Here is a total debunk, using Georgie boy will as the liar, but it applies to you too AB
e Affair Category
Just Keep Calling It Fact-Checking And Someday Theyll Believe You
Zachary Smith at Talking Points Memo, among others, notes that the Washington Post editorial page editor is still claiming that George Wills many misrepresentations about global warming were subject to careful fact-checking, some two months after many people showed they were anything butincluding some who explained the errors in the Washington Post itself. Its a sad coda to a long tale of op-ed woe.
April 30th, 2009 9:14 AM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, The George Will On Ice Affair | 2 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
George Will, Now With Misleading Links!
Theres a lot of dismally wrong coverage of global warming these days (see some recent examples chronicled by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, for example). But the way global warming gets treated on the op-ed pages of the Washington Postparticularly by George Will and his enabling editorsis particularly exquisite. For my little Ahab-like obsession with the editorial process there, check out this string of posts. Many other observers have made similar points, so youd think that somebody over at the Post might have learned something from the experience.
Today, we see that they havent.
One of the more egregious lines from George Wills recent columns on global warming is the claim that real data shows that warnings about a rise in the average global temperature are wrong. He writes: According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.
The secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization himself, Michael Jarraud, decided he had to write to the Washington Post to tell them George Will is wrong.
Heres the nut of Jarrauds letter from March 21:
It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record as was done in a recent Post column [Dark Green Doomsayers, George F. Will, op-ed, Feb. 15] and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.
The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit.
Evidence of global warming has been documented in widespread decreases in snow cover, sea ice and glaciers. The 11 warmest years on record occurred in the past 13 years.
While variations occur throughout the temperature record, shorter-term variations do not contradict the overwhelming long-term increase in global surface temperatures since 1850, when reliable meteorological recordkeeping began. Year to year, we may observe in some parts of the world colder or warmer episodes than in other parts, leading to record low or high temperatures. This regional climate variability does not disprove long-term climate change. While 2008 was slightly cooler than 2007, partially due to a La Niña event, it was nonetheless the 10th-warmest year on record.
Today, George Will is back on the subject of global warming. The occassion for his column is the alleged uselessness of energy-efficient light bulbs. The column is basically a cut-and-paste job on a recent New York Times article on the bulbsthe same newspaper that Will claimed in an earlier column is a trumpet that never sounds retreat in todays war against warming. Somehow, a paper Will knows is nothing but a climate propaganda machine can publish an article related to global warming that he relies on as absolute authority.
But lets leave internal logic aside. Lets just deal with fact-checking. At the start of Wills column today, he argues that all this worry about light bulbs is supremely pointless becauseyou guessed it
Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.
Does the Post read its own letters? Does it remember them? Do they think if you add the phrase stastistics you can continue to mislead on the exact same point emphasized by Jarraud? Perhaps Wills editors think if they put a link in Wills misleading statement, it somehow makes it right. Did they actually look at the linked document? If they did, theyd find stuff like this:
The global average temperature for 2007 is statistically indistinguishable from each of the nine warmest years on record.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74°C, but this increase has not been continuous. The linear warming trend over the past 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the past 100 years.
Every time I think this sorry tale of fact-checking woe cant get worse, it does.
April 2nd, 2009 9:39 AM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, The George Will On Ice Affair | 24 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
Glaciers and Electrons
Thirty-four days ago, George Will published a column in the Washington Post that was loaded with erroneous statements about global warming. Many people, your humble scribe included, laid out the fact-checking. The Washington Post editorial page editors claimed that they checked the column repeatedly, yet their ombudsman granted that perhaps it might have been a nice idea if somebody had called the scientists Will invoked as his authoritiesscientists who themselves refuted him. Yet the Post has not published a correction to Wills column. Instead, they published a second column on the subject from Will, in which he reiterated some of his earlier misleading statements and even managed to slip some new ones in.
Today, at last, the Post published an opinion piece by science writer Chris Mooney in response. I use quotation marks because most of his piece is actually a concise fact-checking report. The same issue also includes a letter from the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, Michael Jarraud, who rejects Wills characterization of the WMOs work on global warming.
Chris says that this experience has changed his previously critical view of the Post editorial page. I wonder how far it changed. It is certainly to the Posts credit that they published these pieces that are so critical of a columns accuracy, even after they claimed it was factually accurate. But theyre presented today in the standard op-ed debate format, as if Will was arguing in favor of health savings accounts and Mooney and Jarraud are responding with arguments in favor of a single-payer health system. This situation is very different. Will made statements that would have not made it past a fact-checker who bothered to call up the experts Will cited. Only 34 days later do the readers get an inkling that this is the case. In an age of electrons, thats a glacial pace. There is still a lot of room here for improvement.
