The following data taken from NOAA datasets is further confirmation that the statement made by George Will in his Feb 15th column is correct with respect to global sea ice extent.

Dec, 79 SH sea ice extent – 10.4 M km^2
Dec, 79 NH sea ice extent – 13.5 M km^2
Total Dec, 79 extent – 23.9 M km^2

Dec, 08 SH sea ice extent – 12.2 M km^2
Dec, 08 NH sea ice extent – 12.5 M km^2
Total Dec, 08 extent – 24.7 M km^2

An increase of .8 M km^2 from December 1979 to December 2008. An area larger than the State of Texas.

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/S_197912_extn.png

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/N_197912_extn.png

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/S_200812_extn.png

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Dec/N_200812_extn.png

credit to: Bill Illis, Watts Up With That science site.

Just remember they wanted our Social Security invested individualy – they wanted to close the geophysical studies of the government – they put a war off budget – and they live to suppress the vote.

Barbara Mathieson

http://justweirdstuff.blogspot.com/2009/02/tale-of-two-editors.html

Artic Science Summit Week begins in Bergen Norway March 24. It is most likely that the latest data collected by scientists conducting global warming experiments will be presented, discussed and further analyzed by the world’s top environmental experts. This may, in fact, result in George Will’s claims-and those who now dispute them-becoming moot.
Vigiliance is an exhausting business.

What an absurdity. Will started a paragraph of cited sentence fragment quotations with the following:

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″

It is my error to read that Will is striving to suggest a consensus?

More egregiously, in this, is that Will selectively chose words from those sources, to misrepresent what was within those articles.

I write: “It is not very hot today”. Will says that Siegel wrote “hot today”. That would be a true fact that I typed those words even if the quotation would be utterly out of context and a misrepresentation. That is the level of quality of much of Will’s citations related to Global Cooling (and otherwise).

Will Says:

Mr Will was comparing the END OF 2008 with the END OF 1979. If you check CT’s website, you will see that his statement is accurate. In fact, due to a malfunction of the satellite instrumentation, the data reported on CT has been underreporting sea ice extent for over a month.
February 21st, 2009 at 1:44 pm

A Wrinkle In Ice (or Not)

I got a prompt response from Bill Chapman, a University of Illinois climate scientist:

“It’s refreshing to have someone ask about the data before they write about it.”

Just pause to consider that. After all this kerfuffule–involving a nationally syndicated columnist, the assistants to that columnist, the editors at the columnist’s syndication service, the editors at the Washington Post editorial page, and the Post’s ombudsman–Chapman was refreshed that someone bothered to contact him about his research before writing about it. What a concept. For me, this whole affair has been about the value of fact-checking science, and Chapman’s reply shows just how little checking was carried out by the Post and company.

Nothing there for George Will or his apologists.

Sorry, Will.
~

The egregious element, which too many are glossing over, is how Will quoted item after item out of context to create the false impression of global cooling have been some form of ‘consensus’ scientific opinion.

Will said nothing about a consensus. He quoted from a series of news reports from the 70s reporting scientific findings of cooling. If you falsely inferred a claim of consensus from those quotes, that’s your problem, not Will’s. And yammering on about “context” is equally vacuous. You’d have to show that the context materially changes the meaning of the quoted text for your complaint to have merit.

We must, however, not lose track of two things:

1. Will’s column did not have one error, but a serious of explicit twisting of material into false representation. Whether we are talking ice, temperature records, etc, there is no truth in Will’s OPED. The egregious element, which too many are glossing over, is how Will quoted item after item out of context to create the false impression of global cooling have been some form of ‘consensus’ scientific opinion. While he did, in many cases, cherry pick articles, he also cherry-picked sentences from the articles to then portray the articles 180 degrees out from their actual conclusions.

2. The Will piece is far from isolated. Time after time, the Washington Post has given space to global warming skeptics and deniers (Krauthammer, Will, Samuelson, Lomborg, etc …) without, it seems, laying any serious evidentary standard to their deceptive pieces. And, when called to task for the dishonesty on their pages, the Post responds with weak corrections which few read, if they react in public at all. See: http://getenergysmartnow.com/2009/02/15/washpost-complicit-in-disformation-or-explicit-collaboration/

Can’t the WP at least publish the arctic climate center’s rebuttal of Will’s false claims?
_____

Of course not: that would espose Will for the entitled politcal hack he is, and it might get him disinvited to Washington Post editorial coffee clatches and martini lunches.

The fact is that Will doesn’t employ fact-checkers — he doesn’t them: first, because he’s a liar to begin with, and doesn’t intend to be corrected; and second, because he knows that the editors who publish his shrill shilling will cover for him.

By contrast, the objective facts were reported by the actual journalistic media, and were other than the editorialist’s relatively common RIGHT-wing attacks on Clinton.

In view of the lousy “fact-checking” of the “news” section, the “Washington Post” employs the same standard intellectual laziness when the concern is editorials: outright lies, rebutable distortions are considered “opinion,” and will not be corrected.

Then, when caught being thus lazy, they will do all they can to reject the criticism and correction so as not to be exposed for what they are: intellectually lazy, careless, and wrong.

And, incapable of critical/ethical thinking in the first place.