We arrived on Appledore Island this afternoon, which is drenched in sunshine and heat. The gulls are screaming and the students are busy reading up on tidal pools (or, as I was informed at dinner, the intertidal) in advance of our journey tomorrow. But despite the fact that New Hampshire is just a strip on the horizon, the email and the cell phones work here, and this evening I was asked to talk on the radio tomorrow about my recent article on global warming and evolution. I’ll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC in New York some time between 12:30 and 1 pm EST on Tuesday. You can listen live here, or wait for the archived podcast.

Listen right here!

Two of my stories came out this week–one on the near future, and one on the distant past.

1. Global warming is beginning to drive evolution of plants and animals. And soon it will be shifting to high gear. Read more at Yale Environment 360.

2. You, me, and the mushroom over there are all eukaryotes. So are slime molds and Giardia. We all share a number of features that set us apart from prokaryotes like E. coli. The split between eukaryotes and other living things is arguably the deepest in all life. In this week’s issue of Science, I have an essay that looks at how the basic eukaryote cell, complete with nucleus, mitochondria, and all its other bells and whistles came to be. Check it out (here or here). And you can also listen to me talk about the question on this week’s Science podcast here.

Zachary Smith at Talking Points Memo, among others, notes that the Washington Post editorial page editor is still claiming that George Will’s many misrepresentations about global warming were subject to “careful fact-checking,” some two months after many people showed they were anything but–including some who explained the errors in the Washington Post itself. It’s a sad coda to a long tale of op-ed woe.

Last week I wrote about a piece in Slate in which Brendan Borrell argued that concerns over the threat to biodiversity from global warming is overshadowing the bigger threat from habitat destruction. Brendan is back from a trip to South Africa and has left a lengthy–and well-considered–comment below. Definitely check it out. I still have some problems with his argument, but it’s so much more satisfying to discuss these issues with somebody who takes the scientific research seriously than someone who just wants to quote-mine.

Yesterday I wrote about how conservation biologists are debating the value of moving species to protect them from climate-change-driven extinction. As a follow-up (or an antidote), check out “Blood for no oil: Our obsession with climate change is killing off animals left and right.” in Slate.

Brendan Borrell, biologist turned journalist, argues that climate change poses a genuine threat to biodiversity, but “it does not come close to the immediate, irreparable damage caused by the destruction of habitat.” Good old chainsaws are still the big danger, he argues, because two-thirds of the world’s biodiversity is in the tropics, where deforestation is happening fast and the effects of climate change may not be as dramatic as they’ll be closer to the poles.

I wrote about similar skepticism in 2007 in an article for Science. Some critics point out that we have yet to discover some of the important factors in how species respond to shifting climates. Borrell also points out that one of the most famous examples of an extinction caused by climate change–the golden toad of Costa Rica–looks now as if it may have had other manmade causes (see this study, for example). And in trying to cope with the dangers of climate change, Borrell observes that we’ve already seen some disasters. The feel-good desire for biofuels is driving a catastrophic loss of rainforest in Indonesia for palm oil plantations. And, as I point out in my piece yesterday in Yale Environment 360, moving species to save them from climate change driven extinction could, theoretically at least, turn them into dangerous invasives.

That being said, I think Borrell’s argument is thin. Maybe he didn’t have enough room to make his full argument in a slender Slate piece. But the evidence he lays out doesn’t justify his big claims.

Borrell claims, for example, that the most dire projections about extinctions from global warming should not be trusted because they came from studies that ignored the tropics, which are home to so much biodiversity. But it’s not as if there was some sort of anti-tropics malice involved; it’s just a historical fact that the most careful studies of range shifts due to climate have been done in places like England and the United States. And the same researchers who issued those warnings went on to look at climate change in the world’s biodiversity hotspots, many of which are in the tropics. They concluded that “estimated global-warming-induced rates of species extinctions in tropical hotspots in some cases exceeded those due to deforestation, supporting suggestions that global warming is one of the most serious threats to the planet’s biodiversity.” Borrell may not like this study, but he shouldn’t act as if it doesn’t even exist.

