ezra, don't you understand? fred barnes told george will!

A better article here.

Of course this just goes to show the importance of public opinion. And don't for a second assume the left and the scientists are somehow above misrepresenting facts to prove their point. The response by U of Illinois shows this. Instead of explaining why Will made this claim (and why it is actually wrong) they just paint him as a malicious liar. They ignore to mention that sea ice has made a rebound in 2008 lest anyone dumb enough misinterprets this as proof climate does not exist.

SAhorter Gekko:"Sure Will was lying but UofI was mean when they said he was a liar and so they suck!"

Look, I am no Will supporter, and am sure there is still an explanation here, but...

I parse his statement very differently. I read him as saying
1) Global ice has increased from Sept 2008 to now.
2) this increase is the fastest increase in either an up or down direction that has been observed in the past 30 years.

So his point may be that even though overall ice may have decreased in 30 years, the most recent 6-months have seen an increase of great magnitude.

Gordon, actually, the climate change denialists are malicious liars. Will is willingly serving as a tool of propaganda in service to his political team. He might not be consciously lying, but he is serving as a willing dupe.

The problem is that there is a political faction in america who has decided to set themselves up as the sworn enemy of scientists, and that will prove to have been a poor moral decision. What you need to be doing, Gordon, is making full-out condemnations of this faction of the right in order to stop their hideous propagandizing.

The question is why you're treating Will as an honest broker with a legitimate voice on this matter rather than a partisan propagandists for ideological extremists within the republican party.

The data graph is here:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg

It looks like, if Will was talking about Sept_08 - Feb_09, he is still wrong. But the increase from Sept_07 (the historic low) back up through about April 2008 is a pretty large increase.

But it does take Willfully ignorance that the clear general trend of the graph is down.

I dont think Will's specific statement was a lie. Sophistry, not lying, really is the right word for what he was doing...

The data graph is here:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg

It looks like, if Will was talking about Sept_08 - Feb_09, he is still wrong. But the increase from Sept_07 (the historic low) back up through about April 2008 is a pretty large increase.

But it does take Willfully ignorance that the clear general trend of the graph is down.

I dont think Will's specific statement was a lie. Sophistry, not lying, really is the right word for what he was doing...

Determing the cause of global warming and.....yada...yada....yada...it's man's activites, of course.

The difference is only 1.3 million square kilometers.

As they say, a million here and a million there and pretty soon that adds up to geological change!

jWill, the statement that is clearly wrong is this: "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."

What is disgusting is that Will not only lies but he disguises the lie as a quote from a reputable scientific institution. It is hard to explain this away as an "honest mistake". In any case, he has the chance to apologize and correct. If he doesn't, he's a liar period.

His email is georgewill@washpost.com in case anybody wants to ask him directly.

"According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979. "

That's the relevant quote. It's not a question of trend or variation. It's a straight comparison. It's either true or it isn't. If it's not true, it's a lie.

"If it's not true, it's a lie" Let's hold Obama to that standard too, shall we? will create 3 million jobs? Probably a lie. Giving millions to the client of Obey's son is stimulative? True -- or a lie?

And the Anonytrolls arrive to fling poo.

The sooner the site admins force these fuckers to put on clown masks, the better.

That guy's not trolling, he's just an idiot.

It appears that George Will got this story from an article by Michael Asher of DailyTech.com.

Just as bloggers take stories and pass them around, George did as well and like many who forward emails before they check snopes.com, they are embarrassed.

A lie is a deliberate act.

Here is the original article:

http://www.dailytech.com/Sea+Ice+Ends+Year+at+Same+Level+as+1979/article13834.htm

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

Pledging to wait 5 days before signing any non-emergency bill and then signing two just hours after passage by Congress....now *that's* a lie.

Will scarcely comprehends the context of the state of knowledge about climate change during past decades. Spencer Weart's "History of Global Warming" could be helpful. In a nutshell: There has been a massive paradigm shift since the 1970s with respect to understanding rapid climate change. Major discoveries were made in climate history during the 80s and 90s showing just how fast global-scale changes can occur. Furthermore, consensus on the likely direction of rapid change has developed since then--consensus that did not exist when those 70s articles Will cites appeared, as a decent reading of the articles themselves would reveal.

This post seems like a pretty good explanation of why Ezra Klein should not post regarding scientific matters. He seems incapable of differentiating between "the extend of the ice" and "the rate of change."