March 21st, 2009 4:46 PM by Carl Zimmer in The George Will On Ice Affair | 9 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
Ice Never Sleeps: George Will, Jr.
Ive been writing from time to time recently about the poor job that op-ed sections do with science. As my prime example, Ive focused on a column George Will wrote poo-poohing global warming for the Washington Post. But Ive never meant to imply that that particular column was some isolated fluke. I think similar problems can be found in the editorial pages of many newspapers, and many branches of science are affected.
I dont have the luxury (not to mention the masochism) to become a fact-checker on every opinion piece that appears in every major US newspaper. But I do want to point out a new column by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe today, Wheres Global Warming? Sounding like a George Will, Jr., Jacoby presents what he claims is evidence suggesting that there is no global warming.
Considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldnt the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isnt it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?
What I find striking about this column is that I dont actually have to do any fresh fact-checking to identify some problems with it. I already have. Jacoby offers us the same glitch with a satellite sensor that Will did, which he seems to be using to suggest that we dont really know anything about ice coverage. But as I pointed out on February 27, the scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who discovered the glitch made it clear that the temporary error in the near-real-time data does not change the conclusion that Arctic sea ice extent has been declining for the past three decades.
Jacoby then invokes a new paper which I wrote about last week on a potential new shift in the climate. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission.
Remission? Youd think the climate had tumor and was now cancer-free. In fact, Swanson and Tsonis made it very clear that the shift they were proposing was the result of the climates natural variability overlaid on the effects of an ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As I wrote in my post, Swanson put it this way to me: We are describing in this paper what is generally referred to as internal (natural) climate variability, superimposed upon a robust global warming trend at century time-scales.
In both cases, Jacoby misrepresents research. Climate scientists have not concluded that global warming has been affecting the world based on a run of hot weather as Jacoby puts it. They look at long-term trends. When George Will made this same kind of error, his editors claimed that his column had actually passed through a stringent fact-checking process. I wonder if the Boston Globe put Jacoby to the same test. A one-minute phone call to either team of scientists would have been enough to render a verdict.
March 9th, 2009 2:50 PM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, The George Will On Ice Affair | 29 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
Checking George Will: The Perils of Time Travel
While I was blogging over the past few weeks about fact-checking George Wills dismissal of global warming (collected here), I got comments. A lot of them.
A fair number of commenters claimed George Will was right, and presented evidence that they claimed supported him. Some tried to back their claims with news that came out after Wills column was published. For example, a few days after his column came out, there were reports that the a satellite that measure ice cover had some trouble and was fixed. But George Will could not jump forward in time, check out the satellites, and then leap back to write his column. Theres no way that it could have any bearing on fact-checking his piece. Whats more, even if Will did know about them, hed still be wrong, as I explained here.
Today brought more time-travel. Trey writes:
Just FYI to the AGW crown [sic] and to support George Will and Lou Dobbs (CNN) there appears to be a shift to global cooling now. MSNBC and Discovery.com are reporting no warming since 2001 and that were looking at no warming or even cooling for the next several decades.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause-02.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/
My response is much the same as my response to the satellite story. On February 15, George Will wrote the following about current global cooling:
Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.
If were going to fact-check George Will, this is what we have to check. What does the World Meteorlogical Organization in fact have to say about global warming?
This (from April 2008):
The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.
And this (from May 29 last year):
While important uncertainties still remain, the overwhelming global scientific consensus, as reflected through the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, is now that the Earths atmosphere is warming at an increasing rate and that most of this warming is very probably due to human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning and certain agricultural practices. It is also recognized that, while these changes are just beginning, their impacts will intensify in the coming decades.
If George Will has been having back-room chats with the World Meteorological Organization folks, where theyve repudiated statements like these, he hasnt share that news with the rest of us. My hunch is that Will would point to 1998, which was a very warm year, and say, See, global warming stopped in 1998.
But thats not how the World Meteorological Organization (or any major organization of climate scientists) judges global warming. Its pointless to pick out a single year for comparison, because the rising global temperature trend is overlaid on a naturally variable climate. If Will decided to pick 1997 or 1999, hed have to deal with a year that was cooler than recent years. In fact, the World Meteorological Organization judges global warming based on averages of several years, which they compare to the entire climate record since humans started pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on an industrial scale.
