Will O’ The Whip
George Will gets downright Inquisitorial on some NY Times hack reporter.
Let’s watch in HD:
Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done.
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On Wednesday, the Times carried a “news analysis” — a story in the paper’s news section, but one that was not just reporting news — accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.
Reporter Andrew Revkin’s story was headlined: “In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall.” Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing — sometimes a distinction without a difference — concerning today’s climate controversies.
Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts — how does he know this?
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The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.
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, the column said that since September “the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.” According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were “near or slightly lower than” those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.
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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…. 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. The Times (”All the news that’s fit to print”), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
I hope you were able to follow that—follow the link to taste all the delicious sniping.
I’m kind of a science nerd myself (until very recently, I still had the Texas Instruments programmable calculator I bought in the mid-70s)—which is why I’m so pissed at the scientists who have lent their names and reputations to the panic of global warming. Watch any Nova episode, and you’ll see science is no stranger to controversy, dispute, and ego.
The very heart of science is amassing data and concocting a theory to explain them—not the other way around. The Goracle and his disciples are making a mockery of science. Any theory that does not admit as a possibility that it might be wrong is just playground bullying in the school of science.
Satellite error? Impossible. Well, okay, maybe once. Twice?
A rocket carrying a NASA satellite crashed near Antarctica after a failed launch early Tuesday, ending a $280 million mission to track global warming from space.
Well, it would have missed an iceberg “approximately the size of California” anyway.