A recent piece noted how when it came to the assertions of Washington Post syndicated columnist George Will, illogical reasonings, factual manipulations, and basic, downright misinformation, is “debate,” according to editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.

True to form, here is Will, once again on the topic of science, at his logical and factual best.  And Fred Hiatt’s editorial page is right there with him, even promoting his piece with further spin itself. 

The day this particular unchecked piece of abstract tautology by Will appeared, the Post ran it as its feature op-ed online story. This means that it occupied the entire top side of the opinion home page along with a promotional picture, appeared in much larger type than the other op-eds, and took up the same amount of room as all of the other op ed headlines put together.

Here is how the headline and lead on the Post’s opinion home page appeared the day Will’s piece ran:

“Cool to Climate Change» GEORGE F. WILL. When will the alarmists realize that the developing world isn’t getting on board?”

Contrary to what the Post’s feature op ed lead in caption very powerfully implies, isn’t the issue of global attention to the global challenge of climate change of interest to anyone at all who realizes that  rapidly increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels are likely to substantially, and rapidly, alter our climate?

Of course.

So is anyone who realizes that  rapidly increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels are likely to substantially, and rapidly, alter our climate, an alarmist?

Of course not.

So then why did the Post’s editors choose the pejorative and misleading term “alarmists” to describe anyone concerned about climate change — thereby including an overwhelmingly number of the world’s non partisan scientists?

Or was the Post trying to say on its opinion home page — as its feature piece no less — that this “realization” that the “developing world is not getting onboard” is, ridiculously, only relevant to actual “alarmists” rather than anybody concerned about the issue?

As for Will, perhaps he is overwhelmingly driven by intense ideology on the issue. But whatever the reason, his piece is illogical. (He is also, as subsequent columns will illustrate, somewhat incorrect about India and China, as well.)

Let’s start with the facts.  In the piece, Will writes:

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

Will here defines global warming — to put it charitably — in a bizarre way. He defines it as meaning that the world is getting increasingly warmer, literally, and constantly. This means minute to each suceeding minute presumably; except Will likely at least believes that the earth tilts on its axis, giving us spring, summer, autumn, and winter.  Thus, given that slow seasonal movement, he defines global warming as meaning that the earth must get increasingly warmer, not each minute, but each year. As if climate is not variable, but monotonic.

This is asinine.  Climate, esssentially, is to year to year as weather is to day to day.  Will expecting “global warming” to mean that the earth has to get warmer each successive year (which is far different than the fact that it may), is the same as him expecting that because it cooled off from yesterday to today, and it is fall and the north cooling, that it must then cool further from today to tomorrow.  In other words, ridiculous.  (Then again, Will has exhibited time and time again that not only is he not a scientist,  he doesn’t even understand science very well.)   

That’s okay though. His “If you’re 29 there has been no global warming for your entire adult“ (aside from the fact that including 2009 the eleven warmest years on record will all have occurred in the last thirteen years) statement is enough of a technicality for him to avoid the outright “lie” label, and for the Post to then be able to postulate his claptrap under the auspices of “debate” rather than the deliberate (or at least fervently belief driven) disinformation campaign that it is. 

Climate Progress’s Joe Romm didn’t put it so kindly, entitling this piece, as noted in earlier George Will links, “Memo to Post: If George Will Quotes a Lie, it’s Still a Lie”.  But then this is the same Joe Romm who, although sometimes given to hyperbole, also stated in a headline that “Washington Post, Fred Hiatt Turn Editorial Page Into a ‘Joke’…”  (We’ll have a piece up shortly that shows why the rather one sided sounding accusations that Romm throws about –and we’re not sure how convincing Romm’s arguments are from a purely dispassionate standpoint — regarding the July 14 op ed by Sarah Palin that he is referring to, are actually fairly reasonable; even if they may not fully sound it to all but the insta Sarah Palin and Washington Post editorial page hating crowd (of whom there are a lot online, and for good reason, frankly). Here we just wanted to note what one of  the country’s more passionate and knowledgeable advocates on the subject of climate change, had to say about all this.) 

Now let’s look at the logic. Will also sserts:

The climatic benefits of ["weaning" the economy off of its reliance upon carbon] are uncertain but, given the behavior of those pesky 5 billion [ additional people], almost certainly small, perhaps minuscule, even immeasurable. Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative.

Will then uses this as his basis for “logically” mocking (in his trademark sarcastic way) the idea of trying to do anything about climate change, because other countries that matter, “won’t.”  This is based in turn upon some expressed reluctance on the part of such countries to take action. (Overlooking, of course, that we have at times expressed reluctance to take action.)

In other words, George Will wrote a column (and the Washington Post presented it as its feature op ed)  that not only blatantly mislead readers with respect to the basic, underlying information, but one that used the very nature of the challenge – getting us all to attend to the challenge – as the very reason for us not to attend to it.

