The George Will Scandal
Climate Change, The Washington Post, and the Death of Newspapers
SOURCE: flickr.com/locator
If a major media outlet can't even correct facts about global warming, is it still socially relevant?
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Something striking has happened over the past week in the dynamical relationship between the blogosphere and the rather gaunt-looking “mainstream media,” or MSM, with respect to a science controversy. And watching it unfold makes one wonder if we aren’t seeing a kind of turning-point moment in the transition—for better or worse—away from newspapers as the dominant source of opinion, commentary, and thoughtful analysis in our society.
Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture. He is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)
On February 15, as he has done many times in the past, George Will of The Washington Post wrote a howler-filled column about global warming. The gist echoed a point Will has often made: Environmentalist doomsayers like to scare us, but they’re often flat wrong. To this end, the article contained a head-scratchingly long and pseudo-referenced paragraph, making the-oft refuted claim that during the 1970s, the scientific community was convinced that “global cooling” had arrived. In reality, while a few scientists were indeed worried about cooling at the time, and some journalists wrote alarmist stories about the subject, there was no consensus like there is today about human caused global warming.
How to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?
Will’s column also took several other angular swipes at the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change’s human causation, without directly taking it on. In one case, it cited the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center to claim that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” In other words, we’re not really warming up—the ice is doing fine. (The Arctic Climate Research Center quickly repudiated Will’s assertion.) In closing, meanwhile, Will made this truly extraordinary claim: “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.” As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization are central scientific authorities that have long supported the idea of human-caused global warming, this was a particular shocker.
In essence, then, a number of Will’s claims—about “global cooling,” sea ice, and the WMO—were either flatly false or extraordinarily misleading, whether due to dishonesty, ignorance, or some combination of both. This wasn’t necessarily new for Will, any more than it is new for a number of other conservative columnists or pundits who write about global warming. But for some reason, the outrage this time built and fed upon itself. There’s no way to fully list all the things that have since been posted about the matter-the volume is far too great—but Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to have kicked it off; Adam Siegel of EnergySmart has a very comprehensive overview; the folks at Media Matters and TalkingPointsMemo have driven the story; and Brad Johnson of the Wonk Room has not only written about the controversy in detail but gotten responses from the Post itself. In short, the paper takes the cowardly route and refuses to correct Will’s copious errors of fact, interpretation, and so forth. It equivocates. And it claims that Will’s column was fact-checked by multiple people “to the fullest extent possible.” (Ha.)
But enough blow-by-blow: What does it all mean?
Will is of course an eminence grise of Washington punditry, a regular on ABC’s This Week, and widely regarded as a distinguished conservative intellectual. He is also fatuously wrong about the science of global warming, and apparently impervious to and shielded from correction. Bloggers are now gleefully obliterating both him and the Washington Post, and they are substantively right in everything they’re saying-about climate science, about the stubborn inescapability of facts, and, indeed, about journalistic responsibility.
The Post thus takes a dramatic credibility hit here-and the bloggers a credibility gain—and given the current economic straits facing newspapers and the Post in particular, that’s something it can ill afford. We often hear that “technology” is what’s killing newspapers—innovations like Craig’s List have destroyed the in-print classified advertising market; people have stopped reading physical papers and turned to online headlines from news aggregators or blogs; and so on. But there are also matters of substance and standards, and if the Post editorial page can’t even print correct facts about global warming (or correct already printed errors), then how to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?
In this sense, I view the George Will affair with sadness. Sure, I share in the temporary glee of the bloggers. But at the same time, I know there are many kinds of journalism, particularly about science, that bloggers will never replace. They’re extremely well-equipped to pounce and skewer a George Will column, but hardly well equipped to deliver an investigative or narrative feature story. We’re watching the media change before our eyes, the science media in particular—and no one can say, in light of episodes like the latest one involving George Will, that much of old media doesn’t in some sense “deserve” what’s happening to it now. Yet if our only sentiment is joy over the bloggers’ latest trophy, or outrage at the Post, we’re missing something deep indeed.
Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”
Comments on this article
Chris,
To be clear, as to “glee” … I am pretty sure that every single involved blogger would have preferred not to be driven to write on George Will (or Krauthammer or Samuelson or Lomborg or …) writing a dishonest piece on Global Warming in the Washington Post.
I am sure that every involved blogger would have loved to write about how, when errors were shown to the them, the Washington Post stepped up to the plate to correct the errors, make a strong statement as to editorial policy, and guarantee that they would work harder to assure truthfulness in their OPED pieces. (Something like, “Our authors are entitled to their opinions, to their own interpretations, but not to their own facts nor to egregiously misrepresentation of others’ views …”)
We “bloggers” would much prefer to be taking and interpretating good science reporting from traditional media outlets, linking together issues for analysis in ways that perhaps the reporter didn’t. To engage each and with the traditional media reporters in a ‘dialogue’ that enables a richer public discourse about the challenges we face and the paths to address them.
While my website has had many hits due to the Will episode, I assure you that I am not “gleeful” …
February 24th, 2009 at 11:18 pmChris – I have read your books and have ordered your new one. This article is another excellent example of your efforts to expose the false, broken, and most important dangerous ideologies of the far right and also the selfish and short-sighted motivations of much of big business – which would willfully cover up or distort the facts to further their cause. You are doing the world a service and I thank you for it.
Although everyone with an interest in the subject of global warming probably knows of this “scandal”, I suspect mainstream America will not hear much about this and Will will have accomplished his mission, and a mission it is. Similar to the problem with Limbaugh, the danger here is in his long-standing credibility with the (gullible) American public. That is what, to me, makes his actions (and the inactions of the Washington Post) so reprehensible.
How can you get the word more widespread, how can you get this guy exposed to the whole nation like Imus was last year? Will should be drawn and quartered by the press in front of a national audience. Being corrected by the Post would not be sufficient in my view. Being fired from the Post would suffice. But neither of those things will happen.
I hope you are using everything at your disposal to make this as big as it can be.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:34 amThe sad part is that too many scientists have become political scientists. Persons like Hansen are damaging science and in the end will make the public more suspicious of any “science”. Worry more about an anti-science backlash.
February 25th, 2009 at 2:04 pmUnfortunately, it’s not just conservative newspapers that are engaging in this sort of deplorable behavior. The NYT, The Paper Of Record, The Flagship Of The Liberal Media is doing the same dumb thing. Except that Tierney is an NYT staff “science” columnist.
When the disease ranges from the Washington Post to the NYT , it may be time to face the fact that if quality investigative journalism is to be had, it will be found elsewhere.
February 25th, 2009 at 2:36 pmI wish, very much, that Hansen was wrong. But he wasn’t wrong in 1988, and all the evidence indicates that he’s not wrong now. It is far more likely that the public will find itself thinking: “Why didn’t we listen to this guy back then, before things got so bad?”
February 25th, 2009 at 2:46 pmChris writes. “But at the same time, I know there are many kinds of journalism, particularly about science, that bloggers will never replace.”
Replace? What’s that doing there? You really stumped me with replace. “…bloggers will never replace.”
I agree, by the way, that bloggers and amateurs with lives cannot replace what is done by the reporting, investigative and verification divisions of the professional press corps. I agree that we should bracket as highly questionable the breezy assumption that bloggers can just pick up the slack if the press actually goes down. Personally, I doubt that very much. But for every time I have seen it mentioned, I have seem 99 journalists (like Chris) saying: no way, won’t happen.
But if George Will goes down? Replace is not absurd at all there. Can bloggers effectively replace the bad column-writing of a George Will? Well, yeah, they can. Can they replace the fact-checking department at the Washington Post and its syndicated writers arm? They surely can. I don’t understand why you imported “replace” into this controversy. Based on… what? Will as a pundit on climate change deserved to be replaced.
Please clarify.
February 25th, 2009 at 3:37 pmGreat summation, Chris. Thank you.
