George Will Denies Climate Change and Gets Slammed
- Posted by: Cliff Kuang
- on February 17, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Say what you want about George Will, but the man has been a principled and consistent conservative. But every now and then, he produces a big turd of a column. Last Saturday, he used some sneaky rhetoric and half-baked figures to suggest that global warming is just a scare tactic. Let’s break down why his claims are laughably wrong.
Will tries to equate some dire climate warnings by Energy Secretary Stephen Chu with the bygone fad of “global cooling.” A bit about that: Roughly thirty years ago, some in the popular press managed to stir up a story about a possible coming ice age, based in a cooling trend seen between the 1940s and 1970s and the artificial effect of aerosols. Will then uses that anecdote to trot out two findings:
“According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
And the kicker:
“Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.”
Point by point, Will’s argument falls apart. First off, the global-cooling anecdote that Will cites didn’t reflect an actual mainstream scientific opinion—scientists that looked into it at the time concluded that the cooling threat would be far outweighed by warming effects from carbon emissions. It was a half-baked assertion that managed to make the cover of Time—which is a journalistic error, but not a scientific one. (The New Republic summarized the actual debate nicely.) Still, Will uses that example to springboard into a pool of the ripest nonsense.
First, the assertion about ice levels is just wrong. As Talking Points Memo notes, the research group he cites responded thus:
“We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows 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.”
On to the second point. Global warming hasn’t risen since 1998 because that year was particularly hot. No good statistician would take that simplistic, ten-year comparison and close the case. In fact, Nate Silver looked at the longer term statistics and the resulting graph, covering the last sixty years, is damning for Will’s argument.
As the American Prospect points out, conservative columnists seem to trot out a piece on global cooling when they get pinched for an idea. But Will’s column is something else: A willful misreading and outright distortion of the facts, in one of the country’s papers of record. How will the Washington Post respond? So far, they haven’t.
DISCUSSION: 15 Comments
Do they fact-check op-ed columns?
thanks, Cliff, for calling Will out on this bogus column. tmonker–from what I read, apparently WaPo doesn’t fact check op-eds, and editors barely touch the pieces. even worse– the column still appears on the WaPo site without any mention that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center has already made a statement refuting Will’s claim let’s hope the beating they’ve taken in the blogs wakes someone up there.
Gee, I like Will even more now than I did before
Hey Ben and T-monkey—Thanks for reading! Funny to note: After letting their egregious errors go uncorrected (so far) the Post just ran an op-ed lecturing Barbara Boxer about carbon taxes: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/02/fred_hiatt_wont_correct_dishonest_climate_change_columns_will_lecture_congress_on_how_to_handle_climate_change.phpIt’s a reasonable point they’re making—that carbon taxes would be easier to implement than cap and trade—but it’s also totally ridiculous for the Post to be making it, in light of Will’s column
Thank you George Will, wish more poeple spoke with your intellect. The masses are so easily mislead, it’s really starting to get scary.
The big bucks will always go to what needs to be fixed whether it’s really broken or not. So many making money from global warming.
Wake up climate change idiots!! Alaska used to have a tropical rain forest. Check it out on Discovery Channel. It seems the earth has been warmer AND cooler. Go figure. It really doesn’t matter what we humans do. The earth will be as nature intends it to be and there is damn little we can do about it. If it is warming up, then we better build bigger air conditioners and power plants to run them. If it is going to get cooler then we better build bigger heaters. We have to do the adapting. The thought of us warming or cooling the earth is as laughable as seeding a hurricane with dry ice to kill it. As the idiot New Yorkers say “fuggedaboudit”!!
Maybe they fact-check op-ed columns and maybe they don’t. It is obvious no one every fact-checks Al (the whore) Gore. He is the inventor who created the Internet, right?
Want to counteract CO2 emissions? Buy some land and plant a forest. That has a better outcome than complaining about non-existent global warming (at least the presumed human caused type).
The earth has been warming for 400 years since the South Pacific volcano eruption that cooled the planet. We only have about 120 years of recorded temperatures. About half of those years were not very accurate. Trying to extrapolate 60 years of data to cover the several billion years of the earth’s existence is very ludicrous in my book.
Us Senate report said 650 world renoun scientists say man made global warming theory is a fraud. Governments promote this theory because it gives them power over your life. Only Al Gore said discussion is closed. Science is never closed. Scinetists even change their mind on age of earth
Dear Anon—The list of 650 “scientists” you mention wasn’t a “Senate report”. Instead, it was a laughable collection of charlatans, collected by a charlatan—James Inhofe—who bases his votes on literal bible interpretations. Read up on the list: http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/environmentandenergy/archive/2008/12/15/inhofe-s-650-quot-dissenters-quot-make-that-649-648.aspx
There are many planets and moons in our solar system that are warming up. Mars, Jupiter, Triton and Pluto spring to mind just offhand. Are humans also responsible for that? Is it all the cattle farming and cow farts on Mars that are making its ice caps melt? There have ALWAYS been climate changes on earth.
There is one planet where they are digging up oil and coal, burn it, and call it progress. And they do it for hundreds of years. How can you even think for a second that does not make any difference? This is not small scale, all oil in the Earth will be burned in a few decades.
On Feb. 15, Cliff is correct. However, I suspect that Mr. Will last looked at the data at the end of 2008, since he starts the discussion about data starting in September. If so, he would be correct. Since he writes several columns a week, it is likely that he researched this topic back in the late 2008 time frame. So I believe that Cliff is missing the point, global sea ice, not just Arctic ice, shows no significant changes in the last 30 years. I believe the climate is getting warmer and man is a factor in this climate change. However, the global warming crowd seems to want to blame it all on man’s carbon emissions. Over the last 1000000 years, the planet has been 1 to 2 degrees C warmer than today several times. Since most scientists believe there are also natural forces at work and that all man can do is slow the rate of warming, the ocean levels are still going to rise. Wouldn’t it smarter then to move away from the coasts than to cripple the world’s economy?