The Wonk Room

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. More »« Less

Like A Pig To The Trough, Washington Post’s George Will Returns To Climate Denial

Washington Post columnist George Will attacked the “altar of climate change” and “climate confabulations” again today, the sixth such column this year. Post editors Fred Hiatt and Alan Shearer have refused to run corrections for any of these fact-challenged screeds, even as Post reporters, columnists, and cartoonists criticize Will. Without a reference, Will claims that “skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing”:

Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative. When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

Steyn, a Canadian right-winger who writes for the National Review blog, is not exactly a reliable source for climatological data. As Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization explains, global warming “has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years”:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

Jarraud’s letter debunking the myth of recent global cooling was published by the Washington Post on March 21, in response to George F. Will’s February 15 denier column.

It may be true that the “dead baby juice” conspiracy wing of the conservative movement is growing, but Fred Hiatt’s continued publication of George Will’s alternate-universe diatribes is a blot on the Washington Post’s reputation.

Hiatt Stands By His Man, Accuses Critics Of George Will Of ‘Trying To Shut Him Down’

Fred Hiatt, the opinion page editor of the Washington Post, is sticking to his guns in defense of George Will’s egregiously mendacious global warming columns. In an online chat today, Hiatt repeated his claim that Will’s lies were just “inferences,” and lashed out at Will’s critics:

Boston: This doesn’t relate to Obama but would you care to address the whole George Will global warming column controversy? Is there any concern that lax standards for accuracy hurts the prestige of The Post opinion page more generally?

Fred Hiatt: Happy to, because we don’t have lax standards for accuracy. He addressed the factual challenges to his column in detail in a later column. In general we do careful fact checking. What people have mostly objected to is not that his data are wrong but that he draws wrong inferences. I would think folks would be eager to engage in the debate, given how sure they are of their case, rather than trying to shut him down.

When faced with an opportunity to restore the Washington Post’s besmirched reputation, Hiatt instead slung mud. The reality is that Hiatt does have “lax standards for accuracy,” and Will’s errors were both errors of fact and of “inference.” Will, of course, did not address “the factual challenges to his column in detail in a later column” — he added new errors. It’s bizarre that Hiatt is worried for Will’s ability to reach an audience — the man is one of the most widely syndicated columnists in one of the most prominent newspapers in the land, with a weekly appearance on national television. From the beginning, critics have been calling on the Washington Post to run a correction — something that, to this day, Hiatt refuses to do.

(HT: Media Matters)

‘For The Record’: WaPo Reporter Steve Mufson Disses Editorial Page Over George Will Affair

The Washington Post has allowed George Will to publish distortions and lies about climate science for years, without correction. Because of netroots outrage at Will’s most recent lies, Will’s editors — editorial page editor Fred Hiatt and Washington Post Writers Group editorial director Alan Shearer — have come under increasing pressure to restore journalistic ethics to their pages. Questioned by the Wonk Room Wednesday during a panel on how journalists cover energy policy, Washington Post reporter Steve Mufson washed his hands of the Will Affair:

The editorial page, just for the record, is a separately run part of the newspaper from the news page, and the news reporters have nothing to do with George Will’s column. Although it is safe to say the column has been the subject of some conversation.

Watch it:

Mufson made his remarks at the Energy Information Administration 2009 Energy Conference, where he, Eric Pooley, USA Today’s Barbara Hagenbaugh, and energy blogger Robert Rapier discussed energy and climate journalism with John Anderson, journalist-in-residence at Resources for the Future.

The “conversation” among Post employees has now spilled into the public square. Mufson, one of the Post’s most senior scribes, joins Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, cartoonist Tom Toles, ombudsman Andrew Alexander, and blogger Andrew Freedman in distancing themselves “for the record” from Hiatt and Shearer’s use of the Washington Post’s reputation to support George Will’s lies.

To The Washington Post Editors: George Will’s ‘Arctic Climate Research Center’ Is A Right-Wing Fabrication

The Wonk Room has sent the following note to George Will, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, and Washington Post Writers Group editor Alan Shearer:

Mssrs. Will, Hiatt, and Shearer:

I would like to call to your attention a factual error in Mr. Will’s February 15, 2009 column, “Dark Green Doomsayers.” I recognize that there was an extensive factchecking process of the column, but somehow a fabrication slipped through. Mr. Will wrote:

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

There is no such organization.

