Ahh, good ol' George. Mr. Will should be mocked as a "Proud Palinst" at every opportunity.

I pity progressives who seem genuinely concerned about fighting climate change. It is not going to be an easy sell. 44% of Americans don't even believe it is man made (up from 41%) let alone are willing to spend any money to stop it. It is ranked by voters as the lowest priority (lower than moral decline and trade policy). And while public opinions change Americans have been persistently ambivalent towards foreign aid (which tackling global warming would effectively be).
So unless you see something truly awesome (like Hurricane Katrina times ten) the George Will's with their populist messages will win.

Gordon, I think you should pity anyone, regardless of political background, concerned about climate change issues, given the hurdles that must be overcome. It's a serious problem. The solution, generally, is going to involve detaching pundits like Will from the ignorant talking-points factory that he's been victimized by, in the same way that Will has recently mocked his GOP allies who disregard the reality of evolution.

If the post is about a Newsweek cover, why is it accompanied by a Time cover about the fuel shortage?

There actually was a phenomenon going on during the 70's that led to cooling. Global Dimming. It was caused by increased air pollution. It was a likely cause of the drought in Africa. Global dimming acted more quickly than Global Warming, and the clean air act greatly reduced the effect. The combination has caused global temperatures to rise more quickly to the baseline global warming would have caused in the absence of global dimming.

Still a stupid article.

Please learn that "as such" does not mean "therefore." It means "as [some noun just mentioned]." Example. "I am an editor. As such, I fix people's manuscripts." Note that there is a noun to which "such" refers. Note also that if you never thought about what "as such" really means, this context might lead you to think that it means "therefore." But it doesn't.
So that "as such" at the end of the second paragraph just jars.

Damn, I coulda sworn Wheel of Fortune didn't start until sometime in the '80s.

Oh, and great post, Ezra. I thought the same way when I read Will's blather this morning, but you've expressed it far better than I could have.

George Will is notorious for conflicts of interest. He took $200K from Conrad Black while defending Black against criminal charges, and he gets fat speaker's fees for lecturing industry groups from those industries whose interests he promotes in his columns.

The Washington Post ombudsman needs to investigate whether Will has conflicts of interests with the energy industry. Contact ombudsman@washpost.com .

Be polite.

Didn't Will also break the "China is drilling off Florida" story and then issue a correction, but not exactly a retraction?

Will listed nine citations in his column, not just Newsweek. Why wasn't Klein honest about that? When you have to engage in that kind of dishonesty to make your arguments, they probably aren't worth making.

Dude, there are thousands of citations to be made in favor of global warming, and not just in climatological and meteorological journals, and you gripe about Klein not citing nine?

Will listed nine citations in his column, not just Newsweek. Why wasn't Klein honest about that? When you have to engage in that kind of dishonesty to make your arguments, they probably aren't worth making.

In what universe is it dishonesty not to address every single point in an article? Ever read a book review of a non-fiction book? Did the review address every single claim in the book. The article establishes that Will is just making stuff up, or to be generous, maybe just quoting other people who are making stuff up. Will keeps using the same bogus argument over and over, and Klein points that out. That is not in any way dishonest.

"Tell the Truth" must live in the creationist debate world. That's the one where if they give 30 arguments why evolution couldn't have happened you only debunk 29, they win. And they get to keep using all 30 arguments.

I know this is a quaint idea, but it seems to me that "just making stuff up" should be grounds for firing. Will committed journalistic fraud. I guess WaPo is content to have it be known that their editorial page standards are no higher than a wingnut blog.

"Dude, there are thousands of citations to be made in favor of global warming, and not just in climatological and meteorological journals, and you gripe about Klein not citing nine?"

If you think that was the point I made, then you are an imbecile, no doubt. KeithOK seems to suffer the same malady.

The entire point of Klein's post was based on "George Will brought up that one silly Newsweek article from the 1970s again". But Will didn't base his argument on a single Newsweek article. Klein knows that, he's being dishonest.

T the t "quotes" Ezra: "George Will brought up that one silly Newsweek article from the 1970s again".

