wait a minute, Joe, sure Bradley served as Director of Public Policy Analysis at Enron, where he was a speechwriter for CEO Kenneth Lay,” who was “convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges on May 25, 2006″ — but how can you say he proudly shilled for Lay when he has wiped any trace of his connection to Enron from his IER bio here?

Well, I have had the misfortune of knowing Bradley for a long time, since Enron Energy Services (EES) reached out to many leading experts on energy efficiency, and they really liked by book, Cool Companies. Certainly none of the energy efficiency folks were aware of what Enron was doing or they would have quit immediately. I don’t even know if anyone in EES management knew what Ken Lay and his buddies in top management were doing to fraudulently rip-off the public.

And I have no idea whether Bradley knew of the fraudulent activity, but he certainly knew what kind of company he was working for. Over the past several months, Bradley has bombarded me with requests to publish articles about the disinformation he and his IER buddies have written. Just last month he wrote to me and James Hansen:

I wish you (and him) could have been in the Enron government affairs meetings on CO2 trading–we were going to game it to death and make money coming and going. And no one was quaking about the future of global climate.

and before that he wrote to us:

We were going to laugh all the way to the bank with our CO2 trading until the banks said no more laughing–you’re broke. Keep trying Joe–Enron Lives!

As the Biblical Proverb says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Enron does live in on the likes of people like Bradley. That’s why Waxman-Markey has put in many safeguards to protect the public from fraud in the CO2 trading.

Does that mean the system will be free from fraud? Of course not. You can write all the laws you want against fraud and robbery and other crimes, and greedy people who think they are smarter than everyone else will still break the law. The same is true of the tax code — people try to cheat it all the time and some succeed.

But one thing you can certainly say about CO2 trading: The overwhelming majority of CO2 emissions come from the combustion of fossil fuels, and flows of natural gas, oil, and coal are very closely tracked in this country, both sales and purchases. So it would be quite hard to engage in significant fraud of the kind that would lead to, say, much higher actual emissions than were being measured and regulated. And as for cornering the market and running up the price of a tradable commodity, an Enron specialty, again, W-M has multiple safeguards to prevent that outcome.

I am not going to waste time here debunking the latest Bradley-Watts attack on me since I have dealt with almost every point in previous posts. It is 100% nonsense, which is it no surprise since it is largely an excerpt from something Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote. But it does contain one unintentionally humorous attack I will address in a later post.

The point is that one shouldn’t have to debunk anything Bradley writes — or anything the Institute for Energy Research has published or supported, including George Will. You just need to consider the source.

Share

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

34 Responses to “George Will and WattsUpWithThat embrace a proud former shill for a man convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges”

  1. ken levenson Says:
    June 28th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    the right-wingers self-delusion is mercifully loosening its grip on the wider public. how nice to see the climate bill pass -- hopefully we can now ramp-up action fast enough to actually avoid catastrophic climate change.

    I’m beginning to think that the deniers are becoming more irrelevant -- like when all the tabacco executives testified/lied to congress…the game was over.

    Now the issue is that people don’t understand that the horrible effects are not going to wait for generations down the line but are happening here and now and by 2050 we are in for a world of pain.

    And on this point, the paper we love to hate has done it again!!!!!
    With an article on forest fires and beetle destruction…It even had this money quote:

    “But scientists say that recent winters have also lacked the stretches of deep cold — 20 to 40 degrees below zero — that can check the insects’ spread.”

    YET the article never mentions climate change!!!!!! I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I’m starting to wonder….

    http://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 06/ 28/ us/ 28wildfires.html?_r=1&ref=us

    [JR: Good catch. I'll blog on this Monday.]

Link to Joseph Romm's blog post: http://climateprogress.org/2009/06/28/george-will-wattsupwiththat-robert-bradley-ken-lay-enron/

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Climate change myths and facts by Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, refutes George Will's junk science columns

Climate Change Myths and Facts

by Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, March 21, 2009, page A13

A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities.

In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult. Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.

Consider a few of Will's claims from his Feb. 15 column, "Dark Green Doomsayers": In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then."

Yet there's a bigger issue: It's misleading to draw a parallel between "global cooling" concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming -- through the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific academies of various nations (including our own), and leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was "1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979." Again, though, there's a bigger issue: Will's focus on "global" sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it's not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists' expectations -- according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.