The Arctic climate is a research area of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and the informal group of researchers does go by the label of the Polar Research Group.

However, “there is no such center at the University of Illinois,” the UIUC’s Dr. John Walsh has informed me in electronic correspondence. “There is a group of scientists and students working on Arctic climate, but no formal center.”

The existence of such an organization was first fabricated out of whole cloth by DailyTech’s Michael Asher, in a 1/1/2009 blog post entitled “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979“:

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.

I myself was guilty of trusting the Washington Post’s multi-layered factchecking process, and have incorrectly referred to the UIUC Polar Research Group as the Arctic Climate Research Center in my own writing about Will’s column. After noting that the phrase first appeared on a notoriously inaccurate blog, I checked the facts with a UIUC scientist. I have since corrected the error in my own work, including my suggested correction for “Dark Green Doomsayers,” which I sent to Mssrs. Hiatt and Shearer via electronic correspondence on Feb. 22, as yet to no reply.

The suggested correction, as amended:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column vaguely characterized a statement by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the threat of catastrophic snowpack decline in California due to global warming. Chu was referring to an end-of-the century scenario, not a near-term threat.

Will’s column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice.

Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” Although the university said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979″ at the start of January, global sea ice levels are now eight percent below their levels in February 1979.

Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record.

Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that imminent global cooling was a threat.

Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of manmade global warming that have since proven to be accurate.

Will’s column misidentified the source of global sea ice data as the “University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center.” The actual source was a working group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Atmospheric Sciences, informally known as the Polar Research Group.

The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

Despite publishing criticism of factual errors and distortions in “Dark Green Doomsayers” by Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, science journalist Chris Mooney, Secretary General of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization Michel Jarraud, Post blogger Andrew Freeman, and Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, the Washington Post has yet to issue a single correction for Will’s column, syndicated in dozens of newspapers nationwide.

George Will’s Latest Denier Column Links To Global Boiling Document

A day late for an April fool’s joke, George Will returned Thursday to Fred Hiatt’s editorial pages at the Washington Post to attack climate science and lightbulbs. He repeats a variant of his lie about the U.N. World Meteorological Organization’s temperature record, writing that “according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization [WMO], there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.”

In a marked improvement from his previous lie-filled columns, this misleading claim now includes a link to the WMO’s latest publication about the status of global climate (2007), which states:

– The size of the uncertainties is such that the global average temperature for 2007 is statistically indistinguishable from each of the nine warmest years on record.

— January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.

– The linear warming trend over the past 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the past 100 years.

– Global averaged sea level continued to rise through 2006 and 2007.

– At the end of the melt season, the Arctic sea ice extent was 39 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 and 23 per cent below the previous record set in 2005.

– Since 1960, the thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice caps are the largest contributions to sea-level rise. There has also been an increasing contribution from surface melt from the Greenland ice sheet over this period. These contributions are directly related to recent climate change.

Furthermore, the WMO recorded the “record-breaking temperature anomalies throughout the world,” “severe to extreme drought,” “extreme flooding,” a “new worldwide record rainfall,” and “unusual sea-surface temperature patterns”:

Significant climate anomalies and events in 2007. Click to enlarge. Chart: WMO. Data: NOAA.

While the Washington Post takes right-wing oil money to syndicate George Will’s lies in carbon-based newsprint across the nation, the World Wide Web has responded.

This column, Media Matters notes, comes less than two weeks after Fred Hiatt published a letter from the WMO Secretary-General calling Will’s “no recorded global warming for more than a decade” claim “a misrepresentation of the data and of scientific knowledge.”

“I’m all for newspapers giving their columnists latitude,” Jon Chait opines, “but at some point I wonder if some very basic, low level of factual knowledge ought to be required to propound upon a topic in their pages.”

Turning up the heat, Joe Romm calls for Hiatt to be fired, and Matt Yglesias argues that “anyone working at The Washington Post or in conservative journalism who has a shred of intellectual conscience has a duty to stand up to this kind of nonsense.”

George Will’s Lies Live On »

With the publication of George F. Will’s error-filled “Dark Green Doomsayers” column of February 15th, the Washington Post failed to abide by its guiding principles. Despite the publication of a mildly critical ombudsman’s column, a strong rebuke by guest columnist Chris Mooney, and a letter to the editor from the misattributed United Nations World Meteorological Organization, the Washington Post editors have not issued a single correction to the column, which was syndicated to dozens, and possibly hundreds, of newspapers across the nation. After Eugene Meyer bought the Post in 1933 and began the family ownership that continues today, he published “These Principles“:

The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.

The newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.

As a disseminator of the news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.

What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as for the old.

The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of the owner.

In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.

Will’s column, distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group syndicate, ran in dozens of newspapers. Until the Writers Group issues a correction — George Will himself does — his lies will live on. Based on Nexis and online archives, these papers include: More »« Less

Washington Post Publishes Science Progress Editor Chris Mooney’s Response To George Will

Chris Mooney, contributing editor at our sister publication Science Progress, has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that calmly lays out the many significant flaws in George F. Will’s recent global warming denial column. In “Climate Change Myths and Facts,” Mooney shows that Will’s errors are not simply “inferences,” as editorial page editor Fred Hiatt claimed, but deliberate lies about the science and the organizations cited in Will’s column. Mooney explains why we so greatly need journalism that “is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility”:

Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities. In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult. Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.

Mooney continues his column with explanations — and links to sources — of several of the errors in Will’s column, errors that fail to meet any standard of evidence, rigor, or reproucibility. He convincingly makes the case that whereas Will himself can say anything, the Washington Post and its army of factcheckers have no place publishing such tripe.

The NYT’s Coverage Of Climate In The 1970s Was A Megaphone For Science, Not ‘Global Cooling’ Alarmism

Our guest blogger is Robert Brulle, professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University.

The New York Times’ climate science coverage in the 1970s reflected the lack of consensus among scientists.

In “Climate Science in a Tornado,” George F. Will has completely misrepresented the historical New York Times coverage of the “global cooling” issue. Despite Will’s claim that the New York Times was a “megaphone for the alarmed” during “1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling,” its coverage was actually nuanced and prescient.

On December 21, 1969, the New York Times ran a UPI wire story, “Scientists Caution on Changes In Climate as Result of Pollution,” which reported that scientists discussed the possible threat of manmade global warming at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, with calls for greater monitoring of the climate:

J.O. Fletcher, a physical scientist for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., said that “man had only a few decades to solve the problem of global warming caused by pollution.” Global warming could cause further melting of the polar ice caps and affect the earth’s climate.

On December 29, 1974, the New York Times ran the story, “Forecast for Forecasting: Cloudy.” This article is a long discussion of the state of climate forecasting, and has an extensive discussion of the process of global cooling due to aerosols, and the contrary impact of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and the great difficulty in developing valid and reliable climate forecasting models. The lead paragraph:

In the long term, climate is cooling off — or is it warming up? As for tomorrow’s weather, even the world’s biggest computer can’t say for sure what it will be.

On May 21, 1975, the New York Times ran the story, “Scientists Ask Why the Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead.” This article begins with a clear statement of uncertainty:

The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.

On August 14, 1975, the New York Times ran, “Warming Trend Seen in Climate.” In this article, the New York Times discusses two scientific articles that focus on the overall climate patterns. It covers the debate over global cooling due to aerosols and global warming due to CO2 increases:

Dr. [Wally] Broecker’s argument is that the present cooling trend in the north will be reversed as more and more carbon dioxide is introduced into the atmosphere by the burning of fuels.

In the decades since, of course, scientists have come to the consensus that our continued burning of fossil fuels are tied to the warming of the planet. It is not the New York Times that is dishonest in its coverage, it is George F. Will.

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.

Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt Defines George Will’s Lies As ‘Inferences’ »

George Will lashes out at New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin for “meretricious journalism” in a column today that attempts to justify his significant factual errors but “can’t help making new ones.” But in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt defended George Will, saying he is simply “drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject,” and calling critics “irresponsible.”

In fact, Science Progress Chris Mooney explains, “George Will made factual errors rather than debatable inferences.” In sum, Will has not only lied about scientific research, he has also falsely attributed his own opinions to the following named sources: New York Times, Science, Science News, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, and the “Arctic Climate Research Center” (sic). Before Hiatt’s outburst, Oregonian commentary editor Galen Burnett told the Wonk Room in a telephone interview:

I was a little troubled by the response from the Washington Post editors which was basically dismissive of people’s challenge of the column. That’s the more troubling aspect to me. I would expect more of the Post.

Union of Concerned Scientists spokesman Aaron Huertas told the Wonk Room:

Clearly something wrong is going on with their factchecking process, because what Will said was clearly incorrect.

