John McQuaid

There isn’t much to be gained by pointing out the contradictions of commentators and politicians, but sometimes they are revealing. George Will takes another bite out of the “global warming: not happening” apple today. Or does he?

Defending his previous column, Will reiterates the point that that media (including the New York Times) reported in the 1970s that we were entering an age of global cooling; he also argues his assertions regarding data on global sea ice were correct. (Andy Revkin, whom Will attacks in the piece, quotes a number of scientists knocking those arguments down.)

But read carefully, and you’ll observe that he subtly backs off the original column’s theme that climate science consists mainly of murky, contradictory findings that are selectively hyped by doomsayers:

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.

Note the last five words: Will is attacking environmentalists and the media, not the scientific community. He says nothing about the scientific consensus on the issue. But where does he stand on that? No idea. It’s not clear how you can make a serious argument against global warming hype while ignoring the underlying issue of whether climate change is happening. If the risks are overhyped, we’re being misled. But if it is happening, shouldn’t we be alarmed? Or, if it’s all just too complex to understand or predict, as Will also implies, what’s the point of studying the climate at all?

Instead, Will wants to question global warming by insinuation and suggestion, without denying it outright. In fact, the first column contains no explicit statement that climate change is hokum, but strongly implies the point by citing cases of dire environmental predictions that proved false. Will gives the skeptics what they want, but also retains plausible deniability when he’s criticized for attacking the science. Clever.

One last observation on George Will, the Washington Post and climate change. Beyond the scientific questions involved (is the aggregate area of polar ice decreasing due to climate change, what are the implications of that, etc.) the Will piece raises a broader issue: how much credence should media outlets give to columnists or others who deny anthropogenic climate change is occurring?

Obviously, the people who run the Post editorial pages should not lend their platform to discredited arguments (hold the snark, please). But this is a tougher question than it seems on the surface. Has man-made climate change now entered the realm of universal scientific acceptance, like evolution, quantum mechanics, or the notion that the earth orbits the sun and not vice-versa? Almost, but not exactly. There is an overwhelming consensus among scientists who have studied the issue. But that’s not the same as universal acceptance.

Also, since climate science involves computer modeling of very complex systems, it’s inexact. “Climate change” and “global warming” are themselves vague terms. The future – not just temperatures but sea levels, impacts on agriculture, changes in local living conditions and political stability – is very hard to predict. The policy options are numerous. This pocked terrain means there’s plenty of room for debate on the nature and impacts of climate change and the science used to assess those things. Some think the problem is overhyped by Al Gore and others, or that government-centric policy fixes such as carbon trading won’t work. Those arguments should be aired and grappled with.

But frankly, there isn’t much serious scientific debate on the existence of anthropogenic climate change itself. Given the preponderance of scientific opinion on the topic, media outlets should be very skeptical of pieces that deny it. Almost always, they’re based more attitude than science. This doesn’t mean you can’t argue that climate models are flawed — they are — but if you run with that, make sure it’s a serious, rigorous argument.

What you shouldn’t do, though, is what Will did: cherry-pick headlines that appear to fit an unsupported thesis and pretend you are making a serious argument. This has the effect of discrediting your own position, that of the media you’re working in, and, indirectly, the science you cite.

All of this underlines how important it is to communicate the science clearly, to distinguish the specious arguments from legitimate ones – or else the whole debate breaks down. (And we’ll never figure out how to address this issue as a society.) I’m sure George Will doesn’t have editors question his opinions very often. But some things are not just a matter of opinion, and his editors have an obligation to get this stuff right. It’s journalism 101. Which is why the Post’s apparent decision to ignore its own failings here is so baffling.

Update: TPM’s Zachary Roth reports that Will’s next column comes out swinging against his detractors. Which will probably have the effect of ginning up more faux-controversy over the substance here, which is really not in dispute. That’s what a columnist gets paid for, I suppose, but something is seriously amiss here.

Bobby Jindal has achieved the politically impossible: he has gotten David Brooks and Paul Krugman to agree. What they agree on is that Bobby Jindal gave a really, really crappy speech last night. And it was quite bad. Jindal’s delivery, especially in the opening minutes, is very awkward. He’s obviously nervous, and comes off like he’s talking to a bunch of first graders.

The content of Jindal’s speech is also pretty bad. It’s 100 percent, Reagan-era GOP boilerplate. Its use of straw men and rhetorical misdirection is over-the-top, to the point of being puzzling. (Isn’t government coordination needed in a natural disaster and post-disaster rebuilding? Don’t we need to monitor volcanoes in case they, you know, erupt?) And it offers nothing in the way of creative solutions for the terrible fix the country is in, no realistic, GOP-branded alternatives to the Obama agenda.

