The Loom » The George Will On Ice Affair

George Will: Time For Some Significant Fact-Checking

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:59:02 +0000

A year ago this month, George Will wrote a howler of a column in the Washington Post about global warming, loaded with scientific errors and profoundly illogical arguments. It would not have survived even the most perfunctory fact-checking–despite claims from the Washington Post that his columns go through a “multi-layered fact checking process.” In subsequent months, Will has continued to offer new climate howlers, and this Sunday he provided us all with a dubious one-year birthday gift.

In Will’s latest piece, he yet again declares global warming a construction of hysterical climate scientists who, in his words, “compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes.” This time, he claims that climate scientists themselves are finally confessing that it’s all been a whole lot of hooey.

Will backs up this claim with a link to a BBC interview last week with Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia. A BBC journalist asked Jones questions, some of which had been submitted by unnamed climate skeptics, including this one:

Q: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

A: Yes, but ...

Multi-Layered Fact-Checking Process, Activate!

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:30:41 +0000

Did the new Post op-ed by Sarah Palin on global warming get the same multi-layered fact-checking as George Will? Sigh. Deltoid has the details.

George Will: Uncheckable?

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:45:35 +0000

Long-time readers of this blog will be aware of my Ahab-like obsession with George Will’s global warming errors in the Washington Post–and the Post’s hollow claims to have carefully fact-checked him. I confess that I’ve let a couple of his more recent columns slip by. But I had to stop to blog about his latest take on global warming, in which he jumps on the recently stolen emails among climate scientists. He does a remarkable job of making no sense at all.

In case you haven’t followed it, somebody stole thousands of private emails from the University of East Anglia, where the Climate Research Unit gathers and analyzes climate data. Suspicions are turning to Russian hackers, but there’s been no official word about who did it. The emails ended up on the Internet, and have become a big deal. The University of East Anglia, for example, is investigating both the theft itself and the accusations that have been leveled against UAE scientists as a result.

There’s been a huge amount of stuff published in newspapers and on blogs in the two weeks since the theft. I recommend a piece in Popular ...

George Will’s Crack Fact-Checkers Continue Their Nap

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:24:39 +0000

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 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 ...

Just Keep Calling It Fact-Checking And Someday They’ll Believe You

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:14:58 +0000

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.

George Will, Now With Misleading Links!

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:39:57 +0000

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 ...

Glaciers and Electrons

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:46:31 +0000

Thirty-four days ago, George Will published a column in the Washington Post that was loaded with erroneous statements about global warming. Many people, your humble scribe included, laid out the fact-checking. The Washington Post editorial page editors claimed that they checked the column repeatedly, yet their ombudsman granted that perhaps it might have been a nice idea if somebody had called the scientists Will invoked as his authorities–scientists who themselves refuted him. Yet the Post has not published a correction to Will’s column. Instead, they published a second column on the subject from Will, in which he reiterated some of his earlier misleading statements and even managed to slip some new ones in.

Today, at last, the Post published an “opinion” piece by science writer Chris Mooney in response. I use quotation marks because most of his piece is actually a concise fact-checking report. The same issue also includes a letter from the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, Michael Jarraud, who rejects Will’s characterization of the WMO’s work on global warming.

Chris says that this experience has changed his previously critical view of the Post editorial page. I wonder ...

Ice Never Sleeps: George Will, Jr.

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:50:17 +0000

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 ...

Checking George Will: The Perils of Time Travel

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:48:46 +0000

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 ...

Ice, Ice Baby: When Fact-Checking Is Not Fact-Checking

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:09:03 +0000

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 ...

Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:49:34 +0000

[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 ...

George Will: Locked In Ice!

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:27:05 +0000

Last week I dedicated a few posts (1, 2, 3, 4) to a column by George Will on global warming as an example of why fact-checking is important. The whole thing flared up a lot more than I had expected, with the Washington Post editorial page folks actually claiming they had fact checked Will through a “multi-layered” fact-checking process. (Unfortunately, no one bothered to pick up a phone to call a research center cited in the piece.) Etc., etc.