Will also wrote that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of many respected scientific institutions that support the consensus that humans are driving global warming. Will probably meant that since 1998 was the warmest year on record according to the WMO -- NASA, in contrast, believes that that honor goes to 2005 -- we haven't had any global warming since. Yet such sleight of hand would lead to the conclusion that "global cooling" sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive or the hotness of the years surrounding them. Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons -- 1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño -- study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it's far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven have occurred in the 2000s -- again, according to the WMO.

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.

Chris Mooney is the author of "The Republican War on Science" and co-author of the forthcoming "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future."

Link to article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032002660.html

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Joseph Romm: Washington Post publishes strong debunking by Chris Mooney and Michael Jarraud of George Will's intentional disinformation

Climate Progress — “the indispensable blog” — Tom Friedman, New York Times

Washington Post publishes two strong debunkings of George Will’s double dose of disinformation

by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, March 21, 2009

Today the Washington Post attempted to restore some of its lost reputation as a credible source of information to the public (see “In a blunder reminiscent of Janet Cooke scandal, the Washington Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones“).

The Post took the unusual step of simultaneously publishing an extended debunking by a leading science journalist, Chris Mooney (here), and by the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Michael Jarraud (here), whose organizations’ work was misused by Will.

Kudos to everybody who wrote a letter to the post or its ombudsman and shamed the Post into publishing some journalism that is science-based, rather than ideology-or disinformation-based, as Will practices. Let’s hope it is a trend — the health and well-being of the next 50 generations depends on it. As Mooney wrote:

Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.

Since Will was merely parroting long-debunked global warming denier talking points that all progressives must know how to answer, I will reprint extended excerpts below, starting with the powerful WMO statement:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record — as was done in a recent Post column [by Will] — and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 °F.

Evidence of global warming has been documented in widespread decreases in snow cover, sea ice and glaciers. The 11 warmest years on record occurred in the past 13 years.

While variations occur throughout the temperature record, shorter-term variations do not contradict the overwhelming long-term increase in global surface temperatures since 1850, when reliable meteorological recordkeeping began. Year to year, we may observe in some parts of the world colder or warmer episodes than in other parts, leading to record low or high temperatures. This regional climate variability does not disprove long-term climate change. While 2008 was slightly cooler than 2007, partially due to a La Niña event, it was nonetheless the 10th-warmest year on record.

And here is the heart of Mooney’s excellent debunking:

In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that “emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.”

Yet there’s a bigger issue: It’s misleading to draw a parallel between “global cooling” concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming — through the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific academies of various nations (including our own), and leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

Will wrote that “according to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was “1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.” Again, though, there’s a bigger issue: Will’s focus on “global” sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it’s not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists’ expectations — according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.

This won’t change many minds in the short term — read the comments here — only a major change in media coverage along the lines Mooney lays out can do that. But it is a start.

Related Posts:

Link to blog: http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/21/washington-post-chris-mooney-wmo-debunking-george-will-global-warming-denier/

Written by fatih al-farahat in , , , , , , ,


Peter Clark, David Braaten, Hugh Ducklow, Douglas Martinson, Chris Field: Antarctica is heating up fast scientists warn

Antarctica is heating up fast, a Kansas researcher and other scientists warn

by Scott Canon, Tricity Herald, March 8, 2009

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- No longer is David Braaten constantly cocooned in his red super parka. He left the insta-freeze winds of the Antarctic interior in January.

But as cold as the trip was for the University of Kansas scientist, he recognizes what one discovery after the next has demonstrated this year: It's getting remarkably warm for down there, and it's heating up incredibly fast.

"We're trying to find out what's happening to the ice," said Braaten, the deputy director of the KU-based Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.

Even as changing climate brings more moisture, and ice, to Antarctica's center, on its edges the frozen continent is becoming less so. Melting skyscrapers of ice crash into the ocean at ever faster rates.

That's raising sea levels, disrupting ocean food chains and reducing the region's ability to moderate the planet's climate.

Climate scientists once were befuddled about why Antarctica seemed, if anything, to be cooling while the rest of the world got toastier. It turns out the bottom of the world has been warming after all.

"More is happening than we thought, and it's happening faster," said Douglas Martinson, who studies the impact of polar oceans on global climate at Columbia University.