What Will claimed was an unusually fast change, and if you look at the Northern Hemisphere Extent Anomalies graph here (http://www.nsidc.org/cgi-bin/bist/bist.pl?config=seaice_extent_trends) you'll see that Mr. Will may just be correct; the most recent leg on the graph may be steeper than any other leg on the graph.

The reply from the Arctic Climate Research Center does not address this, but simply discusses the extent of the ice, comparing 1979 with today. This is unresponsive to Will's point. And Mr. Klein does not catch the discrepancy.

No correction should be forthcoming. Will was correct.

Will's claim: "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."

Will seems to be using the "levels" of sea ice as synonymous with "surface area covered by sea ice" rather than "volume of sea ice" which, one would suspect, be far more apropos.

If the Arctic freezes solid from coast to coast, but a good deal of it is only a dozen feet thick, where it used to be hundreds of feet thick since it didn't used to thaw every summer, then the fact that the ice is covering as much surface area as it used to is not particularly informative.

Whether it's a deliberate dishonesty or a mistake a college freshman would be ashamed to have made, Will's error on this point was treating the surface area covered by ocean ice as a meaningful indication of lack of climatic change. Either way, it doesn't reflect well on Will.

A far bigger intellectual crime on Will's part was his twisting of the meaning of his one peer-reviewed source, a 1976 article in Science.

Will's claim: "others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively)."

Here's the context:

Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth's orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.

One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in the exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar's (39) astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate (80).

In other words, based on orbital mechanics alone, we're looking at massive glaciation in 20,000 years - but that specifically doesn't take into account "anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels," which exclusion the author clearly feels the need to specifically mention.

It's hard to imagine a way to more completely twist the meaning of a remark by stripping it of its context than Will did here. Any correction the WaPo issues needs to specifically mention this bit of intellectual dishonesty.

The good folks at RealClimate did a literature review last year of peer-reviewed articles on climate change during the 1965-1979 period, to see just what was the balance between articles predicting global warming and global cooling during this period when, Will tells us, the scientists were feeding us a bunch of hooey.

What they found:
* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral

Not exactly what you'd call a scientific consensus for cooling. In fact, even during the period for which Will claims a scientific consensus for global cooling, the balance of scientific opinion was tilted rather heavily towards warming.

We should also note just how often Will's been to this particular well. He's written columns saying essentially the same thing about global cooling in 1992, 1997, 2004, 2006, 2008, and now 2009 that I've been able to identify.

I parse his statement very differently. I read him as saying
1) Global ice has increased from Sept 2008 to now.
2) this increase is the fastest increase in either an up or down direction that has been observed in the past 30 years.
So his point may be that even though overall ice may have decreased in 30 years, the most recent 6-months have seen an increase of great magnitude.

Yes, it's called "winter".

Assuming that Will is wrong and all the global warming science is right, it still doesn't mean the U.S. should go ahead and accept, on its own, the business dampening consequences of acting on this. It's not only our planet, but our country (not that you give a shit about that), and who can monitor the other major polluters? Like China, or even Mexico. In the absence of control over the rest of the world (and if we shouldn't impose democracy on them, can we impose green standards???) it's hard to see why we should go it alone. Treaties in the past have not stopped most nations from doing what they want, so don't look to Kyoto.

"Just as bloggers take stories and pass them around, George did as well and like many who forward emails before they check snopes.com, they are embarrassed.

A lie is a deliberate act."

If Will corrects the mistake and apologizes for it, I'll be ready to say he is not a liar. Just an overpaid writer of widely disseminated articles full of factual errors who ought to be fired for incompetence if the industry had any standards at all.

An op-ed writer who spreads lies found somewhere on the internet is simply not doing his job, and neither is an editor who doesn't even perform the most basic of fact checks. Most of us who have to work for a living could never afford such a behavior. Cooks, auto mechanics or janitors are held to higher professional standards than the likes of George Will. Screwing up big time gets them fired. George Will gets it an outsize salary.

I think that anonymous (the one at 2/27/09 5:34 AM makes an important point when they separate the science from the politics. The global warming deniers are fighting on the wrong ground; by fighting against science, they only discredit themselves. They do have a case that the politics of stopping global warming are complicated and difficult, and that's the problem we should be arguing about -- not whether global warming is happening, because the science on that is pretty clear.

Maybe, just maybe, those who have no qualms to invent data and lie about scientific facts when it suits their political purposes are not the right people to turn to for discussing "complicated and difficult" politics in the first place.

People who say "maybe, just maybe.." are speaking in the language of fairy tales. They should be dismissed out of hand. And "..qualms to invent..."? bad usage dude.

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