February 25th, 2009 at 8:49 pmTo just briefly address Jay Rosen’s comment….when I say “replace” I guess I was broadening the context to encompass the death of science journalism we’re seeing in the media right now. Bloggers can easily replace George Will, and do his job better. But it is the traditional specialized science journalist, formerly employed by newspapers, nowadays not so much, that I’m not sure they can replace.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:11 pmExcellent post, Chris. To Jay Rosen: unfortunately, I do not think bloggers can replace George Will any more than they can replace specialized science journalists.
That is, If, by that, you mean SCIENCE bloggers. George Will, or a clone of George Will, will one day evolve on blogs.. and, in some sense, it is already the case: remember Matt Drudge? Matt Drudge is much more popular than the average blogger. Not as popular as George Will, but nevertheless much popular than the majority of science bloggers. I do hope that the way ideas are disseminated on the web can help to fight more efficiently Drudge than Will, but I am still not sure if it will happen that easily.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:03 am“The sad part is that too many scientists have become political scientists. Persons like Hansen are damaging science and in the end will make the public more suspicious of any “science”. Worry more about an anti-science backlash.”
Why is it that a prominent scientist, speaking his truth about the science he does, in public fora, dmaging to science? Do you think that those of us for whom scientific inquirey is aprofession (and a hobby) shouldn’t form opinions about the impats of what we uncover and elucidate? SHould we just publish in peer-reviewed journals with no greard for how our work impacts society (of which, last I checked, we’re a part)?
I am so tired of so many people telling me, as a scientist, that I have no place in the policital process, while at the same time, my profession sees more and more demands from the political process for our guidance and input. If you keep calling people like dr. Hansen to testify before Senate committees, you can’t say he should just sit quietly in the corner and run his climate models. Only when society stops asking sceince for the answers to its problems will scientists be able to go back to being scientists.
All of which has NILL to do with the topic at hand, of course.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:05 amExploitation and control require disruption and manipulation. Without a clue toward creating an alternative to this short sighted greed trap we’re in, the controlled press has no other tools. Certainly they’re tedious, but the unfortunate element is what happens when creativity is taken out of expression.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:33 amGeorge Will the conservative “intellect” I just don’t see it I have always thought that while George Will thinks he is intelligent, I really don’t see him as being such. This whole episode of real science showing us the fact of global warming reminds me of Supermans father Jorel trying to tell the intellects of Krypton that the planet is going to explode, and the George Wills of their planet denying it until the planet explodes and kills them all.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:40 amWith all due respect these are minor errors not howlers. A minimal amount of fact checking of your own would have identified that :
a) There is nothing alarming in global sea ice reduction. The Arctic sea ice has been retreating to it’s 30’s level, which means it still might therefore be cyclical and the Antarctic is apparently not changing meaningfully and won’t do so for a very long time. You might have been given the idea that the situation will change but that’s still all speculation. If Will had picked 1980 rather than 1979, or January rather than February 1979, his statements would even have been accurate. You can do this fact checking yourself, but you don’t. You prefer the opinions of the politically motivated.
b) Whether you like it or not, most measurements of global temperature show warming from 1979, a roughly flat period since 1998 (even excluding that years el niño) and a cooling since 2003. Again you can interpret this however you like and you can correctly say short term trends perhaps don’t matter (though it’s funny that the short term trends that suggest alarmism are more acceptable) but these are the bare facts. So Will is correct there.
c) Will is undoubtedly correct that we have had countless alarmist rhetoric throughout the last fifty years, most of it based on studies from glory-hunting alarmist scientists, all of which turned out to be grossly exaggerated. The global warming scenarios are no exception: They all assume that the worst case scenarios are the ones we should be expecting.