Average winter temperatures on the Antarctica peninsula -- changing more than the rest of the continent -- have risen 11 degrees since 1950. That's five times the global warm-up and disastrous to the ice shelves that hang over water and act as corks to bottle up glaciers on land.

In 1950, the Wilkins Ice Shelf was bonded to Antarctica with a 62-mile wide block of ice. Now it clings by an hourglass-shaped link that narrows to just a third of a mile. The Jamaica-size shelf could tumble into the ocean any time.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization said northern Arctic sea ice shrunk to its lowest in the summers of 2007 and 2008 since satellites began watching 30 years ago.

The Southern Ocean, meanwhile, is warming at rates faster than the rest of the Earth.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously," Chris Field of Stanford University told a meeting in Chicago.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize for its scientific consensus on the reality of global warming from human activity. Fresh research suggests the vaunted report lowballed the pace of the problem.

The changes seen now are much faster and parallel the increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in January that although 2008 was one of the world's coolest years this decade, it was still the ninth warmest on record. Since 1880, 10 of the warmest years are since 1997.

A recent column by conservative George Will, in which he argued that concerns about global warming were overwrought and unfounded, was condemned by mainstream climate scientists both for his conclusion and his specifics.

For instance, he said that "global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." But the very authority he cited, the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, said the amount of sea ice in the world was down about 8% over the last three decades, or the equivalent of "Texas, California and Oklahoma combined."

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet covers a third of the continent as well as great expanses of the Weddell and Ross seas.

Fortunately, no one foresees its collapse for centuries, as it could be more catastrophic than previously understood. A recent paper in the journal Science predicted it would shift the planet's axis by a third of a mile and send rising waters sloshing northward.

"It's the difference between spinning a ball with a lump of something on the side, or taking that material and distributing it more evenly around the surface," said Peter Clark, a geosciences professor at Oregon State University.

Scientists had believed such an ice dump would universally raise ocean levels 16.5 feet worldwide, but new computer modeling suggests the shores of North America could face yet five feet more of water.

Braaten and his colleagues try to sort out the complicated question of how much ice still exists. They experiment with high-tech flights to decipher how deep the snow and ice is.

"When you're there, you just see that it looks flat," Braaten said. "Flatter than Nebraska."

But beneath -- the glaciers average 1.5 miles thick in Eastern Antarctica -- sit undulating mountain ranges for Braaten and his colleagues to chart.

Understanding that terrain below and the glaciers piled on top will offer a better idea how much ice may be accumulating in Antarctica's middle -- a consequence of climate change bringing more moisture to the region -- and how much is calving away at the edges.

Particularly on the Antarctica peninsula to the west, the rapid retreat of sea ice has profound consequences for penguins and other wildlife.

"Penguins and seals and whales need that sea ice," said Hugh Ducklow, who also returned from Antarctica to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. "All these ice-loving species are contracting their ranges to the south," chasing after the ice.

The average time per year the ocean around the peninsula is covered by sea ice has fallen by 90 days since 1978. Whaling records suggest the ice began to withdraw as early as the 1930s.

That's meant tiny invertebrates like krill -- which hide from predators and feed on plant matter that grows in the ice -- decline when the ice declines. So do the fish that feed on them, and so on.

"The Arctic was the canary in the coal mine, and we didn't pay much attention when it got sick," said Martinson. "Now the penguins are the canaries down there, and they're not looking too good."

Link to article: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tih/story/502230.html

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Noam Chomsky Excavates the George Will Memory Hole by Gabriel Voiles

Noam Chomsky Excavates the George Will Memory Hole

02/18/2009 by Gabriel Voiles

In a blog post about how it must have been "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet" (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how "on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn't happening" to "a funny story of Noam Chomsky's from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982":

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: He said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek--you know, four lines--in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter; where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" --which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Theorizing that these days "it must be hard for Will to get used to bluggs, because he's spent his entire career with total impunity," Schwarz doesn't spare those people responsible for publishing Will's damaging claptrap either: "Two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won't explain their behavior." See the newest FAIR Action Alert: "Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?: Columnist's Climate Change Denial Distorts Reality" (2/18/09)

Link to above blog post: http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/02/18/noam-chomsky-excavates-the-george-will-memory-hole/

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


SecularAnimist on Real Climate discusses the plain truth about George F. Will and the Washington Post's refusal to retrack the lies and distortions


  2. Comment #85
    SecularAnimist Says:
    2 March 2009 at 8:48 AM

    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.

