Washington Post syndicated columnist George Will has repeatedly demonstrated an outright hostility toward science, raising serious questions about his willingness to learn, or ability to view what he has learned, with even a modicum of objectivity. And yet the Post continues to  publish his pieces on science and climate change, in what is otherwise extremely limited editorial space.

Will also continues to take what little bits his research team is able to find him, and mangles and misrepresents the facts almost beyond repair in order to try and somewhow smash them into an ideologically predetermined box where they simply don’t fit; but they do instead leave readers greatly misinformed as a result.

Yet editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt believes this is simply questioning presumption, drawing different inferences, and challenging conventional wisdom, when it is nothing of the sort.

And he seems to believe, also quite erroneously, that questioning repeated misrepresentations by Will, and the decision to publish them, is ”pressuring newspapers into suppressing minority views.”

This is particularly ironic since we can provide a laundry list, on critical topics, ranging from the Constitution, Natural Rights, Authoritarian Government, Energy Resource Development, Oil, to Foreign Policy, where the editorial page under Hiatt repeatedly shuns contrarian minority views, even where such contrarian minority views may well be far more coherent than the group-think that his editorial page repeatedly prescribes.

Hiatt also seems to believe that Will’s pattern of flagrant logical errors and factual misrepresentations, and for it to be repeatedly published in lieu of other material is okay, because, others can, as he put it, ”debate” Will.

He casually makes this assertion as if the Post editorial page was simply an indiscriminate assortment of random citizen voices, rather than a carefully selected and highly edited amalgam of what is supposed to represent a cross section of various thought provoking,  challenging, and educational ruminations and postulations; not a hodge podges of sometimes ideologically driven, or just wildly misinformed, bastardizations of the facts and incohesions of logic.

Hiatt also seems to be ignoring the fact that the Washington Post’s page is not just a free for all where anybody can allege anything at any time, but is among the most valuable and carefully guarded pieces of editorial real estate in the country.  Yet it’s unworthy of public challenge, on those carefully guarded, and highly prized pages, for Will to assert whatever he wants, however factually and logically bereft, because people can “debate” him?

Will Hiatt publish a “debate” of ours with Will?  Doubtful. Yet he illogically asserts the ability to “debate” Will as a reasonable grounds for publishing his wildly misleading (and, more subjectively speaking, logically contorted) pieces on climate and science.

And even if the Post would publish such a piece (as it finally did regarding one of Will’s earlier pieces this year on climate and science, in likely response to this exhaustive list of critiques of just that one piece, as well as this challenge), does a wildly misleading piece, and a piece very diplomatically pointing some of this out, really constitute the intelligent point, counterpoint, and coherently reasoned and divergent perspectives that even average editorial pages are based upon?

For example, one of Will’s claims therein was that there has been “no global warming” because 1998 was the “warmest year” on record (which, as noted here, he has creatively, and much more recently, morphed into a thinly veiled accusation of “bias” against the NY Times because the Times did not suggest 1998 was climate change’s “apogee” — a fantastically uninformed assertion regardless of temperature data).   This is particularly interesting, given that the ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, and that NASA cites both 2005 and 2007 as warmer than 1998.  And that the head of the organization that ranks 1998 as slightly warmer, very nicely called Will’s’ claim a “misinterpretation.”

Hiatt suggests, again, that this is in fact an “inference” that cuts against scientific consensus. But this is incorrect.  Asserting, as logically and scientifically shaky as such a claim is, that the data does not indicate a level of warming that would leave only heightened atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations as a reasonable cause, is an “inference” that cuts against scientific consensus. Stating that there is likely no climate change issue since 1998 is the warmest year on record is blatant manipulation, since what is not an “inference,” is that climate is not monotonic.  That is, there is natural variability not only from day to year, but year to year as climate slowly evolves.

Thus, deciding what long term weather patterns are, based upon any one recent year, is scientifically specious, or widly ignorant; not “inferential.”  As much as if we wrote a column asserting that the earth in the northern hemisphere now probably gets warmer in the wintertime than summertime because two Thursdays ago, November 19, it was cooler than today, December 3d.

For another illustration between the difference between provocative, or even “shaky” inference, and abysmal, or purposefully manipulative, journalism, with respect to yet another one of Will’s claims from that same column — and one he has been repeating for years – see minutes 3:30 to 6:20 of the video at the beginning of this link.

Will has already exhibited that he seems to think that if he can just “quote” a fib, that it’s therefore not a fib. (Note, in addition to the point in the link just provided, any “ongoing warming” (or cooling) as part of an overall trend has to be measured in terms of deviation from the averages making up the trend, not one random specific year. It’s at the very least specious, or scientifically illiterate, to claim otherwise. Yet Will, once again, nevertheless does.)

But with respect to the separate fib exhibited in this video, he exhibits a corollary trait. That is, if he again repeats a widely debunked misconception, now for the fourth time, by illustrating every bit of evidence of the misconception (which would be the news articles that he now meticulously, but irrelevantly, cites, of course) that created the misconception in the first place some 30 odds years ago, then it’s no longer a misconception!

In other words, it doesn’t matter that 30 -40 years ago, when the earth had been cooling for a few decades, climate change was less well understood, atmospheric greenhouse levels, although high, were lower than today, and the majority of scientists were nevertheless still predicting warming, if Will can find several old news articles that erroneously claimed that the consensus was for cooling, then Will can keep stating it as fact, even though it’s fiction!  At least, on the Washington Post editorial pages, he can.

(A correct claim would be that some scientists thought the earth was cooling. The incorrect claim that Will keeps running is that the consensus was for cooling, when not only was it clearly not, but any consensus that existed back then was still, despite actual cooling, for global warming.  If there is any doubt, however, about the mendacity of this approach, consider that Will once again pumps the idea of fear that we were headed for an ice age, without mentioning that it was anticipated, if at all, 20,000 years from now.  In fact, it is not impossible that climate change (often casually referred to as “global warming, since, in fact, the earth is getting warmer, and the general consensus calls for that), might help create a more rapid, and severe ice age, much more quickly in time. And this would not contradict the phenomenon of climate change; which, at its heart, is the reality that greenhouse gases trap heat and thus ultimately drive climate, and that they have been radically altered in a geologic blink of an eye (and are still being radically altered) through very specific, discernible, and easily changeable human behaviors.)