The Washington Post Continues to Publish George Will’s Climate Change Disinformation

[n2doc]

By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 7, 2011 at 3:59 pm

In April, it seemed like the Washington Post‘s Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt had a real come to … science moment with his blunt op-ed: “The GOP’s climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” I noted that it was a man bites dog story because Hiatt “in the past had printed multiple columns by George Will and Sarah Palin spreading disinformation on climate science.”

But Hiatt is back to publishing disinformation on climate science by Will. In his Friday column, Will poses a debate question for Jon Huntsman:

You, who preen about having cornered the market on good manners, recently tweeted, “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Call you sarcastic. In the 1970s, would you have trusted scientists predicting calamity from global cooling? Are scientists a cohort without a sociology — uniquely homogenous and unanimous, without factions or interests and impervious to peer pressures or the agendas of funding agencies? Are the hundreds of scientists who are skeptical that human activities are increasing global temperatures not really scientists?


In fact, an excellent 2008 review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) debunked that “pervasive myth” of “scientists predicting calamity from global cooling” and found “the possibility of anthropogenic warming' dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.

A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then….

When the myth of the 1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary discussion over climate change, it is most often in the form of citations not to the scientific literature, but to news media coverage.

more

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/07/313679/george-will-climate-change-disinformation/