George Will Believes The Hottest Decade In History Shows An ‘Absence Of Significant Warming’
George Will Believes The Hottest Decade In History Shows An ‘Absence Of Significant Warming’
Blue Jays win the World Series in 1993.
Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt continued to disgrace his paper, publishing yet another column questioning climate science by George Will, the seventh this year. “Cooling Down the Cassandras” (alternatively titled “For Alarmists, Ugly Truths on Global Warming”) is a master class in cherrypicking words and misinterpreting science. Will’s thesis — that there has been no global warming since 1998 — is based on his reading of a poorly written article about temperature trends by New York Times climate reporter Andy Revkin:
By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.
By Will’s logic, we’d have to conclude that the Toronto Blue Jays just clinched the A.L. East division title — after all, they’ve won six games in a row and are 9-1 in their last ten games, while the New York Yankees lost their last game and are only 7-3. However, when the Wonk Room contacted Mr. Will to confirm this theory, he responded:
You don’t seem to understand baseball. The Blue Jays are not even in contention.
Will’s persistent assertion that global warming has stopped during the hottest decade in recorded history is just as nonsensical as the idea that a team that is nine games below .500 is beating one that is 45 games above .500. Unfortunately, Will hung up before we could ask who he believed was the hottest team in baseball.
Essentially, Will’s “global cooling” argument is pinned on an ambiguity of the English language. Just as the Yankees are a winning team but did not win their last game, global warming is terribly real even if 2008, one of the hottest years in recorded history, was cooler than 2007. “Global warming” is popular shorthand for the well-understood phenomenon that the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is amplifying the natural radiative forcing of the troposphere’s temperature — and as the greenhouse pollution continues to rise, the forcing continues to rise, given the natural variability in solar radiation and heat transfer between the ocean and atmosphere. It is not shorthand for “every day will be hotter than the next everywhere on the planet.” As the U.K. Met Office, whose temperature record Will cites in his scientifically illiterate column, explains, it is a “fact” that “temperatures are continuing to rise“:
The rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade since the mid-1970s. Warming has been unprecedented in at least the last 50 years, and the 17 warmest years have all occurred in the last 20 years. This does not mean that next year will necessarily be warmer than last year, but the long-term trend is for rising temperatures.
In fact, the tremendous rise in greenhouse gases — now 396 ppm CO2-equivalents, 115 ppm higher than in pre-industrial times — is having an obvious and accelerating effect on decadal global temperatures, not withstanding the significant natural interannual variability:
All this might be fine, if not for the credibility Will has by virtue of his column. But people who are reading Will's column at their breakfast table and are not otherwise immersed in this debate might find Will's thinking convincing, unaware that the points he's raising have been continually and convincingly rebutted, and that his read of the evidence sharply differs from those of the scientists who are actually collecting and analyzing the evidence. That would be a shame.
7 Responses to “George Will Believes The Hottest Decade In History Shows An ‘Absence Of Significant Warming’”
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Not to go all “George Will” on George Will, but his headline about us all being “Cassandras” is funny as hell. Cassandra is a figure from Greek mythology who was given the gift of being able to see the future. But she was also cursed, so that no one would believe here, even though she was always right. So George Will, who is prides himself on being a bit of a literary and intellectual snob, just tried to mock our views on global warming by comparing us to someone whose warnings always end up being correct.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:10 amBrad-
It seems to me you are avoiding the real issue: we need to reconcile all the conflicting climate data. There is a huge disconnect in data when the ‘green’ NY Times says, ‘global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/science/earth/23cool.html?_r=3&em‘
To view the situation in a different perspective, I believe support for cap-and-trade has evaporated. Daily I read editorials, comments and letters-to-the-editor from all over the nation. When the House passed the cap-and-trade bill it was maybe 2-to-1 against cap-and-trade, opinion now is off the charts against it.
