The Tracker is late in recognizing a terrible, illuminating row over climate change politics, ideology, data, history, and general perceived idiocy that has been raging for a couple of weeks now. It’s not just a cat and dog fight, but a roaring whirlwind of coyotes, stoats, wolverines, and other beasts ripping and snapping away. So here is an incoherent summary – the only thing possible in the midst of this ruckus – with enough links to get started anybody who also has missed it, and wants to catch up.

It started with newspaper column that, to these eyes at first, seemed nothing particularly unusual.

Anybody who keeps up on climate change politics has heard most or of the standard arguments why the world’s climate is not changing so much or, if it is, it’s not our fault or it’s good for us and anyway the IPCC is full of meddling, hysterical eggheads who mistake transistors  for brains. The standard litany of “evidence” includes: just 30 years ago science said we are heading into an ice age, changes in solar output explain it, melting ice is part of a natural cycle, anti-feedback loops are so robust little old mankind can’t possibly upset a whole planet, global warming stopped ten years ago,  it was even hotter back in the medieval warming, and (lately) arctic sea ice has been growing in the winter at a record pace, etc. That’s all standard fodder on the right side of the internet. But when prominent baseball writer, columnist, and weekend TV conservative talking head George Will put a big dose of them in the Washington Post two weeks ago, all hell broke loose.

While it seemed to be just another denialist spitting into the wind, this wind has blown up into a hurricane. Andy Revkin at the New York Times with his Dot Earth blog, and Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Observatory have gotten caught up. Matt Nisbet at Framing Science got in on it early, too. At his The Loom, über-freelancer Carl Zimmer has gone hammer and tong against Will and his amassed “facts.”  Ancillary battles have broken out, including attacks on Revkin by, of all people, climate worriers furious that Andy somewhat twitted Al Gore for exaggerating the link to climate change in one research team’s analysis of the rising rate of natural disasters (Gore took it back, retiring the offending slide from his show).  Most prominent in this critique is Joe Romm at his Climate Progress site, where he manages to put Revkin and climate researcher Roger Pielke Jr. of Prometheus in the same boat, a neat trick.

Back to Will. Surprise surprise, he did not back down. He fired off another column Friday that ratcheted up the prose and, remarkable given how wrong he appears to be, beefed up further the assertion that climate science is voodoo because look at how it said not so long ago we’re in for an ice age. He offered specifics, purportedly showing the NYTimes itself reported this consensus on cooling.  His evidence incuded a few lines from a 1975 story by the sainted, late NYTimes science writer Walter Sullivan. That in turn prompted this riposte from blogger John Fleck at Inkstain who suggests, convincingly, that Sully’s story said no such thing and that Will – or his researchers – baldly and falsely cherry picked their info. Fleck, incidentally, last year got into the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society an analysis rather totally demolishing the idea that US science, or media, agreed in the 1970s that an ice age looms. Fleck, one must note, is a science writer at the Albuquerque Journal. His pieces would have been regularly noted at this site except that the paper has made it difficult to see its articles free on the internet (not a bad business plan, all things considered). He ran a fine, recent news analysis of the Will kerfuffle, which I hope opens for Tracker readers.

Even the Post’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander got involved, offering a mild mea culpa for not examining more closely the “fact-checking” process in the op-ed department that greenlighted Will’s missives and his factual misfires. He’s been hammered by both political sides in the debates over warming and what to do about it. His best line as he surveyed his emails, “It was a bit like watching chairs being thrown in a bar fight.” For a chair-by-chair analysis put up this morning, see this post by Tom Yulsman at the CEJournal.

The Tracker, being biased toward his own biases – such as an inclination to favor what the majority of the most credentialed, major league scientists in pertinent fields say – has listed mainly blogs and other stories critical of Will and supportive of the kinds of scenarios that the IPCC sees. There is plenty of fur flying in the other direction too, of course. One of the more readable and comprehensive blogs skeptical of the importance of anthropogenic climate change – should anyone visiting this site want to see one – is ICECAP (link was busted for months, sorry about that – cp 7-17-09) It is run primarily by meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo (check out his whole roster, which includes many members of the denialist pantheon). It has several entries on the Will affair and related topics.

Pic: Popeye and Bluto having a big fight (alternative was Beetle Bailey and Sgt. Snorkel). Source;

-CP

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under About Journalism, Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.