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

September 14, 2014

We all do well to remember how we got to this point.  

Things seemed very different in June of 2009.  People were finally very hopeful that we were on the road to doing something about carbon emissions.  (Please read the comments at the link to the post.  They are really instructive.  Some of you will recognize the names.  I see Peter Sinclair, Gail Zawacki, Dano, dhogaza and Anna Hayes, for example.  For the uninitiate, "TVMOB" = Viscount Monckton.)  

Not so many months after Joe Romm wrote this post, the fake scandal of "Climategate" was trumped up, and the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (COP15) was in shambles.  President Obama and Secretary Clinton had to chase after the BRIC leaders holding secret meetings.  

Senator Inhofe was threatening Michael Mann.  The main newspapers and TV networks took climate change off the radar.

And so here we are.......

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, June 28 and 29, 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 biohere?

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 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.

SEE COMMENTS HERE:  http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/06/28/204287/george-will-wattsupwiththat-robert-bradley-ken-lay-enron/

Joe Romm: 6 Ways The Washington Post Could Show It’s Serious About Climate Change

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, August 27, 2014

CREDIT: AP

Cheers to the Washington Post for (finally) taking human-caused climate change seriously enough to launch a series of editorials demanding a change in both dialogue and action. Jeers for suggesting the paper will now be “more inclined to take op-eds that challenge” their view that climate science is real and that the threat posed by it is “existential.”

The Post’s first editorial in the series this week was about “The country’s sinking debate over global warming.” It begins by stating “the national debate on climate change has devolved.” As the paper’s editorial board explains, it’s devolved from serious talk by both parties before Obama’s election into inaction because “a faction that rejects the science of global warming dragged the GOP into irresponsible head-in-the-sand-ism.”

But there are there other reasons that the debate has devolved into paralysis, including ones that are in the direct control of major national media outlets like the Post. In particular, if the Post is serious, it needs to start treating the story of the century as the story of the century and treating the established science as established science, not debatable politics.

Indeed, the paper’s second editorial notes, “among mainstream scientists, this paralysis is mind-boggling.” And the Post summarizes the editorial this way:

Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt explained to Media Matters why the Post took the unusual step of committing to a week of editorials on climate change: “Over the long run it is an existential threat to the planet, I believe that, so you don’t get much bigger than that.” Precisely.

In the spirit of these statements by the paper, here are six ways the Washington Post could show that it truly gets that climate change is an “existential threat.”

1. Fact-check op-eds on climate
2. Stop printing comments and letters from climate science deniers
3. End false balance
4. Restore coverage on climate change
5. Put Juliet Eilperin (and/or another top climate reporter) back on the climate beat
6. Bring on a full-time science blogger

Let’s look a little closer at those.

Fact-check op-eds on climate

Ideally, the Washington Post should simply stop publishing climate science deniers, people who spread misinformation and disinformation on the existential threat that is climate change. Of course, that would include major columnists of theirs, including George Will.

Sadly, it appears the reverse is going to be true, Media Matters reports:

But Hiatt said the new focus on climate change does not mean those with differing views, even deniers of the problem, will be barred from the Post’s opinion pages.

“We encourage robust debate on our op-ed page and for anything in general, not just any one topic,” he said. “I’m more inclined to take op-eds that challenge our editorials than just kind of join the chorus.”

Yes, the Post asserts “the science is clear” and climate change is “an existential threat” and “the national debate on climate change has devolved,” but will publish even more pieces by deniers and confusionists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bjorn Lomborg, and Sarah Palin.

Does the paper publish more op-eds from people claiming cigarette smoking isn’t harmful to your health simply because the editors accept that fact? Of course not. Yet the scientific community’s certainty about human-caused climate change is as great as that of the medical community’s a certainty that cigarette smoking is bad for your health.

Bizarrely, Hiatt told Media Matters that “we try in both letters and op-eds to make sure that nothing we print is factually inaccurate.” That is patently false — see, for instance “The Washington Post op-ed page remains the home of un-fact-checked disinformation about clean energy and global warming” and “Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column?” and Will yet again.

Things got so bad that the Post’s own reporters took the unprecedented step of contradicting George Will in a news article.

But even years after that debacle, the Post still publishes pieces from Will in particular that clearly have not been checked for accuracy (see “Shameless Flameout: Washington Post Once Again Publishes George Will’s Anti-Scientific Nonsense”).

If the Post’s senior editors won’t even fact-check their own op-ed page, it is hard to take seriously their seeming epiphany on climate.

Stop printing letters and comments from climate science deniers

It should be a no-brainer to stop printing false statements from readers who are no-brainers themselves. Heck, a year ago the LA Times announced its policy that “letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed.” Other papers have announced similar policies. Is the Post going to treat the issue less seriously than the Times?