So what about this new report from Discovery.com, and reprinted by MSNBC? First off, a fact-checker cant use it to confirm a statement Will made about the World Meteorological Organization three weeks ago. The story itself from Discovery is very short and doesnt provide any details about where the study in question came out. So I got in touch with the scientists, Kyle Swanson and Anstasio Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin. They sent me their paper, called Has the climate recently shifted? It will be published soon in Geophysical Research Letters.
filename.jpgSwanson and Tsonis observe that over the past century, the average global temperature has risen, but there have been periods when it has dropped temporarily. Swanson and Tsonis have been investigating how the natural climate variability may explain the shifts between these phases. This variability includes oscillations in the circulation of the ocean and the air. El Nino is the most famous of these oscillations, but there are others as well in the North Pacific and the North Atlantic. Only three times in the twentieth century did all these oscillations synchronize, after which the climate moved to a new state. This figure, from the paper, shows the periods of synchronization as cross-hatched bars.
Based on the study of chaotic systems, Swanson and Tsonis propose that the synchronization and climate shift are connected through cause and effect. Once a lot of oscillations are working in sync, even a small change to one of them can radiate out through the whole system and trigger a change. And along with the three shifts in the real climate, climate models also show a similar response when oscillations line up.
In their paper, Swanson and Tsonis then look at the past few years. They see a peak in synchronization in 2001 and 2002, and they also observe that in the years since, the temperature change has been on average flat (although much warmer than at the beginning of the century). They estimate that all the warming due to carbon dioxide should have driven the temperature up .25 degrees C since then. The fact that it hasnt leads them to propose the the oceans and atmosphere have changed the way they handle heat. The oceans may have absorbed more heat due to a change in circulation, or the atmosphere may radiate more heat away by clouds. If this hypothesis is true, then its possible that the climate will remain in this new stage for some years to come before it shifts again.
Swanson and Tsonis write:
Of course, it is purely speculative to presume that the global mean temperature will remain near current levels for such an extended period of time. Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing.
They conclude with this warning:
Finally, it is vital to note that there is no comfort to be gained by having a climate with a signicant degree of internal variability, even if it results in a near-term cessation of global warming. It is straightforward to argue that a climate with signicant internal variability is a climate that is very sensitive to applied anthropogenic radiative anomalies (c.f. Roe [2009]). If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability [Kravtsov and Spannagle 2008].
This story has been bouncing around a lot around the blogosphere. The conservative Heritage Foundation quoted from the Discovery.com piece with the headline, Trillions in New Taxes to Accomplish Nothing. A lot of the coverage describes the study as showing that global warming stopped in 2001, as Trey writes. But the paper doesnt say that. It says that a synchronization happened then. Its a bit odd how easily people can shift from claiming the warm year of 1998 as the end of global warming to 2001.
So I asked Swanson and Tsonis what they thought about its reception.
Tsonis wrote,
I was worried that this will happen, that is why we caution in the paper that while climate shifts may be part of the natural variability of the climate system they may be superimposed on a anthropogenic warming trend. We mentioned that also in the MSNBC story, and this will be my answer to anybody who asks me.
I like to report on the science only. If political organizations want to pick up what they like in order to pass their point and ignore the real science, there is nothing we can do.
Swanson wrote to me that this natural shifting is exactly what youd expect if the Earths climate was indeed sensitive enough to carbon dioxide that it would respond by warming as has been projected.
We are describing in this paper what is generally referred to as internal (natural) climate variability, superimposed upon a robust global warming trend at century time-scales. Viewed in that light, the halt in global warming is no different than an El Nino/La Nina transition, which also breaks a warming trend - what we are describing is just climate variability that occurs over longer time scales.
Swanson and Tsonis have certainly come up with an intriguing hypothesis, based both on temperature observations and mathematical models of the climate. Ill be curious to hear what other climate scientists think of it. It will take time to test, but even if it turns out to be right, it does not mean that global warming is over. If George Will could have climbed into a time travel machine and jumped forward to today, he would have been wrong if he tried to use this study to bolster his arguments back in February.
Update: I just noticed the Discovery news article did mention the journal where the paper will be published. Ive struck the offending text.
March 4th, 2009 2:48 PM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, Meta, The George Will On Ice Affair | 19 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
Ice, Ice Baby: When Fact-Checking Is Not Fact-Checking
For the past couple weeks, Ive been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example Ive focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.