  3. 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.

Link to RealClimate post on George F. Will: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/what-george-will-should-have-written/langswitch_lang/im#comment-113852

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Michael Asher's Daily Tech article "Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979" as discussed by the Cryosphere Today

On January 1, 2009, an article by Michael Asher entitled “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same
Level as 1979” appeared on the Daily Tech website. We have received many requests
for confirmation and clarification on this article from media outlets and interested
individuals regarding the current state of the cryosphere as it relates to climate change
and/or global warming.

One important detail about the article in the Daily Tech is that the author is comparing
the GLOBAL sea ice area from December 31, 2008, to same variable for December 31,
1979. In the context of climate change, GLOBAL sea ice area may not be the most
relevant indicator. Almost all global climate models project a decrease in the Northern
Hemisphere sea ice area over the next several decades under increasing greenhouse
gas scenarios. But, the same model responses of the Southern Hemisphere sea ice
are less certain. In fact, there have been some recent studies suggesting the amount of
sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere may initially increase as a response to atmospheric
warming through increased evaporation and subsequent snowfall onto the sea ice.
(Details: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050630064726.htm )
Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S.
Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, as
noted in the Daily Tech article. However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is
almost one million sq. km below values seen in late 1979 and S. Hemisphere sea ice
area is about 0.5 million sq. km above that seen in late 1979, partly offsetting the N.
Hemisphere reduction.

Global climate model projections suggest that the most significant response of the cryosphere to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will be seen in Northern Hemisphere summer sea ice extent. Recent decreases of N. Hemisphere summer sea ice extent (green line at right) are consistent with such projections. [See link below for the graph.]

Arctic summer sea ice is only one potential indicator of climate change, however, and we urge interested parties to consider the many variables and resources available when considering observed and model-projected climate change. For example, the ice that is presently in the Arctic Ocean is younger and thinner than the ice of the 1980s and 1990s. So Arctic ice volume is now below its long-term average by an even greater amount than is ice extent or area.

Link to pdf file: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Real Climate: What George F. Will Should Have Written

From Real Climate (ya gotta lov'em!):

28 February 2009

What George Will should have written

Filed under: — gavin @ 3:42 PM

We've avoided piling on to the George Will kerfuffle, partly because this was not a new story for us (we'd commented on very similar distortions in previous columns in 2004 and 2007), but mostly because everyone else seems to be doing a great job in pointing out the problems in his recent columns.

We are actually quite gratified that a much wider group of people than normal have been involved in calling out this latest nonsense, taking the discussion well outside the sometimes-rarefied atmosphere of the scientific blogosphere (summary of links). Maybe RealClimate has succeeded in its original aim of increasing the wider awareness of the scientific context? However, like many, we are profoundly disappointed in the reaction of the Washington Post editors and George Will himself (though the ombudsman's column today is a step in the right direction). It would have been pleasant to see an example of the conservative punditocracy actually learning something from the real world instead of resorting to ever-more unconvincing pseudo-legalistic justifications and attacks on the messenger to avoid taking their head out of the sand. Nonetheless, in a moment of naive optimism, we have allowed ourselves to indulge in a fantasy for how a more serious columnist might have dealt with the issue:

The scientific method in journalism
Feb 29th, 2009, Washington post

This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done.

It is no secret that I am a critic of sensationalism in the coverage of environmental issues and that I have a philosophical preference for reality-based policies over those based on the ideologically-based fantasies of those I critique.

In my last column, I reported on a statistic concerning sea ice extent -- that global sea ice extent is unchanged since 1979 -- that was trivially shown to be untrue, and for that I apologize. Rather than throw the fact checkers in my office or at the Washington Post under the bus, I take full responsibility for the mistake. However, as with good scientific practice, this provides an example of how journalism too can learn from its mistakes.

The source of the original quote was a Daily Tech blog post published in early January. While that post itself was heavily criticized as being misleading, it did use data from a reliable scientific source which was technically accurate at the time. My error was in assuming that scientific 'facts' don't change over a month or two and thus it was not necessary to revisit the source of the original data before writing my column. What was true in January would still be true in February, right? Wrong.

