Last week George Will wrote yet another completely whacked-out op-ed column, which appeared in the Washington Post, denying global warming.
I remember reading an earlier column of his from April 2nd, called Climate Change's Dim Bulbs. Back then, I didn't know what to believe. I admit I had a bias towards believing that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) was a real issue and a real problem, but I hadn't done much reading about it. Will writes persuasively, and after finishing his column, I felt frustrated, because I just didn't know where to go to get the truth.
In particular, this quote set me back a bit: "according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998". If that were true, it seemed to me, that was a pretty persuasive argument that climate change was still questionable. Yet, from other quarters, I'd heard that the scientific consensus was firmly established, and getting more and more so all the time. So, what was going on?
Since then, I've done a lot of reading on the web, and have found a few very good sites, and have come to realize how thick and deep is the bullshit that we've been served by George Will and his denier cronies. For a debunking of the particular myth mentioned above, i.e. that global warming stopped in 1998, I highly recommend this very watchable video, in the Climate Crock of the Week series.
The week before last, I noticed this NYT article by Andy Revkin, Momentum on Climate Pact Is Elusive, and found myself shaking my head at a number of the statements in it. Particulary, I was surprised to read him repeating the myth that global temperatures have not risen, or have even been cooling, ever since 1998. As I was reading it, I knew it would provide fodder for the deniers; and sure enough, George Will quoted heavily from it in his column.
Unfortunately, I don't have as much time as I'd like to write about this. But I want to encourage everybody to go watch this latest Crock-of-the-Week video, Birth of a Crock. This documents some of the timeline leading up to many of the misrepresentations in the NYT article, which then got repeated and amplified by Will's. It's mind boggling to see how what the scientist Mojib Latif actually said, was completely twisted and distorted by the denier media.
P.S. One thing I found entertaining was a recent letter to the Post that pointed out that Will's use of "Cassandra" in his column's title was deeply ironic, in that Cassandra was known for accurately predicting the future, but not being believed by those with the power to do anything.
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