From Climate Progress
Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist?
I know what you’re thinking — George Will isn’t even the most ignorant columnist in the Washington Post (see Krauthammer’s strange denier talk points, Part 1: Newton’s laws were “overthrown” and Part 2). And of course John Tierney is easily the worst science writer (see here). And take Gregg Easterbrook … please! (see here).
But with today’s column, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will not only shows that he is the leading conservative media victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS) — he is the Typhoid Mary of ASS.
First, he dismisses the science-based warnings of Stephen Chu (see Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”) without actually citing any evidence whatsoever against Chu’s claim. Really, they’re just handing out Nobel prizes in physics to anyone these days.
Second, and this makes the diagnosis definitive, he spends a long paragraph recycling the long-debunked denier talking point that the scientific community believed in the 1970s that we were headed into another a long period of cooling. I don’t know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie again and again. As a 2008 review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society demonstrated definitively (see “Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus“):
I know what you’re thinking — George Will isn’t even the most ignorant columnist in the Washington Post (see Krauthammer’s strange denier talk points, Part 1: Newton’s laws were “overthrown” and Part 2). And of course John Tierney is easily the worst science writer (see here). And take Gregg Easterbrook … please! (see here).
But with today’s column, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” Will not only shows that he is the leading conservative media victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS) — he is the Typhoid Mary of ASS.
First, he dismisses the science-based warnings of Stephen Chu (see Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”) without actually citing any evidence whatsoever against Chu’s claim. Really, they’re just handing out Nobel prizes in physics to anyone these days.
Second, and this makes the diagnosis definitive, he spends a long paragraph recycling the long-debunked denier talking point that the scientific community believed in the 1970s that we were headed into another a long period of cooling. I don’t know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie again and again. As a 2008 review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society demonstrated definitively (see “Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus“):
There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
No surprise that Will doesn’t cite a single scientific paper on his behalf. If anything, Will’s documentation merely proves how bad media coverage of the climate was three decades ago.
[rest of story here]