I have argued that George Wills claims would have not have passed the standard fact-checking carried out by many magazines. He even manages to add extra errors in his second column, which is just a defense of his first. A number of other bloggers have also criticized the Post on similar grounds. The Washington Post editorial staff has responded on three occasions, most recently and at the greatest length this morning. As Ill explain below, its not much of a response.
The first reaction was reported last week in Talking Points Memo. Andrew Alexander, the new Washington Post ombudsman, checked with the editorial page editors and told TPM that they have a multi-layered editing process in which columns are fact-checked to the greatest extent possible. They had, in other words, been satisfied that the information in George Will column factually correct in advance of publishing it, and now saw no reason to print any corrections. Then the editorial page editor Fred Hiatt was interviewed Thursday in the Columbia Journalism Review, where he stated that Will may have made inferences from the data that scientists didnt agree with, and that it was up to those scientists to debate Will. Again, he saw no need for any corrections, and even suggested that pieces like Wills column helped the public appreciate the uncertainty on issues including global warming, along with other fields like medicine.
Im not going to deal in detail with these responses here, having already done so yesterday. Instead, I want to take a look at the latest response that came out this morning: a full-blown column in the Washington Post by the ombudsman Andrew Alexanderin fact, Alexanders first official piece in his new job. You can read it here.
As I read it, I kept hitting one puzzling statement after another. For example, Alexander starts out the piece by focusing his column on what he calls a key paragraph about the global area of ice. As Ive explained before, that paragraph is indeed in error, both in the specifics of the data, and in the way Will uses it as evidence that global warming has not been occurring. It became all the more striking because the scientists whom Will named as his source for the data rejected his claims, and, as I later showed, neither Will nor any of the fact-checkers bothered to contact the scientists to confirm their information. Instead, they pointed to another statement from the scientists as confirming Wills claimwhile ignoring the parts of the one-page statement that showed why Will was wrong.
But as vivid as that case may be, it was only one of numerous errors in the piece. If Wills columns had indeed been properly fact-checked, the fact-checkers would have drawn attention to other errors in his columns.
For example, Will misrepresents an article by the late great Walter Sullivan in the New York Times in 1975, pretending that it trumpets an imminent plunge into an Ice Age:
The New York Times was as it is today in a contrary crusade a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that a major cooling of the climate was widely considered inevitable because it was well established that the Northern Hemispheres climate has been getting cooler since about 1950.
Here is how that article actually starts:
The worlds climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.
The whole article is here [$]. For more on all this, see here and see The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, (free pdf) published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I write frequently for the Times, although only once about global warming.)
Heres another error Alexander doesnt address: Will tries to use a recent satellite sensor glitch as evidence that skeptical scientists get attacked for questioning global warming. I explained how scientists have dealt with that glitch and corrected the record, and how the scientists themselves state that the glitch doesnt affect their conclusion that the Arctic has shown a three-decade trend of shrinking ice areaa result that also comes from climate models.
But Alexander never addresses anything beyond Wills claims about the global area of ice now and in 1979. When fact-checkers write up their reports, they do not just look at one paragraph and call it a day. I dont understand why that is acceptable for a report from an ombudsman about the accuracy of a newspaper column.
But even within this narrow scope, Alexanders conclusions puzzle me. He states:
My inquiry shows that there was fact-checking at multiple levels.
What Alexander then describes is not fact-checking.
It began with Wills own research assistant, Greg Reed. When the column was submitted on Feb. 12 to The Washington Post Writers Group, which edits and syndicates it, Reed sent an accompanying e-mail that provided roughly 20 Internet reference links in support of key assertions in the column. Richard Aldacushion, editorial production manager at the Writers Group, said he reviewed every link. The column was then edited by editorial director Alan Shearer and managing editor James Hill.
Next, it went to The Posts op-ed editor, Autumn Brewington, who said she also reviewed the sources.
Fact-checking descriptions of scientific research involves a wee bit more than perusing Internet reference links. It is not just a pattern-matching game, where you see if a sequence of words is the same in two places. Anyone who has actually fact-checked for a magazine like Discover (where I fact-checked for a few years) can tell you that you need to get familiar with the scientific research to see if the description is a good representation of the science itself.
And one essential part of getting familiar with it is calling scientists who live day and night with that research (especially if those scientists were cited explicitly in the piece being checked). A call to the scientists would have immediately sent up red flags (as I found when I got in touch with them on February 21 to satisfy my own curiosity and clear up some questions of my own).