We’ll continue to attempt to get word from Hiatt — who has ignored several telephone calls and emails — to see if he considers the Oregonian and the Union of Concerned Scientists “irresponsible” critics.

The factual errors in George Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” [2/15/09] (DGD) and “Climate Science in A Tornado” [2/27/09] (CST): More »« Less

The New York Times Attacks Gore For Trusting The New York Times

In a “news analysis” column, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin lumps together global warming denier George Will, Vice President Al Gore, and President Barack Obama for engaging in “hyperbole,” “inaccuracies,” “overstatements,” and “hype.” Gore and Will are “two leaders of their tribes waving the tribal flag,” said David Ropeik, a “consultant on risk communication who teaches at Harvard University.” Communications professor Matthew Nisbet complained that criticism of George Will “only serves to draw attention to his claims” and “reinforces the false narrative” that “the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.”

Revkin’s article, “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall,” fails on several fronts:

Revkin Is Attacking Gore For Trusting The New York Times. In a February appearance before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vice President Al Gore included a chart displaying a catastrophic rise in weather-related disasters. Andrew Revkin accused Gore of misrepresenting the data and of “inaccuracies and overstatements.” The chart was constructed in 2008 by New York Times visual op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow, who blamed manmade global warming for the rise. [NYT, 5/31/08] [AAAS, 2/15/09]

David Ropeik Is A Public-Relations Expert For The Bush Administration And Top Corporate Polluters. Revkin quotes David Ropeik, a “consultant on risk communication who teaches at Harvard University,” to paint Al Gore and George Will as equivalently “polarizing figures.” Ropeik is in fact a former television reporter whose public relations company’s website promotes “media training” and “risk communication” for clients like the Bush White House, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Entergy Power Corporation, the Edison Electric Institute,and Foundation Coal Company. Although he used to work at the Exxon-funded Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, Ropeik’s current association with Harvard University is limited to a position at the Harvard Extension School. [Ropeik & Associates: Background, Services, Clients]

Revkin Cites A Paper’s Argument Without Disclosing The Paper Cites Revkin. Revkin writes, “In a paper being published in the March-April edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor of communications at American University, said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight.” Revkin fails to disclose that Nisbet’s paper relies on Revkin himself to support that argument: “Andrew Revkin, who has covered climate change for nearly 20 years for the New York Times, argues these claims are effectively countered by critics, such as Inhofe, as liberal ‘alarmism,’ since the error bars of uncertainty for each of the climate impacts are much wider than the general link between human activities and global warming.” [Environment, 3/09]

Andrew Revkin genuinely believes that discussion of the real and present danger of climate-related catastrophes is counterproductive to combating global warming. Unfortunately, motivated by that belief, he presented misleading, distorted attacks on political leaders that were backed by commentary from people like David Ropeik, a consultant to the Bush administration and top corporate polluters, and Roger Pielke, Jr., who has testified at the request of Republicans about the politicization of science, written for the Cato Institute, and whose attacks on climate scientists have been repeatedly cited by Marc Morano’s right-wing climate denial machine.

Revkin’s piece on the reality of climate science fails to quote a single climate scientist. Fortunately, he put email correspondence from climate scientist Richard C. J. Somerville in the comment section of his blog. Somerville is scathing, saying that Revkin’s depiction of Gore and Will as equally “guilty” misleaders “doesn’t square with the facts“:

It’s a false dichotomy, and I doubt you could find well-regarded climate scientists who would agree with your framing. Gore is imperfect here and there. Will is just 100% plain dead wrong throughout. There’s a huge qualitative difference between them, and your readers deserve to hear that from you.

Andrew Revkin can be reached at arevkin@nytimes.com, public editor Clark Hoyt at public@nytimes.com, and national editor Suzanne Daley at national@nytimes.com.

Wonk Room Report: The Washington Post Should Correct George Will’s Column

A new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund challenges the Washington Post to correct George F. Will’s error-filled “Dark Green Doomsayers” column, published February 15th. “Matter of Fact” describes how Will has challenged the scientific basis of man-made global warming for years in his columns for The Washington Post, nationally distributed by the Washington Post Editors Group. These columns have been cited for errors in years past. The most recent is no exception.

The report explains how George Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” makes significant errors in depicting sea ice as a measure of global warming, the past decade of global warming, and the history of predictions of “global cooling.”

Download “Matter of Fact: The Washington Post Should Correct George Will’s ‘Dark Green Doomsayers’ Column” from the Wonk Room Resource Library.

