The bottom line is that there is no warming crisis and the politically driven hype has been exposed by the actual science.

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.
You 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.

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.

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.

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 $$$$$.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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?”

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.

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.

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” …