What I didn't consider was that in complex and noisy data there are always going to be outliers, and in heavily politicised subjects there will always be people who will want to exploit a chance occurrence for a sound-bite. I should of course have known better since I decry this practice on a regular basis in discussions of economic issues. Through a combination of wishful thinking and time constraints, my failure to recognize a piece of classic cherry-picking lay at the heart of this problem.

However, sometimes old dogs do learn new tricks. The surprising fact (to me at least) that the difference in global sea ice between two single dates 30 years apart can change so radically in such a short space of time, implies that it is not a particularly good measure of long term climate change. It is a bit like looking at a single stock to gauge the health of the economy. Unfortunately (for me at least), it also validates the scientific consensus about the original article. It was indeed a misleading statistic, and I was indeed misled. Next time I will try and be more careful.

There continues to be a pressing need for an informed conservative discussion of the issues of climate change. Voices such as Senator John McCain, and businessman Jim Manzi (writing in the Nation last year) can perhaps show the way. The distraction of the last week over exact parsings and interpretations of technical data are just a sideshow while real decisions are already being made every day in Washington. In order for conservatives to have a voice at those tables, we need to be seen as serious contributors. Every time we are mislead by amateur bloggers, we lose another chance to influence policy. This may have been useful as a delaying tactic in the past, but now that there is clear leadership in the White House, this serves only to marginalize conservatives even further. Unlikely as it may seem for me to quote President Obama approvingly, it may be time for us to put aside childish things.

If only…..

Link to Real Climate post and comments: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/what-george-will-should-have-written/

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


George F. Will's Dishonesty Explained in Detail by A. Siegel of The Huffington Post -- good job!

Will-ful Deceit on Climate Change: Three Blunt Examples

by A. Siegel, The Huffington Post, February 22, 2009

As discussed in WashPost: Complicit in Disformation (or explicit collaboration)?, last Sunday's George Will column was a disgraceful example of distorted discussion of climate change issues. This deceitful piece and the Washington Post's seeming backing of it has created an uproar through the blogosphere that is seriously questioning what this sort of shoddy editorial management of opinion pages means for any Washington Post claim to journalistic integrity.

Now, this issue goes beyond this George F Will column to his serial stretching of fact to beyond the breaking point beyond truthiness. This issue goes beyond Will's repeated will-ful deceit to the repeated Post publication of deception, often dishonest opinion pieces related to global warming and climate challenges. This is more than about Will's deceit in Dark Green Doomsayers. Even so, it is worth returning to this specific deceitful piece to provide a simple summary of how it is deceitful with some quick references.

Here are just three of the explicit arenas of his deceit:

1. Claims that scientists (especially climatologists) were united in concerns over Global Cooling in 1970s. FALSE.
2. States that sea ice is same today as 1979. At best, misleading and disingenuous. And, his source disagrees with him.
3. States that there has been no global warming for a decade. At absolute best, misleading and disingenuous. And, his source disagrees with him.


"Global Cooling."

Will writes:

In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950"

And, he has reference after reference seemingly nailing the coffin shut to prove this point. Only problem: it is not true that there was some form of scientific consensus around Global Cooling. Science works from hypothesis to testing of hypothesis to, if it stands up to testing, that hypothesis becoming a theory. Unlike Global Warming / Climate Change, which is a Theory, Global Cooling was never more than "hypothesis" and a "widely" disputed one at that. Last fall, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published the peer-reviewed review of this issue with the revealing title of The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. It begins


There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.

But, the true extent of Will's deceit goes further than this. One of the authors of this study, John Fleck, wrote both blog posts and an opinion piece following Will's article. In Cherry-Picked Facts Heat Up Climate Debate (which should be a must read for the Post's hand-picked fact checking team), Fleck points out that Will selectively quotes from articles, misrepresenting the actual conclusions. As to Will-ful deceit, Flect notes

When George Will last wrote about this subject, in May 2008, I sent him a copy of the 1975 Science News article, hoping he might get a fuller picture of what was going on at the time. I got a nice note back from him thanking me for sharing it. It doesn't seem as if he read it, which would have been nicer.

After a fact and truth filled piece, Fleck concludes:

George Will is entitled to his own opinions. He is not entitled to his own facts.


Correlation of Will comments with the truth? Zero.

