Perhaps George Will's mother told him there would be days like these.
On Sunday, during his regular turn on ABC News' This Week, the conservative commentator tried to tell a joke about global warming, an issue that has earned him considerable disdain and ridicule over the past couple of months. "I think it's a climate-change thing," he said, apparently referring to the Obama administration's signals that it may back away from cap-and-trade legislation. Or maybe it was the budget in general. It was hard to tell.
He plunged ahead.
"That is," he continued mirthlessly, "we're going to keep the planet from warming by having all these dollars going back and forth. It will block the sunlight. Every dollar that comes in, I gather they're going to somehow shuffle out to people and make good the increased energy prices, right? You can't stop laughing."
Except that he didn't laugh. Nor did anyone else.
When last we left Will, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, he had written two dismissive commentaries about global warming that he based on his own demonstrably false reading of the scientific evidence. For that he earned a full-throated defence from the Post's editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, and a polite but firm knuckle-rap from the Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander.
Since then, things have gotten worse for Will, as he has faced a virtual insurrection from his reality-based colleagues at the Post.
Will's humiliation began with his ill-advised decision to hazard yet a third column on global warming. On April 2, he wrote: "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."
Trouble is, the scientific case for human-caused global warming, already compelling, only grows stronger with each new study. And journalists at the Post have had enough of Will's disingenuously selective reading of the evidence.
On April 7, the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan reported that the Arctic ice cap was melting even more rapidly than scientists had predicted. They added this for good measure: "The new evidence ... contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979."
And in case anyone missed the message, Washington Post science editor Nils Bruzelius told blogger David Roberts that the swipe at Will was his idea.
Also on April 7, Post weather blogger Andrew Freedman devoted an entire dispatch to Will's columns, calling them "a case study in how one can cherry pick scientific data to fit their own agenda." And he took on Will's 1998 fixation, writing that – as scientists have observed repeatedly – it was an anomalously warm year because of "an unusually strong El Niño event."
Finally, and perhaps most ominously for Will, the Post this past Saturday ran an editorial – on the page overseen by his patron, Hiatt – that began: "Make no mistake, Arctic Sea ice is melting."
No, Will was not called out by name, and no, it's not unusual for a newspaper's editorials to take positions different from those of its op-ed columnists. But it's one thing for an editorial to argue that the $787m stimulus bill is a good thing and a columnist to counter that it's bad. It's quite another for an editorial to disagree with a star columnist on a matter of provable fact.
George Will has a right to his opinion. But his malign and deliberate (at this point, how can we think it otherwise?) mischaracterization of global-warming science is on a par with claiming that the earth is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. At root, Will is not expressing opinions — he is stating facts that have repeatedly been proved wrong, and then drawing conclusions on the basis of those falsehoods.
Will's intellectual dishonesty has become an embarrassment. It's time for him to write a fourth column on global warming, on Hiatt's orders if necessary. He may take any position on climate change that he pleases. In so doing, however, he should be made to account for his factual errors. And if he still feels moved to tell us that global warming is nothing to worry about, he should base that view on verifiable scientific evidence.
In his blog post, Freedman wrote that Will's columns "raise some interesting questions about journalism, specifically concerning the editing process." No kidding. It's long past time that we got some answers.