That said, though, I don’t think the speech was as horrendous or career-destroying as some seem to think. Jindal really didn’t have any other choice than to be an utterly conventional Republican, which today means your brain is effectively in a state of deep hibernation, with only reflexive responses enabled. Some, myself included, hoped that Jindal, the genius policy wonk extraordinaire, might actually have something interesting to say. But look at it from his perspective. He is a rising star whom few people have seen, suddenly given a national spotlight. The last thing he’s going to do is wander off the Republican reservation, no matter how isolated and remote that reservation may be at the moment. No, he’s going to stick with the Reagan agenda and try to make it sound new. That way he establishes his own credibility with – for him – the most important audience, the GOP base. And he basically did that.

That said, you have to wonder: who or what is going to bring the Republican Party out of its current coma? Jindal better start thinking more creatively, or he’ll be an old man by then.

A couple of notes on President Obama’s not-the State of the Union address last night. First, the president took pains to explain the banking crisis and the rationale behind impending (but still-undefined) moves to rescue the banking system. It was a very concise, concrete explanation of the nature of credit: banks may have done a lot of stupid, venal, and impossibly complex things that seem far from the everyday reality of most people; but we all still depend on them:

The concern is that if we do not re-start lending in this country, our recovery will be choked off before it even begins.

You see, the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy. The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education; how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.

But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. With so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or to each other. When there is no lending, families can’t afford to buy homes or cars. So businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more, and credit dries up even further.

This is an interesting rhetorical device because it doesn’t hit the usual hot buttons of presidential speeches: It doesn’t call on emotion – in fact, it’s an explicit appeal to set emotion aside. There’s no applause line. Nor does it lecture or condescend (Bush sometimes seemed to be talking down to audiences; Bobby Jindal approached that line last night too.). It’s an appeal to rationalism, to pragmatism. The explanation projects a certain respect for the audience, assuming listeners will have the patience to listen and understand (and also note the respect). Politically, this is both sensible and shrewd. And with the GOP off in its own reality, Obama pretty much has the the political market on pragmatism cornered right now.

The second thing: In my previous post I noted that Obama’s current mad dash to address a series of crises is driven primarily by events, not necessarily by some vision of himself as FDR or LBJ. I still think events rule, but the speech made it clear that FDR or LBJ – or Lincoln – is exactly what he’s shooting for. (Though the last line is significant: Obama is saying, in a typically post-Reagan/post-Clinton formulation, that government not an end in itself but a catalyst for the huge transformations underway in the country.)

History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas. In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world.

In each case, government didn’t supplant private enterprise; it catalyzed private enterprise. It created the conditions for thousands of entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and to thrive.

David Brooks is, of course, absolutely right that the Obama administration has bitten off way, way more than it can possibly chew:

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy.

Brooks is also right that the results of these efforts, once they’re tallied up a few years or decades from now, may not live up to their advance billing. How could they? But his critique is a bit of a pose.

If, over the past decade, American conservatives had actually operated from the cautious, modest principles that Brooks extolls, America would be in much better shape than it is today. Instead, they treated governing as a kind of grand ideological experiment. We got laissez faire approaches to the environment and the economy. We got Iraq and Bush’s second inaugural address promising to spread liberty throughout the world. All of these policies privileged, to varying degrees, either abstract point-scoring or political constituency-rewarding over the realities they purported to address.

Obama, by contrast, is (so far, anyway) responding to a genuine set of emergencies by reconfiguring the instruments of government. It’s not shocking that he’s using liberal principles to do this – but it’s not like he’s embarking on an unhinged scheme, out of the blue, to create a Really Great Society. That wouldn’t work anyway – it would fail just as the Bush-Rove project to conjure up a national consensus around narrow and arbitrary conservative principles, disengaged from actual problems, failed. If Obama fails, the failure won’t be due to over-interpreting a political mandate. It will be because the things he tries don’t work. At which point, one hopes, he’ll try something else.

The dust-up over George Will’s global warming denial column has morphed into a classic example of newspaper institutionalist failure. In its own small way, it shows why – on top of the Internet-driven collapse of media business models – many people are losing confidence in newspapers and other traditional media outlets.