I’ve been too busy with many deadlines on other projects to keep close track of this any longer, but I just had to pass on this bit of news from Talking Points Memo: George Will is back, baby!

We thought we were done with the topic of George Will and climate change. But now we’ve gotten an advanced look at Will’s latest column, set to run tomorrow in the Washington Post and in syndication. And it amounts to a stubborn defense of the amazing global warming denialist column he published earlier this month, that was ripped apart by just about everyone and their mother — including us….

Will stands by the substance of the February 15 column, ...

A Wrinkle In Ice (or Not)

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:53:19 +0000

[Correction appended]

There’s been a wrinkle in the global warming fact-checking saga I’ve been following this week.

Just to recap–George Will wrote a column claiming that global warming’s a lot of hype. He made a number of misleading statements, including one that was rejected by the very scientists he claimed as his source.

Will stated, “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

A statement was then posted on the research center’s web site of the Polar Research Group:

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.

A number of bloggers laid out the problems with the column and sought a response from the Washington Post. The Post announced that they had fact-checked Will’s column, and that it was just ...

You Call That Fact-Checking?

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:50:38 +0000

While recovering from an extracted wisdom tooth this morning, I cheered up when I saw that Talking Points Memo and other blogs have picked up my grousing about George Will’s error-laden global warming column in the Washington Post. When I first became aware of Will’s column on Monday, it seemed to me the perfect example of the general problem with treating op-ed pages as “opinion.” That is, if by opinion, you mean that someone doesn’t have to adhere to the facts. I could state that the Earth is 6000 years old, and no one would dare correct me, because it’s just my opinion. (I guess that’s the rationale that led Forbes and US News to run pieces by young-Earth creationists as “commentary” a couple weeks ago in “honor” of Darwin’s birthday. [Okay. No more air quotes. Promise.])

Now we learn via Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post‘s ombudsman, that the editorial page has a whole team of fact-checkers. Or at least there are personal assistants to George Will, a couple syndication editors, and Post copy editors who have been identified as fact-checkers. Somehow, this army all decided that Will’s piece was just dandy. Even ...

The Sea Ice Affair, Continued

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:12:24 +0000

[Correction appended]

Monday I bemoaned the lack of fact-checking of opinion pieces in newspapers, pointing to a George Will column on global warming in the Washington Post as evidence. Now the Washington Post op-ed folks claim that it was in fact heavily fact-checked. All I can say is that none of them better apply for a fact-checking job here at Discover.

To recap: George Will wrote a column in which he tried to downplay the evidence that global warming has already affected the Earth, and that it will have bigger impacts in the future. Various bloggers have pointed out examples where Will misrepresented scientific studies in this column. The most glaring one was this: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

The Research Center put a statement on their site explaining that Will was wrong. On February 15, the day Will wrote his column, there was substantially less ice than on February 15, 1979: the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

I picked up this story from Talking Points Memo, and it has been bouncing around for a few days now. The folks at ...

George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:20:46 +0000

I had to spend a couple hours this morning footnoting my next column for Discover so that it can be fact-checked. I had to assemble the papers I read, the web sites I visited, and the contact information for scientists who helped me understand the subject. One of Discover‘s intrepid fact-checkers will then spend many hours following in my footsteps and discovering where I tripped. He or she will have no compunction about writing up a detailed report of my mistakes. I’m sure some mistakes will turn up, and I won’t be angry to see them in a fact-checking report. I’ll be grateful that my column won’t inadvertently misrepresent someone’s research. And I’ll be personally glad to have any misunderstanding of mine put straight.

Fact-checking is an underappreciated art. As John McPhee explains in his recent essay, even a legendary fact-monger like himself benefits from the relentless skepticism of the New Yorker‘s fact-checkers. I got my own start as a fact-checker, and it was the best training I could imagine for science writing. Even when I don’t have the luxury of fact-checkers vetting my own writing, I have an inner skeptic that drives me to double-check whatever I feel unsure ...