To make the case for a minor risk from climate change, Borrell cites a 2007 study that indicates that birds will suffer many more extinctions from the destruction of habitat than climate change. It’s certainly an important study from leading experts. But it was not the last word on the subject. For example, in 2008 researchers developed a model for bird extinctions that took into account the elevation at which the birds live. (A warmer climate may push some species upslope.)  They concluded that climate may hit birds (including tropical birds) hard. They warn of 400 to 550 extinctions and 2150 additional species put at risk of extinction by 2100.

Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University, reviewed both these bird studies in a piece called “Climate Change or Habitat Loss — Which Will Kill More Species?” He concluded, “Large numbers of species, thus-far largely unaffected by human actions, are in danger of extinction from climate change.”

There are actually a lot of other potential threats that global warming poses to biodiversity. For example, the carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the air is also acidifying the oceans. Coral reefs may be endangered as a result–along with the vast biodiversity they shelter. But Borrell doesn’t even mention these factors.

After trying (unsuccessfully, I think) to downplay the risk of climate change, Borrell then fails to persuade me that concerns about climate change are actually causing extinctions. While the palm oil plantations have been disastrous, it’s not fair to imply that conservation biologists who worry about climate change were responsible for them. I have yet to encounter somebody who says that we don’t have to worry about deforestation and need to push all conservation efforts into dealing with climate change. And Borrell doesn’t present any examples.

Deforestation is clearly harming biodiversity right now, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that global warming will have an important effect too in decades to come, although there’s lots of uncertainty about just how big a role it will have. And the two forces will not be working independently: climate change may make some species more vulnerable to the loss of their habitat, and vice versa. What’s more, there may be some solutions that address both threats at the same time, such as creating networks of preserves. Not only do endangered species get the habitat where they are now; they potentially get a way to move to better habitat if the climate makes their current one unsuitable.

Casting debates about extinctions in simple either-or terms may be good for attracting web traffic, but nature is more complex. And our solutions should be too.

Update 4/27: Brendan is back from South Africa and has left a lengthy–and well-considered–comment below. Definitely check it out. I still have some problems with his argument, but it’s so much more satisfying to discuss these issues with somebody who takes the scientific research seriously than someone who just wants to quote-mine.

Two years ago I learned about an idea for saving species from climate-triggered extinction: move them some place nice. Here’s a piece about the concept that I wrote at the time for the New York Times. Over the past two years, more evidence of climate-induced changes to diversity has accrued. And now some scientists have actually moved some animals to test the possibility that assisted migration could help. But the idea has also now triggered some intense opposition from critics who call it a game of ecological roulette.

I’ve revisited assisted migration (now known as managed relocation) for a new piece for Yale Environment 360. Check it out.

In several posts in my series on George Will’s misleading claims about global warming in the Washington Post, I have referred to the “Arctic Climate Research Center” at the University of Illinois. It has been brought to my attention that no such center actually exists. Instead, there is a group of scientists at the University of Illinois who conduct research on climate in the Arctic (one of whom, Bill Chapman, I interviewed as part of my research).

The phrase “Arctic Climate Research Center” is apparently the concoction of Michael Asher in a January 1 Daily Tech post. George Will has stated that he based his (erroneous) claims about global sea ice on Asher’s post. I can only assume he also got the fictional center from the same source. In writing my own posts on this controversy, I conducted a Google search on the name and ended up on a page with the banner “Arctic Climate Research at the University of Illinois.”

As with any error, I regret this oversight. I am now adding clarifications to all the erroneous posts.

Brad Johnson, who noticed this error, sums the situation up nicely:

Despite publishing criticism of factual errors and distortions in “Dark Green Doomsayers” by Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, science journalist Chris Mooney, Secretary General of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization Michel Jarraud, Post blogger Andrew Freeman, and Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, the Washington Post has yet to issue a single correction for Will’s column, syndicated in dozens of newspapers nationwide.

Corrections are standard operating procedure at newspapers. It’s fact-checking after the fact, as it were. A few of my science articles for the New York Times have “Correction Appended” branded on them. There’s no shame if the corrections were simple oversights. We all make mistakes, and we ought to live with them. But have we really reached the point now where blogs [shudder] are becoming more conscientious about corrections than the editorial pages of the Washington Post?

