George Will Misrepresents Climate Change Study
No matter where you stand on the issue of anthropogenic climate change, surely we can all agree that misrepresenting facts isn’t going to help anyone understand the subject—and calls into question the motives of those who do it: The Sea Ice Affair, Continued.
Monday I bemoaned the lack of fact-checking of opinion pieces in newspapers, pointing to a George Will column on global warming in the Washington Post as evidence. Now the Washington Post op-ed folks claim that it was in fact heavily fact-checked. All I can say is that none of them better apply for a fact-checking job here at Discover.
To recap: George Will wrote a column in which he tried to downplay the evidence that global warming has already affected the Earth, and that it will have bigger impacts in the future. Various bloggers have pointed out examples where Will misrepresented scientific studies in this column. The most glaring one was this: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
The Research Center put a statement on their site explaining that Will was wrong. On February 15, the day Will wrote his column, there was substantially less ice than on February 15, 1979: the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