Even more irrationally, Will is also pretending — or worse, has convinced himself — that any action that we take is therefore done in a vacuum. That is, that no other countries will take any ameliorative action, no matter what we do, and we alone can’t effect the problem much, so let’s do nothing. It is somewhat hidden of course in his usual obtuse and Shakespeareanly rambunctious prose: But — now that he has graduated from pure climate denial (although as noted near the end of the piece cited twice above, he has now jumped back to the reactionary, “we need to study the issue some more” “solution” of nine years ago), this is essentially what, irrationally, he spends this entire Washington Post feature oped piece, arguing.

Will’s strange, but predictable, ode to how not to solve a problem, also bizarrely misses the central fact of American leadership. That is: countries that have not had the benefit of our early economic growth will be far less likely to take action on what is a global problem, if the long term leader in carbon emissions, as well as the closest thing we have to leader of the free world, does not take realistic and legitimate actions itself. That would be us.

But Will would rather say that although we are responsible for almost 25 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, and the leader of the free world, we “really can’t do anything about it because some other countries don’t want to come on board.”

The predominant reason that these countries, ideally, don’t wish to, of course, is two fold. The first part is that we keep running this largely fictitious, yet widely presumed, idea that it will cost a lot of money to sensibly address climate change; that is, that it will only detract from economic growth and our modes of production, rather than shift how they are defined, and what actually contributes to them. (With cleaner energy and its development and implementation, of course, serving as just one example of the latter). The second part is the fact that far from being a world leader on the issue — and despite being the world’s wealthiest nation — we have been a world laggard on cutting emissions. So Will essentially argues that because of this (and thus the similar claimed path by other key nations), we should be a laggard some more!

His rationale here for not trying to solve this, thus, is very similar, in response to any challenge, to tautologically defining a big part of the challenge itself as a reason for inaction:

The challenge is getting the world (including, most notably, us) off of environmentally destructive, and long term climate altering, fossil fuels, and to some degree advancing agricultural practices. So Will publishes an entire piece, that gets syndicated, and that the Post prints as its feature op-ed, that essentially says, “because these countries don’t really want to do anything [which is, along with our actions, the entire challenge] , let’s not do anything!”

Note to Will, the Post, and to the various other outlets running Will’s reactionary and upside down thinking: That is the problem in the first place. That is what we are trying to solve.

Let’s break it down further for the Post editorial board, which, apparently so moved by the clever home page headlining of “when will alarmists realize,” seems to have missed this basic point: If the world wide problem is the desire to keep doing X, when the solution is to change to Y, asserting the world wide desire to do X as the rationale for thus not addressing the problem, is tautological.

It’s equivalent to writing an entire column which in essence argues; “this is a hard problem, so what makes it hard is that it is hard to do, therefore we should not do it.” The fact that it is a global problem by definition, and that our own actions, independent of those of other nations (misleading or ill reasoned as such a predication is) can not have nearly as great an effect, does not change this.

Will did not win the prize for “op-ed that comes up with the most illogical way to argue against doing anything to solve a known, and increasing problem” (just awarded, here today, in this column), for nothing:

Aside from neglecting to mention that for years he tried to refute — and even mocked — the potential for man induced climatological alteration (thus making one wonder why he should have any authority to opine on the matter now), he also has a fallback position here, in case the illogic of his main thesis is picked up: With nary a whit of knowledge about the subject matter, he continues to nevertheles promulgate skepticism that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations/warming even matters (see above), while at the same time managing to argue that it is such a large and advanced issue that we can’t do anything helpful about it anyway.

It is is also interesting that Will is such an expert on atmospheric, climatological, and ecological science that he knows that any benefits of “weaning” the economy off of carbon are, according to him, “almost certainly small, perhaps minuscule,” as a matter of declarative fact, when in reality he has absolutely no idea.

Given that greenhouse gas concentrations are continuing to rise as a result of man’s specific, and alterable, activities, and that scientific problems normally do not accrue on a one to one basis with additional variable input — but rather tend to rise on an often lagging, increasingly steep (and in the case of climate almost assuredly somewhat disjointed) curve as variable input increases, and given that all three of the carbon emitting fossil fuels are finite, and that two of the three, climate change aside, are also highly polluting and (in the case of coal) environmentally destructive — this is a pretty ignorant assertion. But it is nevertheless no problem for Will to make. It fits right in with his award winning reactionary anti science tautological contortions, and allows him to toss around a little fake, yet wildly ignorant, “expertise” for good effect.

This is ignorance that the Washington Post Editorial Page, under Fred Hiatt, seems happy to keep promoting — under a ridiculous assertion of what constitutes “provocativeness,” “counter-arguments” “challenges to certainty,” and contrarian point raising.