George Will’s ‘Global Cooling’ Column Is Almost Old Enough To Vote »

George F. Will has been recycling error-filled columns challenging the existence of manmade global warming since 1992, for publication and distribution by the Washington Post. Despite the evident mendacity of these columns, the editors of the Washington Post are standing behind their conservative columnist, who is syndicated in more than 450 newspapers nationwide. The Wonk Room already noted Will’s recycling goes back to 2004 — but we hadn’t looked back far enough.

A comparison between 2009’s “Dark Green Doomsaying” column and 1992’s “Chicken Littles” reveals that Will is repeating content that was first published when Boyz II Men and Sir Mix-a-Lot ruled the charts. Since then, of course, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published three new assessment reports of the science of manmade climate change based on thousands of new scientific papers. Each IPCC report has been more certain than the last — by 2007 they found a 90 percent chance that the “unequivocal” warming was “due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Once the recycled content is removed from his latest column, one is left only with Will’s dismissal of long-term worst-case scenarios for California’s climate, a factoid from a John Tierney blog post, and three stories recently promoted by the Drudge Report (here, here, and here). These few additions introduce new errors.

Will’s self-plagiarism raises many questions. What, exactly, is the Washington Post paying George F. Will to do? Do Fred Hiatt, Autumn Brewington, and Alan Shearer consider zombie talking points from the era of grunge to be respectable work? Is it time for Will to retire, and allow the valuable column inches to be occupied by someone willing to devise original content for the Post? If an error is uncorrected for more nearly seventeen years, do the Post’s editors stop caring?

Below is a comparison of the text of “Dark Green Doomsayers” [2009] and “Chicken Littles” [1992]: More »« Less

A Suggested Correction For Will’s ‘Dark Green Doomsayers’ Column

The following has been sent to Autumn Brewington, op-ed page editor for the Washington Post, Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Alan Shearer, editorial director of The Washington Post Writers Group, and Andy Alexander, Washington Post ombudsman.

To the editors of the Washington Post:

George F. Will’s column of February 15, 2009, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” contained certain factual inaccuracies despite the “multi-layered editing process” it underwent. Several bloggers have volunteered their time to fact-check Mr. Will’s column. Here is a suggested correction based on their work:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column mischaracterized vaguely characterized a statement by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the threat of catastrophic snowpack decline in California due to global warming. Chu was referring to an end-of-the century scenario, not a near-term threat.

Will’s column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice.

Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” Although the center university said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979″ at the start of January, global sea ice levels are now eight percent below their levels in February 1979.

Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record.

Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that imminent global cooling was a threat.

Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of manmade global warming that have since proven to be accurate.

UPDATE: Will’s column misidentified the source of global sea ice data as the “University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center.” The actual source was a working group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Atmospheric Sciences, informally known as the Polar Research Group.

The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

(HT: Progress Report, ClimateProgress, The Loom, TPM Muckraker, The Vine, Island of Doubt, and New Mexico Science)

Washington Post Defends George Will: The Editorial Page ‘Checks Facts To The Fullest Extent Possible’ »

The Washington Post “multi-layer editing process,” via The Onion.

George Will’s recent “global cooling” column contained several demonstrable falsehoods. Despite waves of criticism, George Will and Post opinion editor Fred Hiatt have refused to respond or run corrections on Will’s “stunning, boneheaded, egregious errors.”

When contacted by the Wonk Room, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, veteran reporter Andy Alexander, “sought clarification from the editorial page editors”:

Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will’s column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

Wow. I’d hate to see what Will’s columns look like before the “multi-layer editing process.”

Full email from Andy Alexander (ombudsman@washpost.com): More »« Less

George Will Believes In Recycling

Conservative leading light George F. Will recently penned a column claiming global warming is a “hypothetical” calamity. In “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will attacked Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for discussing a worst-case scenario of California drought caused by the decimation of Sierra snowpack, falsely claiming Chu predicted this will come to pass “no later than 10 years away.” Will also incorrectly claimed that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ — based on a 45-day-old blog post by Daily Tech’s Michael Asher, one of Marc Morano’s climate denial jokers.

Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

“Let Cooler Heads Prevail,” 4/2/2006:

While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

“Dark Green Doomsayers,” 2/15/2009:

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″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), 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). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

Will’s critics should recognize his recycling of old content is an admirable way to reduce waste and limit the production of hot air.