See the rest of this post and the comments and A. Siegel's astute responses at this link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/a-siegel/will-ful-deceit-three-blu_b_168999.html

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Also from the Cryosphere: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


More on George F. Will's dishonest "journalism," the Washington Post's "fact checkers" and reactions on Joseph Romm's Climate Progress blog

From Joseph Romm's Climate Progress blog, February 20, 2009:

The day DC journalism died: Washington Post is staffed with people who found ZERO mistakes in George Will’s error-filled denial column

After my debunking of George Will’s recent column collection of error-filled denier talking points [redundant], it became somewhat of a sport on the Internet (see Island of Doubt). I had written:

I don’t know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie again and again.

Now we know it is the latter, thanks to Brad Johnson at WonkRoom, who got this jaw-dropping email from Post ombudsman Andy Alexander:

Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will’s column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

Paging Woodward and Bernstein. [The CP fact checker notes that Woodward abandoned journalism based on facts, at least checkable facts, many years ago.]

Both of my parents were professional journalists, and I must say that response makes me want to cry. I could understand Will’s people stooges signing off on his crap — they drink from the same pitcher of Kool-Aid. And I could understand if the Post said that they don’t fact-check opinion pieces.

But there is no clearer evidence of how far traditional journalism has sunk than that five different editors associated with the Washington Post signed off on a piece that brings to mind Mary McCarthy’s famous quip about Lillian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie — including ‘and’ and ‘the.’

I am not going to redebunk Will here point-by-point, but I will excerpt the devastating response to the ombudsman’s lazy defense of Will penned by Hilzoy of the Washington Monthly. After you read it, I’m sure you will want to give Andy Alexander (ombudsman@washpost.com) — “the reader’s advocate” — a piece of your mind (and please do repost it in the comments).

Alexander’s original email ends:

The University of Illinois center that Will cited has now said it doesn’t agree with his conclusion, but earlier this year it put out a statement (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/ cryosphere/ global.sea.ice.area.pdf) that was among several sources for this column and that notes in part that “Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979.”

Hilzoy writes:

Naturally, I clicked the link Mr. Alexander provided, and read it. Did he? I don’t know what would be worse: that he did, and takes it to support Will, or that he didn’t take his job seriously enough to bother.

Remember Will wrote:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Hilzoy then reprints “the statement Mr. Alexander cites as ‘one of’ Will’s sources, including the sentence he specifically references,” (noting that it is a response to an earlier piece in the Daily Tech called “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979″):

One important detail about the article in the Daily Tech is that the author is comparing the GLOBAL sea ice area from December 31, 2008 to same variable for December 31, 1979. In the context of climate change, GLOBAL sea ice area may not be the most relevant indicator. Almost all global climate models project a decrease in the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area over the next several decades under increasing greenhouse gas scenarios. But, the same model responses of the Southern Hemisphere sea ice
are less certain. In fact, there have been some recent studies suggesting the amount of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere may initially increase as a response to atmospheric warming through increased evaporation and subsequent snowfall onto the sea ice.
(Details: http://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/ 2005/ 06/ 050630064726.htm)

Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, as noted in the Daily Tech article. However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is almost one million sq. km below values seen in late 1979 and S. Hemisphere sea ice area is about 0.5 million sq. km above that seen in late 1979, partly offsetting the N. Hemisphere reduction.

Hilzoy writes:

Where I come from, when someone writes something of the form: “P is not evidence for Q, and here’s why”, it is dishonest to quote that person saying P and use that quote as evidence for Q. If one of my students did this, I would grade her down considerably, and would drag her into my office for an unpleasant talk about basic scholarly standards. If she misused quotes in this way repeatedly, I might flunk her.

Will does this more than once. Since it’s Will’s only citation of a peer-reviewed journal I recognize, I checked the quote from Science in this passage:

“Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively).”

It’s from this paper (pdf, subscription wall.) Here is the bit Will cited in context:

“Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth’s orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends — and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.

One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in an exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar’s astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate.”

So that “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” is (a) supposed to happen “over the next 20,000 years”, not imminently, and (b), more importantly: it’s a prediction that does not take into account anthropogenic changes in climate, like, um, those “due to the burning of fossil fuels”. Which is to say, the kind of global warming we’re now talking about.