This is not a criticism of the people Alexander names in his column. Newspapers and magazines are responsible for establishing procedures for fact-checking, which staff members must then follow. What I dont understand is how Alexander can offer us this account of what happened and call it fact-checking at multiple levels.
Even more puzzling is Alexanders account of his own research into the narrow question of the ice.
The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Wills assertion that global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979. I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.
It said that while global sea ice areas are near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, sea ice area in the Northern Hemisphere is almost one million sq. km below the levels of late 1979. Thats roughly the size of Texas and California combined. In my mind, it should have triggered a call for clarification to the center.
But according to Bill Chapman, a climate scientist with the center, there was no call from Will or Post editors before the column appeared. He added that it wasnt until last Tuesday nine days after The Post began receiving demands for a correction that he heard from an editor at the newspaper. It was Brewington who finally e-mailed, offering Chapman the opportunity to write something that might help clear the air.
Readers would have been better served if Post editors, and the new ombudsman, had more quickly addressed the claims of falsehoods.
I know that I may be sounding a bit Talmudic by spending so many blog posts on this one bit of information, but examining how these Post editors have dealt with it has proven to be very revealing. They never bothered to check with scientists about the validity of a statement in a column, and after thousands of people have complained, they recognize that there was something so amiss that should have called the scientists. But they still cant manage to make a decision about whether the statement requires a correction.
Whats more, they continue to ignore the broader, more important problem with Wills discussion of sea ice: the facts that picking out two days from a thirty-year time series is not a meaningful way to look at climate trends, and that climate models do not, in fact, lead you to expect a decrease in global ice cover. And they have not even taken any notice of all the other errors in Wills two columns.
Alexanders prescription for the Post is this:
On its news pages, it can recommit to reporting on climate change that is authoritative and deep. On the editorial pages, it can present a mix of respected and informed viewpoints. And online, it can encourage dialogue that is robust, even if it becomes bellicose.
I dont see why the news reporters at the Post have to recommit to anything. Theyve been doing their job. What really has to happen is for people who claim to be fact-checking to really do some fact-checking. Its that simple.
Update, Sunday 3/1: In my initial version of this post, I sometimes referred to Andrew Alexander as Anderson by mistake. When I first noticed this mistake, I thought I only did it once and fixed that error. But commenters have kindly pointed out I had left several Andersons behind. Ive now fixed them all. Apologies for the confusion.
Update later Sunday: Via Andy Revkin, I came across what is essentially an independent fact-check. Its from Walt Meier of NSIDC, responding to a question about Wills column
Basically, Mr. Will made three mistakes:
1. He was factually incorrect on the date that he reported his daily global ice number. However, he was merely out-of-date with his facts (it was true on Jan 1, but wasnt 6 weeks later). This is somewhat nit-picky, though it illuminates how fast things can change in a relatively short period of time, meaning that one should be very cautious about drawing any conclusions about climate from an isolated event.
2. Related to that, it is easy to cherry-pick one date here and one date there to compare to support most any view. The important thing is to look at things in the context of long-term changes. That is what NSIDC always tries to convey by comparing to long-term averages.
3. Global sea ice simply has no meaning in terms of climate change. The Arctic and Antarctic are unique and separated environments that respond differently. It would be like taking a drought in Georgia and torrential rain in Maine, adding those up and claiming that rainfall is normal in the eastern U.S.
Update, 4/7/09: Alexanders use of Arctic Climate Research Center is incorrect.
February 28th, 2009 3:09 PM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, Meta, The George Will On Ice Affair | 29 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters
[Correction appended]
I guess I dont understand editorial pages. The laws of physics must be different there.
Chapter 1: A Correction
On February 15, George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post, in which he scoffed at dire warnings about the effects of global warming. He claimed that environmental pessimists are always warning about catastrophes that never come. And he offered a series of claims about the climate that added up to a larger claim about the lack of evidence of global warming. For example:
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
These are statements about factsboth the grainy little facts of data, and the larger facts they add up to about how the world works. Are these facts correct?
As I wrote on Monday, that question would have been answered if Will was writing for a science magazine like Discover (or the New Yorker, or many others). A good fact-checker would burrow into the column and demand confirmation of everything in theretypically by reading over all the relevant material and calling up the sources.
Ive long wondered if opinion pieces are fact-checked at all, especially ones that deal with science. Over the years Ive read some real howlers. And so it was very striking to read, via Talking Points memo, that the Arctic Climate Research Center, the very place Will invoked as his source of information, posted this statement on their web site:
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
I later contacted Bill Chapman, who runs the center, to ask about the statement. He explained that he and his colleagues got somewhere between 80 and 100 from people coming to the centers web site to see for themselves how the ice was the same, and finding that there was a lot less ice than George Will had said. Of course, they probably assumed that by now, Will had mean now, as opposed to two months ago. Silly readers.
