Sign up for The Media Today, CJRâs daily newsletter.
Thought the dust kicked up by George Willâs February 15 column in The Washington Post, âDark Green Doomsayers,â had settled? Think again.
On Friday, the Post will run a second column by Will addressing the widespread criticism he received for the last one. And while his editor, Fred Hiatt, defends both columns to CJR, the climate world is beside itself, and the case raises important questions about journalistic evidence and inference.
In his first column, Will attempted to argue that predictions of dire, planetary impactsâdrought, sea-level rise, etc.âcaused by global warming are nothing but paranoid hype. Will used a number of misleading arguments, however. He misrepresented scientific evidence about the state of global sea ice and he resurrected a long-debunked argument about a scientific consensus on prolonged global cooling in the mid-20th century.
A wide variety of scientists, journalists, bloggers, and pundits has refuted Willâs arguments many times over in the week and a half since. A comprehensive list of those rebuttals, including an early entry from CJR, can be found here.
A number of critics tried to reach Will, but to no avail. Then, four days after the column ran, the Wonk Roomâs Brad Johnson got a response from the Postâs ombudsman, Andy Alexander, who wrote that the paper “has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Willâs 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.â Later, Alan Shearer, the Washington Post Writers Group editorial director, told the Wonk Room, âWe have plenty of references that support what George wrote, and we have others that dispute that. So we didnât have enough to send in a correction.â
âThereâs a lot of wiggly, lawyerly language here,â science journalist Carl Zimmer wrote in a very well reasoned blog entry about why the Postâs response was inadequate. Three days earlier, Zimmer had published what was perhaps the best case (among the myriad others) for a correction, arguing that opinion pages need to do a much better job with fact checking.
But his point about the wiggly, lawyerly language is especially germane because this is a classic case of evidence versus inference. The Post can argue that, technically, all of the evidence Will presents passed fact-checking; and Will can then infer what he wants about that evidenceâeven if his inferences differ drastically from those of the scientists who collected the evidenceâwithout journalistic foul.
Undeterred, on Tuesday, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Media Matters for America sent a joint letter to the Post reiterating the call for some form of correction or clarification. It cited three key problems with Willâs column: that he misused data on global sea ice levels from the Arctic Climate Research Center; that he misrepresented the World Meteorological Organizationâs position on global warming and climate trends; and that he ârehashed the discredited myth that in the 1970s, there was broad scientific consensus that the Earth faced an imminent global cooling threat.â
âGeorge Will is entitled to his own opinions, but he is not entitled to his own facts,â the letter concluded. âWe respectfully ask that you immediately make your readers aware of the glaring misinformation in Will’s column.â But the Postâs position remains the same.
âWe looked into these allegations, and I have a different interpretation than [those who signed the letter] about what George Will is and is not entitled to,â said the paperâs editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt. âIf you want to start telling me that columnists canât make inferences which you disagree withâand, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subjectâI think thatâs really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject â so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But donât make it by suggesting that George Will shouldnât be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.â
Hiatt said that he has invited both the World Meteorological Organization and the Arctic Ice Center at the University of Illinois to write a letter for publication taking issue with anything that George wrote, but neither organization has taken him up on the offer. Hiatt added that he doesnât think Will has an obligation to point out, âin every column he writes about climate change,â that such organizations disagree with his interpretation of their data.
âIf youâre concerned that readers of The Washington Post donât get a sense that most of the world thinks climate change is real, I think thatâs a misplaced concern,â he said. âAnd I can tell you: I donât share Georgeâs view. If you read our editorial pages you would know that we believe that the evidence of climate change is sufficiently alarming to justify major changes in public policy. But, you know what? I think itâs kind of healthy, given how, in so many areasânot just climatology, but medicine, and everything elseâthere is a tendency on the part of the lay public at times to ascribe certainty to things which are uncertain. I believe, and this me personally speaking, that there is a lot more we donât know about climatology and thereâs a lot more we have to learn in terms of our ability to predict climatological phenomena and how whatâs happening in the oceans is going to interact with whatâs happening in the atmosphere. And do I think itâs somehow dangerous to have one of our many columnists casting doubt on this consensus? No, I think itâs healthy. And let the other ones come in and slam him, if they think itâs irresponsible. Thatâs what an opinion page is for.â
Many would disagree with Hiatt, however. The Oregonian, for instance, declined to run Willâs column, which is widely syndicated. And, according to Talking Points Memo, which got a leaked copy, part of Willâs Friday column is expected to address an article by Andrew Revkin in The New York Times, which argued that Will had misrepresented scientific evidence in his first piece. Ironically, however, Revkinâs article, published Wednesday, has drawn a considerable amount of criticism from Willâs critics, too.
The pieceâs central tenet was that there is an ever-present temptation to make exaggerated arguments, which either overplay or underplay the likely impacts of global warming, in an effort to influence public opinion. As case in point, Revkin cited both Willâs column and an overstatement about impacts made by Al Gore at the recent meeting American Association for the Advancement of Science.
During a presentation, Gore showed a slide that illustrated a sharp spike in weather-related disasters around the world and warned the audience that global warming was responsible. Gore removed the slide from his presentation after the Belgian research group had that assembled the disaster data said he had misrepresented their research, and that global warmingâs relative contribution to the extreme events remains uncertain.
A few of the bloggersâmost notably Joe Romm and Brad Johnsonâwho had been criticizing Will, along with a number of Revkinâs readers, immediately criticized the article for âlumpingâ Gore with Will, which they described as a âfalse equivalency.â And they have a point. Revkinâs Gore-vs-Will frame was certainly not the best choice for conveying his argument about the dangers of hyperbole. Though both men have committed the same mistakeâmisrepresenting scientific researchâthere is no question that Gore has demonstrated a far superior understanding of climate science than Will, and treated it much more accurately over many years of public discourse. In a response to readersâ complaints posted at his Dot Earth blog, Revkin wrote that:
In a longer story, I might have included some of the biographical background showing just how different these two men are on the issue ⌠But the differences in the mensâ backgrounds, expertise and reputations were not at the heart of this piece. It was about the realities of climate science and long-term risk assessments and how they are a bad fit for the policy arena, no matter what your worldview or level of knowledge
Fair enough, but background, expertise, and reputation were certainly close enough to the heart of the piece to merit consideration. And even with such context, the choice of frame still seems questionable. Revkinâs main point, that we must not overplay or underplay the impacts climate change is incredibly important, but using Gore and Will to illustrate that point seems to be a case of needlessly politicizing climate issues in order to get space in the newspaper, which Revkin has deplored many times. Again, a backgrounder might have helped, but the resultâa lot of heat and no light, as they sayâmight have been the same regardless.
Along that line, Revkin quoted American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet, who argues that the wave of criticism of Will âonly serves to draw attention to his claims while reinforcing a larger false narrative that liberals and the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.â
There is some truth to that. Indeed, because of the hullaballoo, Will is now writing about climate change for the second time this month. On the other hand, this whole affair raises a number of important questions about how the press, particularly columnists, cover climate change. The most important seems to be: can inference rise to the level of such absurdity that it becomes subject to the same rigors as evidence?
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.