After Will’s column calling global warming a media-driven fad, the Washington Post has declined to correct its errors and misrepresentations. The new ombudsman, Andy Alexander, sent out a note to those who wrote in complaining about the column, saying that the piece had undergone a thorough editing/fact checking process and that Will had committed no errors.

Hilzoy shows the superficiality and ultimate spuriousness of Alexander’s claim. Will’s principal disputed factoid has been contested by the source, the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center. Alexander resorts to a semantic defense, saying that Will’s claim – that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979″ can be reconciled with the ACRC’s statement that polar ice levels are “near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979.” Obviously, “equal” is not the same as “near or slightly lower than,” especially when we’re dealing with scientific evidence. So the semantic defense itself is weak.

But even if you call that one for Will, the ACRC takes pains to note what’s really going on: the measured declines in northern ice are partially made up for by increases in southern ice, a phenomenon that is itself linked to climate change. In other words, Will’s statement, which stretches the data, also misrepresents the underlying science, which tells a more complex story that doesn’t fit his thesis.

The Post editorial page and ombudsman get a lot of interest group-driven complaints, and the liberal blogosphere has been all over this one. But this isn’t just another firestorm on “the left” that can be safely dismissed as such. The Post, its editorial and op-ed pages included, has an obligation to present science correctly and not to distort it for ideological purposes. To dismiss these serious concerns with a semantic fig-leaf is irresponsible.

There’s a forest-for-the-trees absurdity here: The Washington Post has, apparently to avoid conceding error to critics it dislikes, closed ranks behind a piece denying what is a nearly universally-accepted scientific fact — one that is a very grave threat to humanity — and all-but explicitly backed the distortion of science. It’s crazy. Andy Alexander is new on the job. If he’s smart, he’ll take a second look at this one.

It’s been a few days since George Will’s column calling global warming a passing fad, like the short-lived 1970s-era media hype over global cooling. This has been extensively debunked elsewhere, including by one of Will’s sources, so I won’t revisit here. The Washington Post has yet to issue a correction on Will’s factual errors, but if this follows the pattern of past columnist snafus, one will likely be appended to a coming Will column. (As Dan Kennedy put it on Twitter, “Maybe he’ll offer a mea culpa. In a surly manner, insisting that his overall point was correct.”)

What’s hard to understand is the persistence of global warming denialism on the right, even among elite conservative opinion-makers such as Will who have both a large readership and a claim to intellectual integrity. Does Will really believe the scientific community has manufactured climate change out of its wish for more federal grants and environmental regulations? Or that climate science has made no advances since the 1970s? Or that a foolish 1980 bet by Paul Ehrlich (an entomologist by training) that overpopulation would quickly deplete resources has anything to do with global warming?

It’s true that environmentalists have sometimes raised dire scenarios that didn’t come to pass. And that Al Gore can be annoying. And that all kinds of new taxes and regulations that conservatives will object to may be proposed to combat climate change. But none of these are good reasons for denying a scientific reality, one that is a very great danger to the world, living standards, and, er, conservative values. If conservatives such as Will were serious, they would engage the serious issues raised by global warming and try to devise solutions they and their followers might find more palatable.

A mountaintop removal project in West Virginia

A little late noting this, but last week a panel of appeals court judges shut down attempts to beef up the regulation of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The legal issues here are somewhat arcane, but they turn on whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is adequately interpreting the provisions of the Clean Water Act when it grants permits to mining companies that fill in intermittent streams on mountaintops. Judge Robert Chambers issued a strong ruling rebuking the Corps in 2007, saying what is pretty obvious to anyone who visits mountaintop sites: the environmental damage is extensive and the law is not being enforced. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Chambers’ ruling – not on the merits, but on the grounds that Chambers overstepped his own authority and that the Corps deserves deference in interpreting its own regulations.

This has happened before. It will probably happen again. And it underlines the political and cultural isolation of West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia. Around the U.S., a consensus regional environmentalism has evolved over the past couple of decades in which competing stakeholders – businesses and environmental groups – can hash things out with federal and state officials and arrive at workable solutions. The Bush administration usually did not take part in these efforts and sometimes shut them down. But that didn’t halt them completely.

In Appalachia, however, potential compromises to better protect mountain ecosystems are off the table. The coal industry is politically untouchable and has no incentive to deal. Environmental and community groups have little clout with legislators, so their only recourse is the courts. The 4th Circuit, however, is among the nation’s most conservative and has been unsympathetic to the arguments of those arguing for stronger oversight.