As such Will didn’t have a howler-filled column, he simply has a different and plausible interpretation of the same data that is available to all of us. Instead of believing in “warming masked by cooling”, he decided to come to the rather more obvious conclusion – that likely this is just another over-hyped issue, like all the ones that came before it.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:46 amIt’s easy to become a bit outraged by what we see as Will’s invincible ignorance about science, but we need to go deeper than just responding on the level of the science iteself, as important as that is. It is significant that in the February 15 article at issue, Will refers back to the famous wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon as to the future costs of five important metals of commerce. Ehrlich lost the wager, and the conservatives have since taken this as typical of progressive scientists, a lot of Cassandras, to use Will’s term. Apparently Will forgot that Cassandra correctly predicted a number of disasters, and was ignored. In any case, the connection between Julian Simon and George Will is signficant, and reveals a lot about the philosophical attitudes that keep Will and others like him from accepting science’s authority on matters that have important social implications. I’ve written about this on my blog (click on my name).
February 26th, 2009 at 12:36 pmTo Paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Moynihan, George Will is entitled to his opinions, but he’s not entitled to his own set of facts–(unless he lives alone in his own universe).
February 26th, 2009 at 1:29 pmRather than Cassandra or Jor-El or other fictional characters a better simile might be made between the majority of economist “experts” who thought that an economy based on huge levels of debt was nothing to worry about and the few naysayers who thought that it was a real worry. Said naysayers were ridiculed and called “Doctor Doom” and overly pessimistic yet they were right.
However there is another way of looking at it. It is a good illustration that we cannot assume that the majority of “experts” are correct – they have to put forward good, cogent arguments free from personal interest. Nor should any scientist refuse to listen to alternative interpretations of data because it doesn’t fit their world view. I’m reminded of Carl Sagan defending the status quo “steady state universe” theory against amateur Velikovsky’s colliding worlds theory. Sagan was wrong and the amateur was right. Though there are so many examples of the mainstream being wrong and the upstart being correct in science (Faraday, Pasteur, Einstein etc) that it begins to look like this is the way science progresses. Is Dr. Roy Spencer wrong when he says that no paper anywhere has yet ruled out natural variation as a cause of this 0.5 degree rise in temperature? Clearly anyone who says the lack of warming so far is because it is “masked by cooling” is obviously just guessing.
At the end of the day there is only scientific truth and sometimes people are biased when they present an opinion as “evidence” – like for example the Connelley-Fleck whitewash report about those ice-age scares. Connelley is a green party activist and Fleck is a journalist. Biased? Let’s see: Schneider, the most strident voice in the entire ice-age scare fiasco is listed in that report as being 50/50 on the issue. Oh sure – no cherry-picking in progressive science is there? Clearly what you see depends on where you stand.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:41 pmHeck…we are still “debating” evolution in many regions of the country. Did I read correctly that about 40% of Americans still deny or reject Darwin’s theory?
Then we have a satellite planned to record CO2 crash after take-off (an 8 year project)… have we turned over all the rocks in that tragic turn of events?
All cars before 1900 were electric…the land speed record at that time was 66 mph by a French EV. Rudolph Diesel ran his first diesel engines on biodiesel. Hemp was a great biofuel…as was alcohol. Both were demonized early on. Diesel went missing while crossing the English Channel on a large ship.
Wm Randolph Hearst had his publications lead a crusade for oil. Will and today’s MSM are nothing new under the sun. Follow the $$$$$.
February 26th, 2009 at 2:55 pmLlewelly writes: “I wish, very much, that Hansen was wrong. But he wasn’t wrong in 1988, and all the evidence indicates that he’s not wrong now.”
Actually, it’s looking very much like Hansen was wrong in 1988. The warming we’ve had since then is tracking somewhat below the level he projected if CO2 emissions were to be cut drastically. In reality, emissions have been even greater than in his worst-case scenario. See http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ordinary-eyeball-how-did-hansens-predictions-do/
I find it hard to see how this column of George Will’s constitutes a “scandal”. As JamesG says, the errors in his piece are quite minor. In essence, all he’s done is spin some rather fuzzy data in ways that global warming alarmists don’t like. Al Gore perpetrated vastly greater falsehoods in An Inconvenient Truth (The discredited ‘Hockey Stick’ graph presented as ice core data, when real ice core data show quite a different picture, Pacific Islanders forced to emigrate to New Zealand to flee rising sea levels, and many others). For his efforts he got an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. Now that’s a scandal.