Extending that to comments from science deniers should be straightforward. Last year, Reddit’s popular /r/science forum announced a “de facto ban on climate denial,” as moderator and Ph.D. chemist Nathan Allen told ThinkProgress. “As moderators responsible for what millions of people see, we felt that to allow a handful of commenters to so purposefully mislead our audience was simply immoral,” he said. “So if a half-dozen volunteers can keep a page with more than four million users from being a microphone for the antiscientific, is it too much to ask for newspapers to police their own editorial pages as proficiently?”

End false balance

The Washington Post has a long history of giving equal or disproportionate time to the misinformation of climate science deniers.

But now that they have acknowledged that “the science is real,” there is no longer any justification for their reporters to quote people who are simply spreading misinformation or disinformation. The paper moved beyond quoting the tobacco industry on the supposed harmlessness of their product years ago.

Two years ago NPR released an an ethics handbook for reporters that asserted “our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.” In particular, the handbook noted, “if the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.”

Where is that clearer than in the climate discussion, where we know upwards of 97% of climate scientists share the understanding that human activity is driving recent global warming?

In July, BBC’s governing body released a report on its new policy to avoid false balance. It said, “science coverage does not simply lie in reflecting a wide range of views but depends on the varying degree of prominence such views should be given.” As a result, BBC reporters are to sharply reduce the air time given to climate science deniers — and others with anti-science viewpoints — make make their coverage more fair and accurate.

Is the Washington Post really going to leave it to a fake news show, John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” on HBO, to be the only U.S. “media” outlet to hold a “statistically representative climate change debate” (video here)?

Restore coverage on climate change

Climate Progress has long argued that climate change is an “existential threat” and thus the story that will have the biggest impact on the lives of readers and their children in the coming decades. For the Post senior editors’ new-found seriousness on climate change be taken seriously, they must undo their gutted coverage of the story of the century.

Last year, the paper’s already abysmally low coverage of climate change dropped by one third. It is time for the Post to reverse that and start dramatically increasing their coverage.

Here’s one way to do it:

Put Juliet Eilperin (and/or another top climate reporter) back on climate beat

In early 2013, the Post announced “Juliet Eilperin will return to the world of politics to cover the White House. Juliet has had a terrific run on the environment beat, becoming one of the country’s leading reporters on climate change.”

That was an obvious blunder at the time — and doubly so now.

A paper that is serious about climate change needs to have a top climate reporter or two. I didn’t agree with all of Eilperin’s coverage, but she had a strong command of the subject — and I suspect some of my issues with her were actually issues with editors watering down her pieces or requiring false balance quotes from deniers.

The Post should put her back on the full-time climate beat. They could also bring in one of the many world-class climate reporters let go by the major media in recent years.

Bring on a full-time science blogger

Earlier this year, the Washington Post dropped star blogger Ezra Klein — one of their only consistent sources of science-based coverage of climate change. Worse, at the same time they glommed onto a libertarian, confusionist website, The Volokh Conspiracy, and gave them “full editorial control.”

As Brad Johnson explained at the time, “the Volokh Conspiracy bloggers are aptly named, as many of them have promoted conspiracy theories about anthropogenic climate change and the scientists who study it.” As if there weren’t enough confusionists writing for the Post.

Anyway, there are a lot of great climate science bloggers who can clearly explain things with charts the way Klein does. Here’s one of the best.

BOTTOM LINE: The series of editorials by the Washington Post on climate change is a good start. But they have a lot to do — and a lot to undo — if they want to convince anyone that they are genuinely serious.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/27/3475756/washington-post-climate-change/

ROFL - Unnatural disaster: Roger Pielke, Jr.’s writing is an embarrassment to Nate Silver’s new venture

by David Auerbach, Slate, March 31, 2014

Nate Silver is still backing the wrong horse.

Photo courtesy Randy Stewart/Flickr

I come to praise Nate Silver, not to bury him. In this case, I want to congratulate him for taking the first step toward the eventual firing of Roger Pielke, Jr., author of one of the most heavily criticized pieces to date on Silver’s somewhat beleaguered new site, FiveThirtyEight. Pielke’s March 19, 2014, piece, “Disasters Cost More than Ever—But Not Because of Climate Change,” has been slammed for faulty data, ideological bias, and poor statistical work, leading Silver to publish a conditional defense of the article. Silver admits to some sloppiness in the piece and has said that FiveThirtyEight will publish a rebuttal. These are good steps, but Silver is still backing the wrong horse, and the sooner he dumps Pielke (who’s also a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder), the better.

