John Kerry Challenges George Will: Let’s Debate Your Recycled ‘Errors Of Fact’
John Kerry Challenges George Will: Let’s Debate Your Recycled ‘Errors Of Fact’
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the first member of Congress to weigh in on George F. Will’s egregiously mendacious “global cooling” columns. In a Huffington Post column, Kerry delivers a withering critique of one of his “favorite intellectual sparring partners,” stepping up to the plate on behalf of science and scientists everywhere, including Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and White House Science Adviser John Holdren:
Dragging up long-discredited myths about some non-existent scientific consensus about global cooling from the 1970s does no one any good. Except perhaps a bankrupt flat earth crowd. I hate to review the record and see that someone as smart as George Will has been doing exactly that as far back as 1992. And it’s especially troubling when the very sources that Will cites in his February 15th column draw the exact opposite conclusions and paint very different pictures than Will provides, as the good folks at ThinkProgress and Media Matters for America have demonstrated so thoroughly.
Stephen Chu “is no Cassandra,” Kerry explains. “If his predictions about the effects of our climate crisis are scary, it’s because our climate is scary.” To be fair to Cassandra, her predictions of the fall of Troy were right — what would make Dr. Chu different is if the American people listen to him, instead of the George Wills of the world. Which is why Senator Kerry took up Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s challenge and calls on Will for a public battle of the minds:
I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion — but I’d happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival.
2 Responses to “John Kerry Challenges George Will: Let’s Debate Your Recycled ‘Errors Of Fact’”
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Doesn’t anyone remember that Cassandra’s prophecies came true?
February 28th, 2009 at 11:23 amThe trouble with quick research is that one doesn’t always get the whole picture. It’s like tossing a quarter ten times. It lands 8 times heads up and 2 tails up. So you determine that tails is the heaviest side of the coin. Trouble is this quick study is not thorough enough to render an accuate conclusion. It was a random cycle, not a continuously predictable event. Global warming is continuous, somewhat predictable, and complicated. What is indisputable is that CO2 levels, the ppm (parts per million) of CO2, have soared in the last fifty years. So we have to study how CO2, plus other gases such as methane, are affecting our climate, if they have at all. Turns out, so far, that we may be in a natural warming cycle, but that we may also be contributing to the warming trend with greenhous gases. Also, the new, higher Co2 levels will increase the rate of Co2 output via new bacterial activity, arctic amplification, and many other known and unknown ways. In other words, global warming will itself accelerate the rate of global warming and we are probably helping with the acceleration of the process. The results could be catastrohpic for the human race. George Will, of all people, I would think would want to do an in-depth study of climate change before commenting on it. It’s only by knowing the various, wide-ranging causes and affects that one can come to any sound conclusion.
March 15th, 2009 at 4:28 pm