Well, no, that's not what Ezra wrote. And there is no denying that Will brought the article up. So exactly who IS the imbecile here, Mr. truth?

Keep in mind a few simple things:

1) It's a long weekend. Will would publish a press release from Dow Chemical if it meant getting out of town faster.

2) Will is like a lot of others in the news game - losing market share, and maintaining a comfort zone for his core readership. He doesn't care about the truth.

3) The Post op-ed amuses itself with Hiatt's Rule: Be Contrarian! It's the dumb person's excuse for not editing, fact-checking, etc.

If we're going to discuss dishonesty...I can't read the whole Science magazine that Will referred to but I can go to their web site and look at the listing of articles. There is only one concerning climate and ice ages and it's about one of the recognized causes of ice ages, variations in Earth's orbit. Does Will reference any other peer reviewed journal? No.

In reply to editor, Ezra has used "as such" in place of "that being the case" which would have been better usage. But this mistake is often made. I am curious about the frequent use of "folks" in his writing. This is an unusually old-fashioned word for such a hipster. I think it is used to mean "the good people." I don't think he would write of "the folks in the Bush administration", for instance. It seems to mean"people of good will." He would not say "the folks over at Likud" -- would he?

People who are concerned about global warming should just get on with the business of reversing it -- and stop wasting their energy and time on the small but loud minority in the deny-distract-obstruct crowd. They are disingenuous in their denials and irrelevant to the conversation.

As noted by Jim S. The only peer reviewed study mentioned in Will's columns is the 1976 Science mag paper titled "Variations in the Earth's Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages", which is hardly controversial. Among other things it states:

The dominant, 100,000-year climatic
component has an average period close to, and is in phase with, orbital eccentricity.

6) It is concluded that changes in the earth's orbital geometry are the fundamental cause of the succession of Quaternary ice ages.

7) A model of future climate based on the observed orbital-climate relationships, but ignoring anthropogenic effects, predicts that the long-term trend over the next seven thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.

needless to say, the implications of "IGNORING ANTHROPOGENIC EFFECTS" is way past George Will's pay grade.

Pardon me for asking, but since the world has been cooling since 1998, at what point do we stop saying that it is warming?

Pardon me for responding, but since that lie has been debunked since 1998, as Google has been able to show since 1998, at what point do trolls like you stop bringing it up?

Debunked? So all four global data sources (including NASA and the UKMet) are "debunked" when their measurements show planetary cooling since 2005 despite the highest CO2 concentration ever. Three of these four show cooling since 1998. Debunked?

LOL. 1998 was the hottest year ever recorded. Climate is a 30 year phenomenon, cherry picking a single yearly spike is a rankly dishonest baseline for comparision. Until 2006 temperatures were quite high (less than 1998), then la nina, solar minimum, the PDO, etc has kicked in for a few years, resulting in a slight fall off, which will likely continue a bit.

Meanwhile Will has been shown to be a cherry picking liar on arctic ice extent. Ice extent when he wrote his column is greater than the same date on 1979, contrary to what Will claimed. Oh wait, Will cherrypicked a single day in *December* 1979 to compare it to, making his ambiguous "1979" perhaps technically correct in a weaselly sort of way. In fact, as anyone who know shit from shinola knows, on a weekly basis ice extent is enormously variable. Calm seas, no snow coverage on extant ice, etc. can temporarily make ice extent grow faster in warmer conditions than colder. Ice depth could be relatively tiny. Cherrypicking a single day is bullshit.
Denialsts are worse than creationists, with their factoids cleverly designed to sway the uninformed.

Thanks for this fine piece of work and esp. the link to NAS. I am happy to refer to you on my German blog. cheers, Marc

So... meh. this blog post is the first I've heard about the issue, and based on it and reading the Politico article I'd say it's the kind of thing to ask questions about (if Calderone didn't already know that there are a lot of off-the-record list servs around DC like you say, which come to think of it would be a big thing to be ignorant of), but the answers aren't newsworthy. Smoke but no fire.
I just hate seeing "leftists" act like William F Buckley and the National fucking Review. This is why the left has gone to shit, too many damn rich kids and their summer-camp habits brought into the political arena, instead of actual organizing.

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