Chapter 2: A Multi-Layered Editorial Process
The ice was not the only subject of errors in Wills piece. Brad Johnson of Wonk Room, among others, has come up with a list of other itemsa lot for a column just a few hundred words long. But that sharp reply from the Arctic Climate Research Center made the ice the focus of many complaints that came to the Washington Post.
The ombudsman at the Post gave a response on Tuesday. He had asked around and had been informed that
the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Wills 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.
How had this information about the ice slipped through the dense fact-checking mesh? The ombudsman did not cite a call to anyone at the research center. As I later discovered, nobodynot Will, not his employees, not the two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, not the op-ed page editor, not the two copy editorsactually got in touch with the scientists at the center. Instead, they relied on a statement that had been posted on the centers web site in January.
Chapter 3: Global Warming, Global Ice
That January statement has a backstory of its own.
On January 1, a blog ran a post that claimed that global ice cover at the end of 2008 was the same as at the end of December 31, 1979. The implication being, Hey, whats all this global warming people are screaming about? Theres just as much ice as ever.
In the research centers January statement, the scientists wrote that Observed global sea ice area, dened here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979.
Soon the level of grain-sized facts, Will could have said, with accuracy, that on one day in December 2008, the global ice area was near or slightly lower than it was on that day in December 1979. He did not. I leave readers to ponder why he didnt.
But as you reflect, consider how this rewrite would have sounded: According to the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice is 1.34 million sq. km less now in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
It doesnt quite have the same ring as the original.
Of course, the big difference between February 2009 and February 1979 does not, on its own, mean that the worlds ice is on a fast track to oblivion, no more than picking a single day in December means there has been no change. Climate change happens over years and over decades, with noisy jumps at smaller scales. And to understand how climate change is affecting the ice, climate scientists actually consider what the latest climate models predict about how that ice will change.
In his column, Will claims that many experts were warning in 2008 that the drop in global ice areas was evidence of man-made warming. He doesnt tell us who those experts are. And, in fact, the research center scientists wrote in their January statement that global ice area may not be relevant as an indication of climate change.
Why? Because almost climate change models project shrinking Arctic ice, but not necessarily Antarctic ice. In fact, some recent models show extra evaporation due to warming leading to snow falling on the sea ice around Antarctica.
And if you look at the ice at each pole, the ice in the Arctic has been on a shrinking trend. The ice around the Antarctic has had a reverse trend as is actually covering a bigger area this year than in 1979. This is consistent with the climate models.
All of this was in that January statement. Its one page long. If the Washington Posts batallion of fact-checkers actually used this to approve Wills statement about the area of ice, they had to have seen this additional information. But they did not bother to raise an objection.
Chapter 4: George Will Should Read This Blog
All the attention Will has been gettingor at least an article that discusses his column in the New York Timesseems to have gotten under his skin. In his column today for the Washington Post, he has returned to global warming, and to his own previous column on the subject.
The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged, he claimed. The challenge is mistaken.
The challenge hes referring to is about the ice. Will does not mention the many other challenges that have been laid out. But lets leave them aside. Life is short. What does Will have to say now about the ice?
He now says his previous column was citing data from the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog.
Citing data as interpreted by a blogThats some fine reporting. Neither George Will nor his employees did any more research than look at a blog. Now, blogs can be wonderful, but would it have been really so hard for Will and Co. to drop a note to the scientists themselves to do their own research? Pick up the phone? Apparently not.
Will then uses that same January statement from the scientists in response to that blog post as evidence that he was right.
But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying we do not know where George Will is getting his information. The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the centers Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf) that this column subsequently reported accurately.
See anything missing here? How about the fact that by the time Will published his column, there was a lot less ice than there was 30 years ago? How about the point made in that same statement Will prizes so greatly that global ice is a red herring?
But Will cant leave it at that.
The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:
On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California.
Will ends his column by complaining that the New York Times isnt reporting on that story. But Will hasnt told the story accurately.
First of all, the trouble with the satellite has not affected the information coming from the Arctic Climate Research Center. As I wrote earlier this week, the scientists there use their own methods to calculate sea ice area that are different from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. And by cross-checking with other satellite measurements, they found that their estimates were still good.
Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center scientists began to look at the readings from another sensor on the same satellite. They recalculated the ice area for the past few months. And on February 26, they were back in business, publishing their corrected measurements, which include the period when they had been underestimating the ice.
And in their news update on all this, the National Snow and Ice Data Center scientists had this to say:
The temporary error in the near-real-time data does not change the conclusion that Arctic sea ice extent has been declining for the past three decades.
In trying to justify an old error, Will cant help making new ones. But at this point, Im not expecting any corrections.
Chapter 5: Post-Modern Fact-Checking
What has kept me hooked on this saga is not George Wills errors. Errors are as common as grass. Some are made out of ignorance, some carefully constructed to give a misleading impression. What has kept me agog is the way the editors at the Washington Post have actually given their stamp of approval on Wills columns, even claiming to have fact-checked them and seeing no need for a single correction.
The climax to this part of the story came yesterday, when the Columbia Journalism Review was finally able to get Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor at the Post, to speak directly about the ice affair:
It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists rejectso, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But dont make it by suggesting that George Will shouldnt be allowed to make the contrary pointI think its kind of healthy, given how, in so many areasnot just climatology, but medicine, and everything elsethere is a tendency on the part of the lay public at times to ascribe certainty to things which are uncertain.
Ive heard that line beforethe one about how people can look at the same scientific data and make different inferences.
Ive heard it from creationists. They look at the Grand Canyon, at all the data amassed by geologists over the years, and they end up with an inference very different from what youll hear from those geologists.
Would Hiatt be pleased to have them writing opinion pieces, too? There is indeed some debate in the scientific community about exactly how old the Grand Canyon iswith some arguing its 55 million years old and others arguing for 15 million. Would Hiatt consider it healthy to publish a piece from someone who thinks the Grand Canyon is just a few thousand years old, with just a perfunctory inspection of the information in it?
At this point, its hard for me to see how the answer could be no.
[Correction, 4/7/09: Bill Chapman is a member of the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois. Despite George Wills claims in his column, there is no such thing as the Arctic Climate Research Center at the University of Illinois. I regret not noticing this error sooner. Details here.]
February 27th, 2009 3:49 AM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, Meta, The George Will On Ice Affair | 67 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
George Will: Locked In Ice!
Last week I dedicated a few posts (1, 2, 3, 4) to a column by George Will on global warming as an example of why fact-checking is important. The whole thing flared up a lot more than I had expected, with the Washington Post editorial page folks actually claiming they had fact checked Will through a multi-layered fact-checking process. (Unfortunately, no one bothered to pick up a phone to call a research center cited in the piece.) Etc., etc.
Ive been too busy with many deadlines on other projects to keep close track of this any longer, but I just had to pass on this bit of news from Talking Points Memo: George Will is back, baby!
We thought we were done with the topic of George Will and climate change. But now weve gotten an advanced look at Wills latest column, set to run tomorrow in the Washington Post and in syndication. And it amounts to a stubborn defense of the amazing global warming denialist column he published earlier this month, that was ripped apart by just about everyone and their mother including us.
Will stands by the substance of the February 15 column, maintaining, in the case of the key factual dispute, that he had accurately reported the findings of a respected climate research center on the question of sea-ice levels. Though the center has since put out a statement disavowing Wills use of its data, Will claims that last month it posted confirmation of that very data on its web site and, getting all bloggy, includes a link.
Well leave it to others to parse the finer points of this defense though its immediately noticeable that Will doesnt mention that the centers confirmation of its findings notes that the data concerns global sea ice levels, rather than northern hemispheric levels. Global levels, it says, may not be the most relevant indicator.
But after Will and Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt declined to answer TPMmuckrakers questions about the column leaving that task to the papers ombudsman, who cited the papers multi-layer editing process its certainly intriguing that Will has chosen to wade back into the muck.
Ill have to wait to see the column itself to comment on it, but whats really intriguing to me is that the multi-layer editing process over at the Post has let Will sail through the fact-checking process yet again. I just wonder if they bothered to call anyone this time.
February 26th, 2009 5:27 PM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, Meta, The George Will On Ice Affair | 5 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
A Wrinkle In Ice (or Not)
[Correction appended]
Theres been a wrinkle in the global warming fact-checking saga Ive been following this week.
Just to recapGeorge Will wrote a column claiming that global warmings a lot of hype. He made a number of misleading statements, including one that was rejected by the very scientists he claimed as his source.