There’s a lot of dismally wrong coverage of global warming these days (see some recent examples chronicled by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, for example). But the way global warming gets treated on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post–particularly by George Will and his enabling editors–is particularly exquisite. For my little Ahab-like obsession with the editorial process there, check out this string of posts. Many other observers have made similar points, so you’d think that somebody over at the Post might have learned something from the experience.

Today, we see that they haven’t.

One of the more egregious lines from George Will’s recent columns on global warming is the claim that real data shows that warnings about a rise in the average global temperature are wrong. He writes: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.”

The secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization himself, Michael Jarraud, decided he had to write to the Washington Post to tell them George Will is wrong.

Here’s the nut of Jarraud’s letter from March 21:

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 ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, Feb. 15] — 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 degrees Fahrenheit.

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.

Today, George Will is back on the subject of global warming. The occassion for his column is the alleged uselessness of energy-efficient light bulbs. The column is basically a cut-and-paste job on a recent New York Times article on the bulbs–the same newspaper that Will claimed in an earlier column is “a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today’s war against warming.” Somehow, a paper Will knows is nothing but a climate propaganda machine can publish an article related to global warming that he relies on as absolute authority.

But let’s leave internal logic aside. Let’s just deal with fact-checking. At the start of Will’s column today, he argues that all this worry about light bulbs is supremely pointless because…you guessed it…

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Does the Post read its own letters? Does it remember them? Do they think if you add the phrase “stastistics” you can continue to mislead on the exact same point emphasized by Jarraud? Perhaps Will’s editors think if they put a link in Will’s misleading statement, it somehow makes it right. Did they actually look at the linked document? If they did, they’d find stuff like this:

The global average temperature for 2007 is statistically indistinguishable from each of the nine warmest years on record.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74°C, but this increase has not been continuous. The linear warming trend over the past 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the past 100 years.

Every time I think this sorry tale of fact-checking woe can’t get worse, it does.

I’ve been writing from time to time recently about the poor job that op-ed sections do with science. As my prime example, I’ve focused on a column George Will wrote poo-poohing global warming for the Washington Post. But I’ve never meant to imply that that particular column was some isolated fluke. I think similar problems can be found in the editorial pages of many newspapers, and many branches of science are affected.

I don’t have the luxury (not to mention the masochism) to become a fact-checker on every opinion piece that appears in every major US newspaper. But I do want to point out a new column by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe today, “Where’s Global Warming?” Sounding like a George Will, Jr., Jacoby presents what he claims is evidence suggesting that there is no global warming.

Considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

What I find striking about this column is that I don’t actually have to do any fresh fact-checking to identify some problems with it. I already have. Jacoby offers us the same glitch with a satellite sensor that Will did, which he seems to be using to suggest that we don’t really know anything about ice coverage. But as I pointed out on February 27, the scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who discovered the glitch made it clear that “the temporary error in the near-real-time data does not change the conclusion that Arctic sea ice extent has been declining for the past three decades.”

Jacoby then invokes a new paper which I wrote about last week on a potential new shift in the climate. “In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission.”

Remission? You’d think the climate had tumor and was now cancer-free. In fact, Swanson and Tsonis made it very clear that the shift they were proposing was the result of the climate’s natural variability overlaid on the effects of an ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As I wrote in my post, Swanson put it this way to me: “We are describing in this paper what is generally referred to as ‘internal’ (natural) climate variability, superimposed upon a robust global warming trend at century time-scales.”

In both cases, Jacoby misrepresents research. Climate scientists have not concluded that global warming has been affecting the world based on a “run of hot weather” as Jacoby puts it. They look at long-term trends. When George Will made this same kind of error, his editors claimed that his column had actually passed through a stringent fact-checking process. I wonder if the Boston Globe put Jacoby to the same test. A one-minute phone call to either team of scientists would have been enough to render a verdict.

While I was blogging over the past few weeks about fact-checking George Will’s dismissal of global warming (collected here), I got comments. A lot of them.

A fair number of commenters claimed George Will was right, and presented evidence that they claimed supported him. Some tried to back their claims with news that came out after Will’s column was published. For example, a few days after his column came out, there were reports that the a satellite that measure ice cover had some trouble and was fixed. But George Will could not jump forward in time, check out the satellites, and then leap back to write his column. There’s no way that it could have any bearing on fact-checking his piece. What’s more, even if Will did know about them, he’d still be wrong, as I explained here.