The fact that this prediction specifically excludes anthropogenic climate change means that you cannot use it to say: those silly scientists; they used to believe that the earth was cooling, and now they think it’s warming. When scientists say “if we don’t take man-made changes to climate into account, the earth will get cooler over the next 20,000 years”, this is completely consistent with saying: “however, when you factor in those man-made changes, the earth will get warmer”, or “when you factor in those changes, we don’t know”, or any number of things.

If Will actually read these two articles, it’s hard to see how he’s not being deliberately deceptive by citing them as he did. If, as I suspect, he just got them from some set of climate change denialist talking points and didn’t bother to actually check them out for himself, he’s being irresponsible. All those people who supposedly fact-checked Will’s article as part of the Post’s “multi-layer editing process” — “people [George Will] personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors” — should be fired, either for not doing their job or for doing it utterly incompetently. These are hard times for newspapers; I wouldn’t have thought they could afford more than one layer of an editing process that produces no discernible improvement in quality.

Hear! Hear!

I would also add as more confirmatory analysis in support of Hilzoy, Will writes “Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization [WMO], there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.” As I demonstrated in my original post, the WMO doesn’t believe there has been global cooling, is in fact is a strong articulator of human-caused global warming, and “citing the World Meteorological Organization against the theory of human-caused global warming makes George Will the most ignorant national columnist, if not the most ignorant columnist in the whole globally warmed world.”But again, the Post would need to take advantage of the high-tech fact checker I use — Google — to know any of that, and the Post is obviously stuck in the days of yellow journalism. Hilzoy ends:

And Andy Alexander? He should read the cites George Will gives him before he sends them out, under his own name, in support of his paper’s decision to publish Will’s piece, if he doesn’t want to be embarrassed like this again.

So now we have a leading Washington Post columnist, his minions, five editors associated with the Post, and the Post ombudsman unable to do the most basic fact checking.

Seriously, one 20-something with access to Google could have done a better job than all of them combined. I used to bemoan the decline of the print media, since my father was a newspaper editor for 30 years and my mother was a columnist a number of times. But now I just see it as a logical evolution.

If you want to find the best journalism now on climate — the most science-based, the most fact-based, the most relevant to your lives and the lives of your children and the people you care about and indeed all of humanity — you must go to the web, specifically the blogosphere.

See this Joseph Romm's Climate Progress blog and the very interesting comments related to this post, here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/20/washington-post-george-will-denier-ombudsman/

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Also from the Cryosphere: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


More from the blogosphere on George F. Will's Flagrant Dishonesty with regard to Climate Change Science of the 1970s

More from the blogosphere on George F. Will's boo-boos:

The War on Scientific Denialism Begins to Move Beyond Scientists

Posted on: February 20, 2009 9:55 AM, by Mike

One of the more promising trends I've seen is that the various forms of denialism that scientists regularly decry (including those of us here at ScienceBlogs) are starting to be recognized by non-scientists. I don't know if there's a direct cause-and-effect here, or if like-minded people are coming up with the same idea (the most depressing cause would be if this got started with a stupid blog comment...). Anyway, I bring you public policy professor Mark Kleiman (italics mine):

One largely unremarked aspect of global-warming denialism (as exemplified by George Will and demolished by Mike ...and Zachary Roth at TPM) is that it amounts to a conspiracy theory. All of the world's actual climate scientists, and everyone in an a allied field capable of understanding their models, would have to be co-conspirators in the plot, with only a rag-tag group of economists, meteorologists, petroleum geologists, astrologers, and political pundits capable of seeing, and willing to say, that the emperor has no clothes.

Most of the glibertarians, cultural conservatives, and gadget-heads who constitute the useful idiots around the core oil-and-coal-company global-warming denialist constituency would be horrified to imagine themselves playing the role of 9/11 Truthers, or RFK Jr. pumping the thimerosal/autism link, or Thabo Mbeki claiming that AIDS isn't caused by HIV. But all four "movements" are alike in depending on compete mistrust of actual scientific experts....

One possible reason that global-warming denialism is more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere is that more Americans than Europeans are Biblical literalists. That involves believing that all biologists and paleontologists are either massively incompetent or deliberately trying to mislead the public about the central facts of their disciplines. [The alternative theory, held by some, is that the entire fossil record is a trick by Satan, intended to deceive those whose faith isn't firm.] I haven't seen any data on the overlap between global-warming denialism and creationism, but thinking about Sarah Palin and her fans you'd have to guess at a strong correlation between the two beliefs.