Will stated, According to the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
A statement was then posted on the research centers web site of the Polar Research Group:
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
A number of bloggers laid out the problems with the column and sought a response from the Washington Post. The Post announced that they had fact-checked Wills column, and that it was just fine. I explained why that looks like some mighty poor fact-checking.
Last night in the comment thread, Doug drew my attention to an article on the ice record maintained by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado (a different research center). On February 18 (three days after Wills column appeared), the NSIDC announced that there was a glitch in the satellite sensors measuring ice in the Arctic, and so their record was gradually drifting off. The drift started in January, and gradually increased until they caught it in mid-February. The scientists now say that the latest estimates were off by 500,000 kilometers. Theyre working now to compensate for the drift and correct the measurements. Heres a graph from their web site.
The blue line marks the ice measurements taken by SSMI, the satellite NSIDC uses for the 30-year record of ice extent. The dashed red line is data from AMSR-E, a new satellite that has also been measuring the ice and has remained accurate. The reason the scientists dont switch over to the new AMSR-E satellite is that jumping from one data set to another can create the illusion of change that isnt really there. But AMSR-E is still useful to the researchers, because they can compare its measurements to the ones they get using SSMI satellite to see if everythings okay.
Some commenters wondered whether this development would cause me to take back my criticism. Lets just set aside the fact that this news came out after Will had published his column, and thus could not have any real bearing on whether he or the Post bothered to contact the scientists that they cited as their source.
After looking at some of the web sites involved, I thought I ought to get in touch with the scientists who run the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Centerthe center at the Polar Research Groupthe scientists on whom Will depended for his claim, and which rejected that claim.
I got a prompt response from Bill Chapman, a University of Illinois climate scientist:
Its refreshing to have someone ask about the data before they write about it.
Just pause to consider that. After all this kerfuffuleinvolving a nationally syndicated columnist, the assistants to that columnist, the editors at the columnists syndication service, the editors at the Washington Post editorial page, and the Posts ombudsmanChapman was refreshed that someone bothered to contact him about his research before writing about it. What a concept. For me, this whole affair has been about the value of fact-checking science, and Chapmans reply shows just how little checking was carried out by the Post and company.
In his reply to me, Chapman explained that the two research centers, NSIDC and ACRC, both use the SSMI satellite readings, but they have different methods for building their time series. Chapman and his colleagues at ACRC use a composite of three sequential days for their ice cover readings. If a swath of data is missing on one particular day, they can go back to the previous days concentrations. If there are still missing regions, they go one more day back.
Missing regions or swaths of data have always occurred from time to time in the SSMI record, which is why we set it up this way, Champan explained.
Despite the recent trouble with the SSMI satellite, Chapman said the three-day-composites have still been meaningful. As one check, we have been comparing our time series with those from the independent data source AMSR-E. They are just about identical so we are comfortable that our time series remain solid. Our time series and therefore the statement are unaffected by the recent satellite problems. If the sensor degrades a lot more, our numbers will be affected, but to date, they are not.
I then asked what he thought about the Washington Posts support of Wills claim about ice. (To recap again, their support was decidedly roundabout. A January 1 post on a blog called Daily Tech claimed that global ice cover in late 2008 were unchanged from 1979. In response to that blog post, the Center posted a pdf on their web site explaining that observed global sea ice area, dened here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979. But then the scientists also explained that climate models predict a decline in Arctic ice, but are less certain about Antarctica, with some even suggesting an increasemaking measurements of global sea ice not terribly relevant to the question of climate change. The Post ignored that part.)
Heres Chapmans reply:
Since their statements were based on the end of the previous year, and more importantly the end of 1979, the statement global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979 just didnt make sense any more. We have received 80-100 emails from confused people who had read Georges column and looked up the graphs on the Cryosphere Today [one of the centers web pages] and said they came to a different conclusion, or, could we point them to the report that said that Feb 1979 and Feb 2009 sea ice area was nearly the same. We had to post the current and corresponding 1979 values to avoid the inconsistency that readers were noting. After doing some googling, it appears that Daily Tech article got repeated on a lot of blogs, so its not surprising George Will came across it at some point. Still it was sloppy for them to not double check with the original source and it really points out the danger of making any conclusions on climate change based on any two days in history. I really wish they would have contacted us at some point to avoid this.
Our goal is to present the data in as concise and useful format as possible for interested users. Whether the Washington Post decides to publish a correction is up to them.
Indeed.
Finally, just to illustrate what Chapmans talking about when he refers to the danger of picking out just two days in history, I thought Id also include two graphs from Cryosphere Today. The top one shows the extent of Arctic
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