Issues around climate change and disaster statistics are so complicated—far more complicated than election polling—that you might be tempted to think that, as Silver says, “The debate is hard for us to adjudicate without turning to experts for help.” Silver is wrong. On Pielke’s own terms, even under the most charitable interpretation, his article is an embarrassment. It does not take a trained statistician to see what’s wrong with Pielke’s article, just some old-fashioned critical thinking.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Pielke’s stats on natural disaster frequency and natural disaster cost are absolutely right. (Granted, no one seems to think this.) Let’s only focus on Silver’s statement: “The central thesis of the piece was that although these costs are increasing, the rise can be accounted for by the growing wealth of the global population, rather than by a rise in the number of disaster events due to climate change.” The article fails to make a coherent case even for that modest thesis.

Here is Pielke’s “killer” graph, intended to show that disaster costs are not growing relative to GDP:

This graph only spikes when bad things happen to white people. (Or Japan.)

Consider what is being measured: the aggregate total of disaster costs vs. the global GDP. As we all know, global wealth isn’t distributed evenly. “Wealthy countries hold all of the sway in worldwide cost estimates,” Pielke writes. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the two deadliest disasters by far during the time period of the graph—both in the hundreds of thousands of deaths—don’t produce any spikes whatsoever, and belong to “average” years. Hurricane Katrina, which resulted in around 2,000 deaths, produced that large 2005 spike. This graph isn’t measuring deaths, of course; just economic damage to property and productivity.

So let’s say Lex Luthor causes California to fall into the ocean. The graph will spike like mad. Let’s say Dr. Magneto causes half of Africa to fall into the ocean. The graph will show a mild bump. Pielke decided that aggregating all the costs together for world GDP vs. world disaster costs would be more illuminating than breaking it down even on a continent-by-continent basis. I won’t speculate on his motives here. (Everyone else has already done that for me: Climate Science Watch concludes his goal is to “dismiss the wide array of evidence linking climate change to extreme weather,” while climate scientist Dana Nuccitelli says Pielke is known for “downplaying the links between global warming and extreme weather.”) But this graph hardly seems like the most relevant measure of the impact of natural disasters.

In an attempt to make this graph meaningful (or at least less offensive), Pielke pulls a bait and switch. He writes that increased disaster costs mean that fewer people are dying: “The data show an inverse relationship between lives lost and property damage.” Pielke seems to be implying that as GDP goes up, property damage goes up—even assuming that the number of disasters stays constant—but the lives lost in disasters will go down. There is a correlation, Pielke says, between being rich and being safe in a disaster; the richer the country, the fewer the lives lost when a disaster hits.

“There is some good news to be found in the ever-mounting toll of disaster losses,” Pielke writes; richer countries are “better able to deal with disasters”—Pielke doesn’t say why, but presumably through better infrastructure, safer buildings, greater population mobility, early warning systems, and the like.

So what started as an argument that increased disaster costs aren’t as bad as they seem has turned into an argument that increased disaster costs are actively good. We should be happy if disasters are destroying more Fabergé eggs, because people with Fabergé eggs probably live in earthquake-proof houses.

So Pielke is arguing for two opposing theses: First, that disaster costs haven’t actually gone up that much (it’s not climate change’s fault!); and second, that disaster costs are still going up but that’s a good thing (fewer lives lost!). In other words, it’s a Goldilocks situation: Disaster costs are going up just right.

This is preposterous. The graph only shows two variables, while Pielke is making an argument about three variables: disaster cost, economic growth, and disaster occurrence. The graph conflates disaster cost with disaster occurrence, making it impossible to individuate trends in either. A spike shows that an expensive disaster happened (bad!) but that disaster costs went up (good!). No spike shows that only cheap disasters happened (also bad!), but disaster costs stayed down (also good!).

Compared to the Munich Re data or the IPCC report on which Pielke drew, Pielke’s graphs look closer to USA Today infographics than serious statistical work.

While Pielke is fiddling with GDP numbers and celebrating the wealthy, the second half of the IPCC report, just released yesterday, concludes that climate change risks destabilizing human society and that the projections are grave. Evidently that part didn’t grab Pielke.

From the IPCC 2013 report

Too complicated for FiveThirtyEight?

From Munich Re

At first glance, Pielke just seems to be dumbing down the material, but the internal contradictions in his article make it look far closer to intellectual dishonesty, collapsing variables and muddying the waters. (For example, why is he using a graph whose two biggest spikes come from earthquakes when he’s ostensibly talking about climate change? Is he proposing a heretofore unknown link between earthquakes and climate? Scoop!) The good thing about intellectual dishonesty is that errors beget errors. Sneaky statistical manipulation often bubbles up into conceptual incoherency, as it did in Pielke’s article and now in Silver’s defense of it. There is no need to debate the evidence because the article collapses on its own terms.