Today brought more time-travel. Trey writes:

Just FYI to the AGW crown [sic] and to support George Will and Lou Dobbs (CNN) there appears to be a shift to global cooling now. MSNBC and Discovery.com are reporting no warming since 2001 and that we’re looking at no warming or even cooling for the next several decades.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause-02.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/

My response is much the same as my response to the satellite story. On February 15, George Will wrote the following about current “global cooling”:

Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.

If we’re going to fact-check George Will, this is what we have to check. What does the World Meteorlogical Organization in fact have to say about global warming?

This (from April 2008):

The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.

And this (from May 29 last year):

While important uncertainties still remain, the overwhelming global scientific consensus, as reflected through the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, is now that the Earth’s atmosphere is warming at an increasing rate and that most of this warming is very probably due to human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning and certain agricultural practices. It is also recognized that, while these changes are just beginning, their impacts will intensify in the coming decades.

If George Will has been having back-room chats with the World Meteorological Organization folks, where they’ve repudiated statements like these, he hasn’t share that news with the rest of us. My hunch is that Will would point to 1998, which was a very warm year, and say, “See, global warming stopped in 1998.”

But that’s not how the World Meteorological Organization (or any major organization of climate scientists) judges global warming. It’s pointless to pick out a single year for comparison, because the rising global temperature trend is overlaid on a naturally variable climate. If Will decided to pick 1997 or 1999, he’d have to deal with a year that was cooler than recent years. In fact, the World Meteorological Organization judges global warming based on averages of several years, which they compare to the entire climate record since humans started pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on an industrial scale.

So what about this new report from Discovery.com, and reprinted by MSNBC? First off, a fact-checker can’t use it to confirm a statement Will made about the World Meteorological Organization three weeks ago. The story itself from Discovery is very short and doesn’t provide any details about where the study in question came out. So I got in touch with the scientists, Kyle Swanson and Anstasio Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin. They sent me their paper, called “Has the climate recently shifted?” It will be published soon in Geophysical Research Letters.

Swanson and Tsonis observe that over the past century, the average global temperature has risen, but there have been periods when it has dropped temporarily. Swanson and Tsonis have been investigating how the natural climate variability may explain the shifts between these phases. This variability includes oscillations in the circulation of the ocean and the air. El Nino is the most famous of these oscillations, but there are others as well in the North Pacific and the North Atlantic. Only three times in the twentieth century did all these oscillations synchronize, after which the climate moved to a new state. This figure, from the paper, shows the periods of synchronization as cross-hatched bars.

Based on the study of chaotic systems, Swanson and Tsonis propose that the synchronization and climate shift are connected through cause and effect. Once a lot of oscillations are working in sync, even a small change to one of them can radiate out through the whole system and trigger a change. And along with the three shifts in the real climate, climate models also show a similar response when oscillations line up.

In their paper, Swanson and Tsonis then look at the past few years. They see a peak in synchronization in 2001 and 2002, and they also observe that in the years since, the temperature change has been on average flat (although much warmer than at the beginning of the century). They estimate that all the warming due to carbon dioxide should have driven the temperature up .25 degrees C since then. The fact that it hasn’t leads them to propose the the oceans and atmosphere have changed the way they handle heat. The oceans may have absorbed more heat due to a change in circulation, or the atmosphere may radiate more heat away by clouds. If this hypothesis is true, then it’s possible that the climate will remain in this new stage for some years to come before it shifts again.

Swanson and Tsonis write:

Of course, it is purely speculative to presume that the global mean temperature will remain near current levels for such an extended period of time. Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing.

They conclude with this warning:

Finally, it is vital to note that there is no comfort to be gained by having a climate with a significant degree of internal variability, even if it results in a near-term cessation of global warming. It is straightforward to argue that a climate with significant internal variability is a climate that is very sensitive to applied anthropogenic radiative anomalies (c.f. Roe [2009]). If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability [Kravtsov and Spannagle 2008].

This story has been bouncing around a lot around the blogosphere. The conservative Heritage Foundation quoted from the Discovery.com piece with the headline, “Trillions in New Taxes to Accomplish Nothing.” A lot of the coverage describes the study as showing that global warming stopped in 2001, as Trey writes. But the paper doesn’t say that. It says that a synchronization happened then. It’s a bit odd how easily people can shift from claiming the warm year of 1998 as the end of global warming to 2001.

