Perennial conservative douche George Will continues to distort reality in his drive to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, despite having been caught making shit up in his last column on the subject.  This time, he trots out the zombie lie that global warming has stopped:

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.

Will, like everyone who makes this argument, is shamelessly cherry picking data.  Let’s take a look at some data and see how well Will’s claim holds up:

The blue lines show 8-year trends in the global land-ocean temperature.  Some 8-year trends show a decrease in average temperature, while others show a drastic increase.  Clearly, any given short-term trend tells us little about long-term changes.  Yet, that is exactly Will and other denialists use regularly when they claim that global warming  has stopped.  They take the short-term trend since 1998, which was anomalously warm, and use it to argue that warming has stopped.  Such an argument is clearly wrongheaded.  And this isn’t a hard concept to grasp, so the question is, then, why does anyone listen to anything George Will has to say?  He’s either incredibly dim, which I doubt, or he’s dishonest enough that he’s willing to distort science to fit his ideology.  Either way, I can’t understand why anyone thinks his opinion matters.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Media, Pseudoscience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.