FAIR Has Great Handy Guide To Four Leading Denialists, Plus Facts On Science Non-Controversy

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Like Stossel, Will found in this conspiratorial fantasy an illuminating parallel to actual environmental efforts around global warming, which he called more recently (4/12/07) “a campaign without peacetime precedent. . . . Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans.” The odd reference to April 2007 as “peacetime” aside (letter, Washington Post, 4/21/07), coverage of global warming can only resemble world war–era propaganda if you believe that while Americans were fighting Germany, there were numerous prominent pundits playing the George Will role by continually promoting pro-German arguments.

In one Post column (4/2/06), Will noted that the increase in global temperature “might be the margin of error when measuring the planet’s temperature”—as if the world’s climate scientists were likely to have overlooked something as basic as the margin of error. Will soldiered on, comparing global temperature to that of the human body: “To take a person’s temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.”

In a Newsweek column rounding up some notable end-of-year stories (12/18/06), Will chuckled: “Two U.S. explorers went to the North Pole to study how global warming threatens polar bears. They had planned to go last year, but were forced to delay Project Thin Ice because of unusually heavy snow and ice.” As blogger Glenn Greenwald noted (Salon, 4/14/07), pointing to cold weather as disproof of global warming is exactly as persuasive as citing individual obituaries to debunk the notion that the world’s population is growing. Not that the scientific details matter to Will, but one of the Project Thin Ice explorers told Extra! that the team encountered largely lake-effect snow—which is created by open water—a phenomenon that may be related to warming rather than debunking it.

One panel discussion on ABC’s This Week (3/26/06) found Will conceding that while there might be such a thing as human-caused global warming, “any solution requires trillions of dollars of sacrifice from world economic growth. That’s trillions of dollars that won’t be spent on education, culture, AIDS prevention. Are we sure we want to do this?” Will doesn’t usually promote government spending on such problems, of course—not unless it can be used to beat back the threat of doing something about climate change. After Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel summarized the scientific case on climate change, Will’s incisive reply was “shut up.” One might conclude that Will has little else left to support his case. That could explain his exasperation with the fact that the subject is even being discussed. “Enough already,” Will wrote in Newsweek (2/12/07), before going on to deride “climate Cassandras” and the “consensus catechism about global warming.” Alliterative accomplishments aside, Will’s real problem seems to be that scientists refuse to agree with him.

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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3418