Global-warming denialism is a special case, of course: the policy implications of the facts about climate change threaten some very large economic interests and some dearly-held political beliefs. So global-warming-denialist brochures are printed on glossy paper. Other than that, though, it's fairly standard-grade fringe pseudoscience, not much different from the folks who write endless papers full of gibberish proving that Einstein was wrong.

...there's uncertainty in the models. (Though that uncertainty, the deniers seem to forget, means that the models might be too modest, as well as too alarmist, in their warnings.) But denialism doesn't promote that serious debate: it merely introduces fake uncertainty, which makes it harder to see all the real uncertainty.

I think this is a good development. I realize some around these parts (ok, one guy on ScienceBlogs) thinks that when people engage in communal psychotic breaks from reality, we should be nice to them. But we have to stop being nice to these guys because this isn't a serious argument but a cracked worldview. And Kleiman makes a very key point, one that I don't think is emphasized enough regarding denialism: it requires conspiracy theories that make the X-Files look tame.

The only difference between most denialists (excepting, perhaps, the useful idiots) and the crazy guy on the corner is that the denialists bathe more often.

Link to the above blog: http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2009/02/the_war_on_scientific_denialis.php

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Cryosphere Today's response to: George F. Will's Flagrant Dishonesty with regard to Climate Change Science of the 1970s

Update of February 21: the Cryosphere Today's webpage no longer displays the text below, but it is still a great site. I can recommend downloading the time-lapse of the year 2008 Arctic sea ice retreat -- it is a huge file, but well worth it.

Feb. 20:
Ok, so now I have noticed that the Univ. of Illinois-Univ. of Colorado's Cryosphere Today group has weighed in on George F. Will's absolutely incredibly badly researched "opinion" piece published in the Washington Post.

Here, below, is what they had to say (click here for Cryosphere Today's website):

February 15, 2009
In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009, in the Washington Post, George Will states, "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data show that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


George F. Will's Flagrant Dishonesty with regard to Climate Change Science of the 1970s

George Will and the Global Cooling Scare Permalink comment E-mail
By John Fleck
Sunday, 15 February 2009 07:50

George Will is entitled to his own opinions. He is not entitled to his own facts.

This morning's (Sun. 2/15) Albuquerque Journal published a column by Will in which he repeats a canard that has been a common theme in the political debate over climate change - that today's alarm over global warming should not be trusted because scientists in the 1970s predicted a looming ice age. (You can find a version of the column here.)

What follows is a string of quotes, that, if you follow them back to their original sources, do not support his thesis. To give but one example: Will's citation of a 1975 Science News article that predicts "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age." But if you read beyond that phrase, you find that the original also says:

The cooling trend observed since 1940 is real enough, he (C.C. Wallen, WMO) says, but not enough is known about the underlying causes to justify any sort of extrapolation.

And this:

Stephen H. Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says that by the turn of the century, enough carbon dioxide will have been put into the atmosphere to raise the temperature of earth half a degree.

The article, rather than predicting a coming ice age, summarizes the uncertainty of the day. Will has cherry-picked a quote to support his thesis while ignoring those that might undercut it.

If Will and the others take this argument seriously, it seems incumbent on all of us interested in the climate change debate to go back to the 1970s, to better understand why scientists might have gotten it so wrong, so we could learn from and avoid their mistakes. But when you do that, you find that it is Will who is getting it wrong.

The evidence is in a peer-reviewed paper published last fall in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (Disclosure: I am one of the paper's authors.) The paper involved a rigorous review of the scientific literature of the day, in an attempt to move beyond the anecdotes cited by Will and others engage on this point. Here is what we found:

An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.

When George Will last wrote about this subject, last May, I sent him a copy of the Science News article he misleadingly quoted in the example I used above. I got a nice note back from him thanking me for sharing it.

Link to the above blog post -- click here.

Blogger's note of February 20th, 2009: Ok, so now I have noticed that the Univ. of Illinois-Univ. of Colorado's Cryosphere Today group has weighed in on George F. Will's absolutely incredibly badly researched "opinion" piece published in the Washington Post.

Here, below, is what they had to say (click here for Cryosphere Today's website):

"February 15, 2009
In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009, in the Washington Post, George Will states, 'According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.'

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data show that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."