So I asked Swanson and Tsonis what they thought about its reception.

Tsonis wrote,

I was worried that this will happen, that is why we caution in the paper that while climate shifts may be part of the natural variability of the climate system they may be superimposed on a anthropogenic warming trend. We mentioned that also in the MSNBC story, and this will be my answer to anybody who asks me.

I like to report on the science only. If political organizations want to pick up what they like in order to pass their point and ignore the real science, there is nothing we can do.

Swanson wrote to me that this natural shifting is exactly what you’d expect if the Earth’s climate was indeed sensitive enough to carbon dioxide that it would respond by warming as has been projected.

We are describing in this paper what is generally referred to as “internal” (natural) climate variability, superimposed upon a robust global warming trend at century time-scales. Viewed in that light, the “halt” in global warming is no different than an El Nino/La Nina transition, which also breaks a warming trend – what we are describing is just climate variability that occurs over longer time scales.

Swanson and Tsonis have certainly come up with an intriguing hypothesis, based both on temperature observations and mathematical models of the climate. I’ll be curious to hear what other climate scientists think of it. It will take time to test, but even if it turns out to be right, it does not mean that global warming is over. If George Will could have climbed into a time travel machine and jumped forward to today, he would have been wrong if he tried to use this study to bolster his arguments back in February.

Update: I just noticed the Discovery news article did mention the journal where the paper will be published. I’ve struck the offending text.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example I’ve focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.

I have argued that George Will’s claims would have not have passed the standard fact-checking carried out by many magazines. He even manages to add extra errors in his second column, which is just a defense of his first. A number of other bloggers have also criticized the Post on similar grounds. The Washington Post editorial staff has responded on three occasions, most recently and at the greatest length this morning. As I’ll explain below, it’s not much of a response.

The first reaction was reported last week in Talking Points Memo. Andrew Alexander, the new Washington Post ombudsman, checked with the editorial page editors and told TPM that they have a “multi-layered editing process” in which columns are fact-checked to the greatest extent possible. They had, in other words, been satisfied that the information in George Will column factually correct in advance of publishing it, and now saw no reason to print any corrections. Then the editorial page editor Fred Hiatt was interviewed Thursday in the Columbia Journalism Review, where he stated that Will may have made inferences from the data that scientists didn’t agree with, and that it was up to those scientists to debate Will. Again, he saw no need for any corrections, and even suggested that pieces like Will’s column helped the public appreciate the uncertainty on issues including global warming, along with other fields like medicine.

I’m not going to deal in detail with these responses here, having already done so yesterday. Instead, I want to take a look at the latest response that came out this morning: a full-blown column in the Washington Post by the ombudsman Andrew Alexander–in fact, Alexander’s first official piece in his new job. You can read it here.

As I read it, I kept hitting one puzzling statement after another. For example, Alexander starts out the piece by focusing his column on what he calls “a key paragraph” about the global area of ice. As I’ve explained before, that paragraph is indeed in error, both in the specifics of the data, and in the way Will uses it as evidence that global warming has not been occurring. It became all the more striking because the scientists whom Will named as his source for the data rejected his claims, and, as I later showed, neither Will nor any of the fact-checkers bothered to contact the scientists to confirm their information. Instead, they pointed to another statement from the scientists as confirming Will’s claim–while ignoring the parts of the one-page statement that showed why Will was wrong.

But as vivid as that case may be, it was only one of numerous errors in the piece. If Will’s columns had indeed been properly fact-checked, the fact-checkers would have drawn attention to other errors in his columns.

For example, Will misrepresents an article by the late great Walter Sullivan in the New York Times in 1975, pretending that it trumpets an imminent plunge into an Ice Age:

The New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

Here is how that article actually starts:

The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.

The whole article is here [$]. For more on all this, see here and see “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” (free pdf) published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I write frequently for the Times, although only once about global warming.)

