[Please email Weisberg (at jacob.weisberg@slate.com) who was suckered by Freeman Dyson into writing one of the most uninformed pieces ever to appear in Newsweek.]

Suppose Freeman Dyson had said:

“Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics-retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantage”¦ We fear that ‘fatuous beliefs’ in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society.”

Would he be the darling of the contrarian media crowd — feted with cover stories and credulous coverage (see NYT magazine profiles climate crackpot, Freeman Dyson, and lets him slander James Hansen “” while Revkin gives Dyson’s nuttiness a free pass and below)?  Or would he be vilified, the way William Shockley, the physicist who wrote those words, was — a reporter once called him “Hitlerite.”  Yet Shockley was a “brilliant scientist” like Dyson, and perhaps more so, since, unlike Dyson, a purely theoretical physicist fond of wildly impractical ideas like a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs or Reagan’s Star Wars plan, Shockley was an experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor.

Suppose Dyson had said:

There is no doubt that the Nazis killed some Jews, but the killing was local, not systematic.

I’m guessing that Jacob Weisberg wouldn’t have added a paragraph to his new Newsweek article, “What Else Are We Wrong About?” labeling as myth the statement “The Holocaust was catastrophic.”  Yet Dyson’s blatant global warming denial — “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global” is as false, as scientifically disapprovable, as claims the Holocaust never happened or was wildly exaggerated.  The whole damn planet is getting warmer — that’s why it is called global warming.  It is increasingly hard to find any large region — including the tropics and subtropics — that are not warming [click to enlarge]:

But the conservative disinformation campaign has made global warming denial acceptable to embrace for crackpot contrarians who want media coverage in a way that eugenics and Holocaust denial are not.  Yet such denial, when credulously repeated by a reporter acting as nothing more than a stenographer, poses a far graver risk to humanity since it encourages inaction, encourages us not to take the relatively low-cost steps — one tenth of a penny on the dollar — we must take immediately in order to prevent catastrophe.  And delaying action is exactly what Dyson is all about, as this absurd piece of journalistic malpractice in Newsweek by Weisberg makes clear:

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The Wonk Room has sent the following note to George Will, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, and Washington Post Writers Group editor Alan Shearer:

Mssrs. Will, Hiatt, and Shearer:

I would like to call to your attention a factual error in Mr. Will’s February 15, 2009 column, “Dark Green Doomsayers.” I recognize that there was an extensive factchecking process of the column, but somehow a fabrication slipped through. Mr. Will wrote:

According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

There is no such organization.

The Arctic climate is a research area of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and the informal group of researchers does go by the label of the Polar Research Group.

However, “there is no such center at the University of Illinois,” the UIUC’s Dr. John Walsh has informed me in electronic correspondence. “There is a group of scientists and students working on Arctic climate, but no formal center.”

The existence of such an organization was first fabricated out of whole cloth by DailyTech’s Michael Asher, in a 1/1/2009 blog post entitled “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979“:

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

I myself was guilty of trusting the Washington Post’s multi-layered factchecking process, and have incorrectly referred to the UIUC Polar Research Group as the Arctic Climate Research Center in my own writing about Will’s column. After noting that the phrase first appeared on a notoriously inaccurate blog, I checked the facts with a UIUC scientist. I have since corrected the error in my own work, including my suggested correction for “Dark Green Doomsayers,” which I sent to Mssrs. Hiatt and Shearer via electronic correspondence on Feb. 22, as yet to no reply.

The suggested correction, as amended:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column vaguely characterized a statement by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the threat of catastrophic snowpack decline in California due to global warming. Chu was referring to an end-of-the century scenario, not a near-term threat.

Will’s column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice.

Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” Although the university said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979″ at the start of January, global sea ice levels are now eight percent below their levels in February 1979.

Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record.

Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that imminent global cooling was a threat.

Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of manmade global warming that have since proven to be accurate.

Will’s column misidentified the source of global sea ice data as the “University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center.” The actual source was a working group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Atmospheric Sciences, informally known as the Polar Research Group.

The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

Despite publishing criticism of factual errors and distortions in “Dark Green Doomsayers” by Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, science journalist Chris Mooney, Secretary General of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization Michel Jarraud, Post blogger Andrew Freeman, and Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, the Washington Post has yet to issue a single correction for Will’s column, syndicated in dozens of newspapers nationwide.

Written by Kalen Pruss, intern with the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress and a junior at the University of Michigan majoring in environmental studies and history, and Brad Johnson.

Our pollution-based economy threatens California with tens of billions of dollars in global boiling damages a year, a new report has found. To block plans for a clean energy economy, opponents are lying about the costs of change, but they — and the mainstream media — typically ignore the tremendous costs of inaction. A draft report by the California Climate Action Team (CAT) consolidates dozens of scientific research papers in a groundbreaking attempt to gauge the economic risks of unmitigated climate change. The biennial report argues for aggressive and immediate action for a green recovery, concluding that “any delay” in changing the status quo puts California’s “economic stability” at risk.