Frankly, I don’t see Americans supporting cap-and-trade or any CO2 regulation until we have our own Climate Truth Commission. We now largely out-source our climate science to the United Nations, a political organization advancing a “consensus” view that CO2 drives global warming. The problem is, their view is neither a consensus and can’t possibly be 100% correct because they don’t factor-in clouds and solar activity. Plus, UN forecasts for the last 10 years do not fit what actually happened.
– Robert Moen, http://www.energyplanUSA.com
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 amLet’s please limit AGW articles, pro or con, to facts, without including attacks on the messenger. Personally, I tend to throw attack articles out.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:45 amJohn — It’s painful. I think George Will’s title is meant to be a dig at Paul Krugman’s “Cassandras of Climate.” As you say, Cassandra was right. Not much good it did her or the Trojans, and in my darker hours I fear we share their destiny.
Will should have recycled his 1992 “Chicken Littles” title instead.
Rmoen — Like Will, you’re misinterpreting the NYT article (which, perhaps not surprisingly of Revkin, lends itself to misinterpretation). More importantly, the United States government already established a “climate truth commission” — it was known as the US Climate Change Science Program in the Bush years and is now known as the US Global Change Research Program — both of which use blue-ribbon panels to analyze and synthesize existing scientific literature on the climate.
Moreover, the International Panel on Climate Change is an international “climate truth commission” (but I see that in your eyes any international body is ipso facto suspicious).
During the Bush administration, both commissions found that global warming is accelerating and is catastrophic threat.
If you can’t accept the findings of a climate truth commission run by the Bush White House, I frankly doubt you’ll ever be satisfied.
Despite charts made up by oil-industry front groups, the UN predictions for the last ten years are perfectly consistent with the actual temperature record, although they underestimated the impacts, such as sea level rise and Arctic sea ice loss.
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:54 amWe should all be concerned about the environment, but let us not ignore basic climate history.
Your chart posted above is 100% entirely within the normal range of natural climate variation during our current Holocene interglacial (the current warm interval between ice ages).
See:
This link is about “Basic Climate Science 101″ – very informative actually. The climate history graphs tell the story.
Peace
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:54 pmMy impression is that most of the oil companies, along with other major corporations, are going over to the AGW side. This is an opinion: That’s because they’re all about profits, and they see an opportunity to profit from the AGW menace.
This is advice: you might want to find another boogey-man, that one’s about worn out.
My overall impression, and I read everything on the subject that I can find, is that I’m getting two different slants on AGW depending on the political leanings of the person involved, no matter what the science involved.
Most of the anti-agw stuff begins: refute this, here’s some counter information.
Most of the pro-agw stuff begins: you’re all against us, and a bunch of crooks to boot.
Which set do you think I pay the most attention to?
On the science involved: Pro-agw is too short term, and too vague. Operative terms in most articles – might, could, possibly. Somebody’s going to have to come up with a theory that includes an explanation of the Miocene, when no humans were present except in potentio.
Another obstacle to my buying into the catastrophe theory, is that I spent the years around the Y2K crisis inside the beltway in Washington, up to my ears in correcting problems in data processing systems. The amount of hype and baloney surrounding that rather simple technical problem approached hysteria. And everybody in Washington that wanted to profit from it, jumped on the bandwagon and screamed “disaster.” In the event, the worst thing that happened was that Brindisi, Italy, didn’t meet its deadline and simply declared that 1999 would continue for another year. Only in the birthplace of Fellini could that happen.
It is the misfortune of the pro-AGW crowd that many people see the same sort of thing happening again.
October 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pmNot to go all “George Will” on George Will, but his headline about us all being “Cassandras” is funny as hell. Cassandra is a figure from Greek mythology who was given the gift of being able to see the future. But she was also cursed, so that no one would believe here, even though she was always right. So George Will, who is prides himself on being a bit of a literary and intellectual snob, just tried to mock our views on global warming by comparing us to someone whose warnings always end up being correct.
October 5th, 2009 at 12:25 pm