Here’s another error Alexander doesn’t address: Will tries to use a recent satellite sensor glitch as evidence that skeptical scientists get attacked for questioning global warming. I explained how scientists have dealt with that glitch and corrected the record, and how the scientists themselves state that the glitch doesn’t affect their conclusion that the Arctic has shown a three-decade trend of shrinking ice area–a result that also comes from climate models.

But Alexander never addresses anything beyond Will’s claims about the global area of ice now and in 1979. When fact-checkers write up their reports, they do not just look at one paragraph and call it a day. I don’t understand why that is acceptable for a report from an ombudsman about the accuracy of a newspaper column.

But even within this narrow scope, Alexander’s conclusions puzzle me. He states:

My inquiry shows that there was fact-checking at multiple levels.

What Alexander then describes is not fact-checking.

It began with Will’s own research assistant, Greg Reed. When the column was submitted on Feb. 12 to The Washington Post Writers Group, which edits and syndicates it, Reed sent an accompanying e-mail that provided roughly 20 Internet reference links in support of key assertions in the column. Richard Aldacushion, editorial production manager at the Writers Group, said he reviewed every link. The column was then edited by editorial director Alan Shearer and managing editor James Hill.

Next, it went to The Post’s op-ed editor, Autumn Brewington, who said she also reviewed the sources.

Fact-checking descriptions of scientific research involves a wee bit more than perusing Internet reference links. It is not just a pattern-matching game, where you see if a sequence of words is the same in two places. Anyone who has actually fact-checked for a magazine like Discover (where I fact-checked for a few years) can tell you that you need to get familiar with the scientific research to see if the description is a good representation of the science itself.

And one essential part of getting familiar with it is calling scientists who live day and night with that research (especially if those scientists were cited explicitly in the piece being checked). A call to the scientists would have immediately sent up red flags (as I found when I got in touch with them on February 21 to satisfy my own curiosity and clear up some questions of my own).

This is not a criticism of the people Alexander names in his column. Newspapers and magazines are responsible for establishing procedures for fact-checking, which staff members must then follow. What I don’t understand is how Alexander can offer us this account of what happened and call it fact-checking at multiple levels.

Even more puzzling is Alexander’s account of his own research into the narrow question of the ice.

The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will’s assertion that global sea ice levels “now equal those of 1979.” I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.

It said that while global sea ice areas are “near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979,” sea ice area in the Northern Hemisphere is “almost one million sq. km below” the levels of late 1979. That’s roughly the size of Texas and California combined. In my mind, it should have triggered a call for clarification to the center.

But according to Bill Chapman, a climate scientist with the center, there was no call from Will or Post editors before the column appeared. He added that it wasn’t until last Tuesday — nine days after The Post began receiving demands for a correction — that he heard from an editor at the newspaper. It was Brewington who finally e-mailed, offering Chapman the opportunity to write something that might help clear the air.

Readers would have been better served if Post editors, and the new ombudsman, had more quickly addressed the claims of falsehoods.

I know that I may be sounding a bit Talmudic by spending so many blog posts on this one bit of information, but examining how these Post editors have dealt with it has proven to be very revealing. They never bothered to check with scientists about the validity of a statement in a column, and after thousands of people have complained, they recognize that there was something so amiss that should have called the scientists. But they still can’t manage to make a decision about whether the statement requires a correction.

What’s more, they continue to ignore the broader, more important problem with Will’s discussion of sea ice: the facts that picking out two days from a thirty-year time series is not a meaningful way to look at climate trends, and that climate models do not, in fact, lead you to expect a decrease in global ice cover. And they have not even taken any notice of all the other errors in Will’s two columns.

Alexander’s prescription for the Post is this:

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.

I don’t see why the news reporters at the Post have to recommit to anything. They’ve been doing their job. What really has to happen is for people who claim to be fact-checking to really do some fact-checking. It’s that simple.

Update, Sunday 3/1: In my initial version of this post, I sometimes referred to Andrew Alexander as Anderson by mistake. When I first noticed this mistake, I thought I only did it once and fixed that error. But commenters have kindly pointed out I had left several Andersons behind. I’ve now fixed them all. Apologies for the confusion.

