Tell the Washington Post to Stop Lying about Climate Change

Last week, The Washington Post published a column by conservative commentator George Will that brought no small amount of well-deserved derision and criticism to the venerable old newspaper. The column, entitled ‘Dark Green Doomsayers’, repeated a number of knee-slappers about how climate change is supposedly a big farce and denigrated the work of two climate scientists.

Afterwards, as the blogosphere challenged the so-called ‘facts’ put forward by Will in the column, The Washington Post not only gave themselves and Will self-congratulatory pats on the back for engaging in ‘conversation’ about climate but strongly defended Will’s statements.

George Monbiot of The Guardian fact-checked Will’s claims (read the rebuttals in their entirety at The Guardian):

Claim one:

“In the 1970s, a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” … “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age”

Fact:

A recent paper (pdf) in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society shows that”

… despite active efforts to answer these questions, the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent … A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth’s basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.

Interestingly, this paper cites two of George Will’s earlier columns as perpetuating the myth. He seems to have ignored the journal’s attempt to put him right. But what does the American Meteorological Society know?

So, should we allow newspapers to get away with printing outright lies? Terrapass is asking us all to put a stop to it by writing a letter to The Washington Post asking them to stop spreading false claims about climate change. Here’s an excerpt of the one they wrote as an example:

In response to the controversy over George Will’s repetition of long-debunked falsehoods about global warming, the Washington Post ombudsman writes: “Thoughtful discourse is noticeably absent in the current dispute. But that’s where The Post could have helped, and can in the future.”

Sadly, I am forced to conclude otherwise. The Post can’t foster thoughtful discourse when it reprints known falsehoods about basic scientific research. By now, you are no doubt well aware of the substantial errors of fact and inference contained in Will’s column. That these falsehoods made it through the Post’s “multi-layer editing process” raises fundamental concerns about that process, not about the state of climate change discourse.

Write your own letter demanding that The Washington Post take actual facts into account when writing about climate change and send it though this contact form at The Washington Post website.  When lies are presented as fact, the public is confused into believing them – and we can’t let that happen. We simply don’t have enough time to reverse the damage.

Link [Terrapass] + [The Washington Post] + [The Guardian]

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