Is there a way to shake up this unfortunate status quo? As the debate on global warming intensifies, and coal inevitably gets more scrutiny, things may start to change.

I agree with Yglesias that the Republican strategy of the moment, such as it is, is very much a short-term, win-the-news cycle approach: oppose Obama, make a lot of noise, and hope something sticks with the public and sparks a comeback. In fact, it’s very much like the John McCain campaign, which did a great job, for a while anyway, at commanding the gaze of the media with outrageous statements and stunts, but lacked a coherent policy argument for his candidacy.

So: the GOP “won” yesterday with Judd Gregg’s pulling the plug on his own nomination. It sort of “wins” when Republican members of Congress rebuff Obama’s overtures and give him no votes on key bills, which spark the usual raft of stories about how Obama has failed in his quest for Republican votes. As it did during the campaign, the media effectively cooperate in this effort, because the GOP gives good soundbites and provides the conflict that plays well on the cable shows and feeds a million blog posts.

As Eve Fairbanks wrote earlier this week:

They’re completely obsessed with winning the media “cycle” and getting the sexiest, most provocative quotes on TV, an attitude that yields the kind of overblown dreck RNC chair Michael Steele is now spouting. This obsession was born, I think, during last summer’s drilling fight with Nancy Pelosi in the House, which Republicans cite constantly as the moment that will someday be recognized as the beginning of their rebirth, their A.D. 0: They mounted a lot of antics, their brazenly hyperbolic rhetoric ended up all over the news, and a frightened Pelosi backed down. When I talked to a number of conservatives for a story on the future of the congressional GOP, many — Marsha Blackburn, Louie Gohmert, Republican Study Committee chair Tom Price — explained to me that the energy fight had proven this to them: The GOP lost power due to a failure to communicate its ideas. “Communication” was the it word within the minority. “We need to improve the ways we communicate,” Price told me, reminiscing about the drilling battle: “It [the energy fight] was spontaneous, it was different, it captured the public’s attention. We made clear we were passionate.”

It sounds old fashioned, but the best way to win enduring political popularity – which after all is what parties most prize – is to propose real solutions to the problems we face and get them passed. That doesn’t mean caving into the other side. But it does mean engaging with it and addressing the issues. Obviously, that’s very difficult for what remains of Republican Party, which is not exactly brimming with new ideas, and whose old ideas don’t exactly harmonize with the president’s. But what we’re hearing out of the GOP this week – Judd Gregg is a folk hero! – isn’t the kind of thing that the public responds to. The public doesn’t even know who the frack Judd Gregg is.

Unfortunately, world of Washington and the political media also buy into this kind of artificial drama – after all, it’s their artificial drama too. But Obama never did during the campaign, and it seemed to work pretty well for him.

The science of global warming is improving all the time, but it still isn’t exact. How could it be? The atmosphere is an exceedingly complex system. Add in the oceans, ecosystems and human society, and predicting the course of likely outcomes with any precision becomes close to impossible. Still, we know what’s going on in general terms. The problem is, that usually isn’t good enough for the news media, which likes everything wrapped up in a neat package, preferably with a light and a siren on top.

That’s the basic argument that Vicky Pope, a top British climate scientist, makes in the Guardian:

News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear without the wider audience switching off.

Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point and will disappear very quickly. The truth is that there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, the record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer sea ice increasing again over the next few years. This diverts attention from the real, longer-term issues. For example, recent results from the Met Office do show that there is a detectable human impact in the long-term decline in sea ice over the past 30 years, and all the evidence points to a complete loss of summer sea ice much later this century.

But such misimpressions shape media coverage, political debates and policy, Pope goes on to say, and that means scientists spend an awful lot of time and energy correcting them. This is, of course, a chronic problem in science journalism, a fault line in the public’s shaky understanding of science. But I’m not sure, Fred Barnes notwithstanding, how big a problem it is on global warming. To put things in perspective: over the past few years, thanks in part to Al Gore, the media has more or less adopted the consensus view that manmade global warming is real, and dangerous, and demands action. Sometimes the alarms get loud, and get out of kilter with the scientific realities. But that’s far better than the “two sides disagree” approach we saw so often, in which the opinions of relatively small numbers of global warming skeptics were given weight equal to vastly larger numbers of those taking the threat seriously. That scientists now have to correct journalists for being too alarmist isn’t great, but it’s an obvious improvement. It’s also part of the job of science communication. Journalists should get a better grasp of the facts. But scientists should accept that the job of correcting errors or conveying nuances is ongoing, and ultimately helps public understanding.