Update later Sunday: Via Andy Revkin, I came across what is essentially an independent fact-check. It’s from Walt Meier of NSIDC, responding to a question about Will’s column

Basically, Mr. Will made three mistakes:

1. He was factually incorrect on the date that he reported his “daily global ice” number. However, he was merely out-of-date with his facts (it was true on Jan 1, but wasn’t 6 weeks later). This is somewhat nit-picky, though it illuminates how fast things can change in a relatively short period of time, meaning that one should be very cautious about drawing any conclusions about climate from an isolated event.

2. Related to that, it is easy to cherry-pick one date here and one date there to compare to support most any view. The important thing is to look at things in the context of long-term changes. That is what NSIDC always tries to convey by comparing to long-term averages.

3. “Global sea ice” simply has no meaning in terms of climate change. The Arctic and Antarctic are unique and separated environments that respond differently. It would be like taking a drought in Georgia and torrential rain in Maine, adding those up and claiming that “rainfall is normal” in the eastern U.S.

Update, 4/7/09: Alexander’s use of “Arctic Climate Research Center” is incorrect.

[Correction appended]

I guess I don’t understand editorial pages. The laws of physics must be different there.

Chapter 1: A Correction

On February 15, George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post, in which he scoffed at dire warnings about the effects of global warming. He claimed that environmental pessimists are always warning about catastrophes that never come. And he offered a series of claims about the climate that added up to a larger claim about the lack of evidence of global warming. For example:

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.

These are statements about facts–both the grainy little facts of data, and the larger facts they add up to about how the world works. Are these facts correct?

As I wrote on Monday, that question would have been answered if Will was writing for a science magazine like Discover (or the New Yorker, or many others). A good fact-checker would burrow into the column and demand confirmation of everything in there–typically by reading over all the relevant material and calling up the sources.

I’ve long wondered if opinion pieces are fact-checked at all, especially ones that deal with science. Over the years I’ve read some real howlers. And so it was very striking to read, via Talking Points memo, that the Arctic Climate Research Center, the very place Will invoked as his source of information, posted this statement on their web site:

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.

I later contacted Bill Chapman, who runs the center, to ask about the statement. He explained that he and his colleagues got somewhere between 80 and 100 from people coming to the center’s web site to see for themselves how the ice was the same, and finding that there was a lot less ice than George Will had said. Of course, they probably assumed that by “now,” Will had mean “now,” as opposed to “two months ago.” Silly readers.

Chapter 2: A Multi-Layered Editorial Process

The ice was not the only subject of errors in Will’s piece. Brad Johnson of Wonk Room, among others, has come up with a list of other items–a lot for a column just a few hundred words long. But that sharp reply from the Arctic Climate Research Center made the ice the focus of many complaints that came to the Washington Post.

The ombudsman at the Post gave a response on Tuesday. He had asked around and had been informed 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.

How had this information about the ice slipped through the dense fact-checking mesh? The ombudsman did not cite a call to anyone at the research center. As I later discovered, nobody–not Will, not his employees, not the two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, not the op-ed page editor, not the two copy editors–actually got in touch with the scientists at the center. Instead, they relied on a statement that had been posted on the center’s web site in January.

Chapter 3: Global Warming, Global Ice

That January statement has a backstory of its own.

On January 1, a blog ran a post that claimed that global ice cover at the end of 2008 was the same as at the end of December 31, 1979. The implication being, “Hey, what’s all this global warming people are screaming about? There’s just as much ice as ever.”

In the research center’s January statement, the scientists wrote 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.”

So–on the level of grain-sized facts, Will could have said, with accuracy, that on one day in December 2008, the global ice area was near or slightly lower than it was on that day in December 1979. He did not. I leave readers to ponder why he didn’t.

But as you reflect, consider how this rewrite would have sounded: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice is 1.34 million sq. km less now 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 doesn’t quite have the same ring as the original.

Of course, the big difference between February 2009 and February 1979 does not, on its own, mean that the world’s ice is on a fast track to oblivion, no more than picking a single day in December means there has been no change. Climate change happens over years and over decades, with noisy jumps at smaller scales. And to understand how climate change is affecting the ice, climate scientists actually consider what the latest climate models predict about how that ice will change.

In his column, Will claims that many experts were warning in 2008 that the drop in global ice areas was evidence of man-made warming. He doesn’t tell us who those experts are. And, in fact, the research center scientists wrote in their January statement that global ice area may not be relevant as an indication of climate change.

