On February 15, as he has done many times in the past, George Will of The Washington Post wrote a howler-filled column about global warming. The gist echoed a point Will has often made: Environmentalist doomsayers like to scare us, but they’re often flat wrong. To this end, the article contained a head-scratchingly long and pseudo-referenced paragraph, making the-oft refuted claim that during the 1970s, the scientific community was convinced that “global cooling” had arrived. In reality, while a few scientists were indeed worried about cooling at the time, and some journalists wrote alarmist stories about the subject, there was no consensus like there is today about human caused global warming.
How to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?
Will’s column also took several other angular swipes at the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change’s human causation, without directly taking it on. In one case, it cited the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center to claim that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” In other words, we’re not really warming up—the ice is doing fine. (The Arctic Climate Research Center quickly repudiated Will’s assertion.) In closing, meanwhile, Will made this truly extraordinary claim: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.”
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