Silver seems to realize that he fell down here, and so I hesitate to criticize him too heavily. Silver constitutes such an improvement on horserace journalism that you can bet Politico and Daily Caller are rubbing their hands with glee to see Paul Krugman and Nate Silver turning on each other—it’s even better than Twitter turning on Stephen Colbert. Statistics experts Cathy O’Neil and Deborah Mayo have made some serious criticisms of Silver’s own work, but given the state of much punditry today, the perfect remains the enemy of the good—or at least the enemy of the better-than-Politico. When Leon Wieseltier praises George Will (a pundit whose views on climate change make Roger Pielke look like Al Gore) as superior to Silver, it’s enough to make me drop to my knees and beg Silver not to throw in the towel. Please, Nate, cut Pielke loose and stay the course.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/03/nate_silver_climate_change_denial_it_s_time_to_dump_fivethirtyeight_s_roger.html

Texting WaPo's Jeff Bezos: "George Will Compares Climate Scientists To Nazis"

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, February 28, 2014

Pundit George Will embraced his anti-truth nature when he jumped from ABC to Fox News last year. If only he had jumped from Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

But Bezos, the founder of Amazon — a company built around technology and hard-nosed accounting — must be accountable for the unadulterated anti-science nonsense of his columnists. Charles Krauthammer published his umpteenth falsehood-fest last week. In a debunking, climatologist Michael Mann notes his “laundry list of shopworn talking points [is] so predictable now in climate change denialist lore that one can make a drinking game out of it.”

This week, George Will outdid Krauthammer by dropping the “N” word:

No wonder “97 percent” — who did the poll? — of climate scientists agree. When a Nazi publishing company produced “100 Authors Against Einstein,” the target of this argument-by-cumulation replied: “Were I wrong, one professor would have been quite enough.”

Yes, Will believes the community of climate scientists warning the public about the dangers of unrestricted carbon pollution is analogous to Nazi attacks on Albert Einstein. This is apparently a whole new messaging strategy for the deniers. Last week, Roy Spencer announced that from now on he will refer to many politicians and scientists as “global warming Nazis.”

Of course Will can’t be bothered to use Google to find out that the “poll” is actually a peer-reviewed analysis of more than 1,000 recent scientific papers on climate science.

For Will, like John Christy, there is no greater proof scientists are wrong than when they commit the cardinal sin of agreeing with each other. He writes:

Obama says, “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.” When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.

Well, as the AP reported in September, “Top scientists from a variety of fields say they are about as certain that global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill.”

So I guess we better remove all those Surgeon General warnings from cigarette packs, since scientists are just too collectively over-confident about the dangers of smoking for them to actually be right.

Will has the chutzpah to sneer:

Secretary of State John Kerry, our knight of the mournful countenance, was especially apocalyptic recently when warning that climate change is a “weapon of mass destruction.” Like Iraq’s?

Let’s go back to October 2003, when Will wrote a column defending our Iraqi war policy — despite our inability to actually find WMDs. He argued that some actions must be taken with incomplete knowledge:

How much certainty is requisite as a basis for action depends in part on the consequences of being wrong.

Yet we had no idea what the likelihood of being right about WMDs was, nor, truthfully, what the consequences of being wrong about WMDs in Iraq were (since even if Saddam had them, we don’t know if he would ever have used them against us).

The tragedy here is that the likelihood the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are right is exceedingly high — and we know the consequences of Will being wrong about climate change are a century or more of needless misery for billions of people. That would constitute the basis for action if Will had any intellectual consistency.

But then that 2003 column was titled “Right Man, Right Job” and was a defense of … wait for it … Donald Rumsfeld. In punditry — unlike in climate policy — there is never any consequence for being catastrophically wrong. Indeed, Will has been so blatantly wrong about climate change for so long that back in 2009, two Washington Post reporters took the unprecedented step of contradicting him in a news article.

The Washington Post’s recent track record on climate change is indefensible. Last year, they removed their top climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, from the environment beat, and their coverage of climate change dropped by one third.

Then in January, the Post dropped star blogger Ezra Klein — one of their only consistent sources of science-based coverage of climate change — and added the climate confusionist blog Volokh Conspiracy. And now their top conservative columnists have declared open season on climate science.

The Amazon rainforest’s dry season is 3 weeks longer now than it was 30 years ago. And experts worry that the Amazon could be devastated by drought and extreme weather if we stay on our current CO2 emissions pathway.

The guy who runs the other Amazon needs to stop letting his newspaper be a source of misinformation and confusion. Otherwise it will be a legacy he and the original Amazon may never recover from.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/28/3344481/jeff-bezos-george-compares-climate-scientists-nazis/

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.

The 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.)

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/

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

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.