Why? Because almost climate change models project shrinking Arctic ice, but not necessarily Antarctic ice. In fact, some recent models show extra evaporation due to warming leading to snow falling on the sea ice around Antarctica.

And if you look at the ice at each pole, the ice in the Arctic has been on a shrinking trend. The ice around the Antarctic has had a reverse trend as is actually covering a bigger area this year than in 1979. This is consistent with the climate models.

All of this was in that January statement. It’s one page long. If the Washington Post’s batallion of fact-checkers actually used this to approve Will’s statement about the area of ice, they had to have seen this additional information. But they did not bother to raise an objection.

Chapter 4: George Will Should Read This Blog

All the attention Will has been getting–or at least an article that discusses his column in the New York Times–seems to have gotten under his skin. In his column today for the Washington Post, he has returned to global warming, and to his own previous column on the subject.

“The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged,” he claimed. “The challenge is mistaken.”

The challenge he’s referring to is about the ice. Will does not mention the many other challenges that have been laid out. But let’s leave them aside. Life is short. What does Will have to say now about the ice?

He now says his previous column was “citing data from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog.”

Citing data as interpreted by a blog…That’s some fine reporting. Neither George Will nor his employees did any more research than look at a blog. Now, blogs can be wonderful, but would it have been really so hard for Will and Co. to drop a note to the scientists themselves to do their own research? Pick up the phone? Apparently not.

Will then uses that same January statement from the scientists in response to that blog post as evidence that he was right.

But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying ‘we do not know where George Will is getting his information.’ The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center’s Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf) that this column subsequently reported accurately.

See anything missing here? How about the fact that by the time Will published his column, there was a lot less ice than there was 30 years ago? How about the point made in that same statement Will prizes so greatly that global ice is a red herring?

But Will can’t leave it at that.

The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:

On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California.

Will ends his column by complaining that the New York Times isn’t reporting on that story. But Will hasn’t told the story accurately.

First of all, the trouble with the satellite has not affected the information coming from the Arctic Climate Research Center. As I wrote earlier this week, the scientists there use their own methods to calculate sea ice area that are different from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. And by cross-checking with other satellite measurements, they found that their estimates were still good.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center scientists began to look at the readings from another sensor on the same satellite. They recalculated the ice area for the past few months. And on February 26, they were back in business, publishing their corrected measurements, which include the period when they had been underestimating the ice.

And in their news update on all this, the National Snow and Ice Data Center scientists had this to say:

The temporary error in the near-real-time data does not change the conclusion that Arctic sea ice extent has been declining for the past three decades.

In trying to justify an old error, Will can’t help making new ones. But at this point, I’m not expecting any corrections.

Chapter 5: Post-Modern Fact-Checking

What has kept me hooked on this saga is not George Will’s errors. Errors are as common as grass. Some are made out of ignorance, some carefully constructed to give a misleading impression. What has kept me agog is the way the editors at the Washington Post have actually given their stamp of approval on Will’s columns, even claiming to have fact-checked them and seeing no need for a single correction.

The climax to this part of the story came yesterday, when the Columbia Journalism Review was finally able to get Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor at the Post, to speak directly about the ice affair:

It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject–so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point…I think it’s kind of healthy, given how, in so many areas–not just climatology, but medicine, and everything else–there is a tendency on the part of the lay public at times to ascribe certainty to things which are uncertain.

I’ve heard that line before…the one about how people can look at the same scientific data and make different inferences.

I’ve heard it from creationists. They look at the Grand Canyon, at all the data amassed by geologists over the years, and they end up with an inference very different from what you’ll hear from those geologists.

Would Hiatt be pleased to have them writing opinion pieces, too? There is indeed some debate in the scientific community about exactly how old the Grand Canyon is–with some arguing it’s 55 million years old and others arguing for 15 million. Would Hiatt consider it healthy to publish a piece from someone who thinks the Grand Canyon is just a few thousand years old, with just a perfunctory inspection of the information in it?

At this point, it’s hard for me to see how the answer could be no.

[Correction, 4/7/09: Bill Chapman is a member of the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois. Despite George Will's claims in his column, there is no such thing as the Arctic Climate Research Center at the University of Illinois. I regret not noticing this error sooner. Details here.]