February 26th, 2009 at 5:33 pmThe loss of the MSM print media will not mean a loss of access to good science reporting. Scientific American (monthly magazine with a web site), Science News (weekly magazine with a web site), and the Science Daily web site all provide comprehensive reporting on current developments in scientific research.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:52 pmBloggers don’t need to rely on the MSM for science reporting to inform their discussions.
I have never completely trusted the media and always check sources. I am glad we have bloggers to also fact check and give opinions. George Will is one of an army of celebrated lazy pundits who are not current “experts” on anything and spend much of their time bloviating largely for propagandistic and entertainment purposes. Readers have wrongly come to assume they have special knowledge or they read and watch them to be titillated by their outbursts and gotchas. Consumers of media must take the time to puzzle out valuable and safe information as in any other “purchase.” — Librarian
February 27th, 2009 at 5:00 amLet us keep in mind the context of this discussion is the years MSM failure to accurately report and comment on the travesty of the Iraq invasion, which continues to this day.
We now know what has happened there in our names, but not because of any significant contributions from either the Washington Post or the NY Times. Truth be told, what we know is in spite of these newspapers, both of which have demonstrably mislead the American people over and over again, for years.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:40 amSay it ain’t so, Will!!
I actually heard him say it on the morning show and was surprised that he recalled the original “global cooling”
views by a few people, that I did read in the newspapers.
He must read a lot of newspaper articles and columns.
He must be well aware of the great many errors and frequent gross exaggerations tha appear regularly.
One, from long ago, was a Soviet weapon able to freeze water and create icebergs anywhere!!
I also read the someone had actually flown a, albeit thin skin, Lead Ballon!!
Then, there was the news, long ago, about the house that was destroyed by a boa snake from the Nile River.
Next, I expect to read about a human footprint that is more than a Million years older than the oldest human remains from South east Africa found by the Leakey Doctors.
Do we need a censor? No, of course not, we should all be our own censors, our own Guardians of the Truth and use our Truth Criteria we have refined through the years.
February 27th, 2009 at 3:32 pmYou know, like “Clean Coal” that will revoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics, fat chance!
(There was an actual Congressional Budget item to build one right next door to where I live, a few miles East of San Francisco. It would have put a lot of people to work
-or laughing. I wonder how many Engineering Professors assigned this project as homework?
Anyone that agreed with the idea would flunk out.
Except George Will. He will be with us, forever. I hope.
Excuse my ignorance, but who is Jay Hansen and how did he get stuck in the middle of this controversy? I did not see the name mentioned in the original article.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:44 pmPlease consider the possibility that George Will is anxiously auditioning for Rush Limbaugh’s job as titular head of the Republican Party and chief jester for matters political. He is following the leadership of the ABC network which is apparently suffering from the media version of penis envy.
George Will, The Intellect? I’ve tried to read his columns (attempt to be diverse) but always have to re-read them three or four times just to figure out what point he is trying to make. Very poorly written and structured, from a composition standpoint; but also scatterbrained, loose and nonfactual (if not nonsensical). I don’t get it (how this guy has held a job, let alone is thought of as “smart”) either.
March 6th, 2009 at 1:07 amYou need to check your facts. Will was correct about the ARGOS buoys showing no ocean warming over the past five years and to point out that Hansen’s 1988 predictions overestimated the temperature increase and CO2 levels. He is right to point out that the satellite data shown no warming for a decade even though CO2 levels have increased and that Hansen’s claim of an ice-free Arctic in the next decade is a joke. Not only has sea ice levels recovered, they are above the average and growing even as data comes in that shows that scientists have underestimated ice thickness.
The bottom line is that there is no warming crisis and the politically driven hype has been exposed by the actual science.
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:43 pm