The Climate Action Team found that California is even more vulnerable to global warming harms than previously thought. Greenhouse gas emissions are currently outstripping 2006 projections, exacerbating the already significant costs created from climate change. Linda Adams, Secretary for Environmental Protection and Chair of the state’s CAT, concluded that “any delay in fighting global warming” puts her state’s economy in danger:

Any delay in fighting global warming would be detrimental to our economic stability — costing us billions of dollars and dampening the state’s most important economic sectors.

The impending costs of damages from inaction include:

– Rising sea levels: Sea levels could rise 11 – 18 inches by 2050, and 23 to 55 inches by 2100, from 2000 levels. The cost of replacing at-risk property could reach $100 billion, while building and maintaining seawalls and levees to protect vulnerable areas would cost $15.4 billion.

– Wild fires: Increased risk of wild fires could total $2 billion per year by mid-century, and up to $14 billion per year by 2100. Forests would burn at twice their current rate by 2085. California spent $1 billion fighting forest fires in 2008.

– Skyrocketing energy demand: Increased use of air conditioning due to higher temperatures would cost an additional $1.6 – $10.2 billion annually by 2100, more than offsetting any reduction in reduced heating costs.

– Diminishing agricultural returns: Water loss would greatly reduce the irrigated crop area in the Central Valley, resulting in declining yields that could cost farmers $3 billion annually by 2050.

– Widespread drought: Southern California could become up to 15% drier, and urban water scarcity could cost up to $427 million annually by 2085.

It is still possible to avert disaster. The report concluded that “climate change will impose substantial costs to Californians in the order of tens of billions of dollars annually, but that costs will be substantially lower if global emissions are curtailed” to a low-emissions scenario. The corporate beneficiaries of the status-quo pollution economy and their conservative allies are falsifying and exaggerating the cost of change. Their economic fearmongering would in reality saddle Americans with billions of dollars in global boiling damages.

Download the Climate Action Team draft report.

Strong, immediate U.S. action on climate change is critical to maintaining our competitiveness (see “Why the United States REQUIRES a strong climate bill to remain competitive, Part 1” and “Part 2: When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green“).  The Center for American Progress’s Director of Agriculture, Trade and Energy Jake Caldwell looks at the language in the Waxman-Markey climate bill focused on competitiveness — and how it could be improved — in a post-first published here.

When President Barack Obama greets representatives from the world’s largest developed and developing economies later this month in Washington, D.C, as part of his administration’s reengagement with the rest of world to find solutions to global warming, expect him to argue in clear terms that a concerted, worldwide solution is required. U.S. action on climate change is obviously urgent after years of neglect by the Bush administration, but Obama’s energy team knows that an international agreement with binding commitments from all major emitters of greenhouse gases remains the best means to meet the twin challenges of boosting global economic prosperity and protecting our planet.

Persuading our trading partners around the world to sign onto a global accord to limit greenhouse gas emissions is a central component of the administration’s foreign policy. An international agreement is within reach through the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate processes. In the meantime, the U.S. Congress has to move forward with an energy bill to build the competitive and innovative U.S. clean-energy economy that Obama and the congressional leadership promised during the election campaign last year.

That process began early last week when House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ed Markey (D-MA) released a draft energy and climate bill that would boost renewable energy, increase efficiency, and reduce pollution. The proposed legislation also presents a new plan to deal with the thorny but critical issue of maintaining U.S. manufacturing competitiveness in energy-intensive industries in a low-carbon global economy.

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“Morano … was also among the first reporters to write about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign…. Morano penned an article questioning the Purple Heart medals of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.).”

Swift boat smearer Marc Morano, former denier-in-chief (DIC) for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL), is emailing around his bio and his new website to whatever members of the media are aching to tarnish their professional reputations.  You can read that full bio in the Wonk Room post “Climate Depot Alert! Global Warming Denier Marc Morano Sets Up Shop! Now With Crazier Formatting!” — I can’t bring myself to inflict it on you.

And yet Swift Boat smearer Morano leaves out of his emailed bio that on May 3, 2004, he wrote the CNS article “Kerry ‘Unfit to be Commander-in-Chief,’ Say Former Military Colleagues” — a pack of lies ahead of its time! He leaves out his smearing of Murtha.  He never mentions he was “previously known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Man in Washington,’ as reporter and producer for the Rush Limbaugh Television Show.”  Isn’t this all first-paragraph-bio stuff for a right-winger?  Well, thank heaven for SourceWatch.

So major media, if you think the research behind the widely repudiated Swift Boat smear was credible, if you think Rush Limbaugh’s rantings are credible, then, by all means, as Morano suggests, keep his name and info in your Rolodex (font, color in original):

For your on-air expert contributor talent files: Credentialed “Counter Guest” to popular global warming ideology

I will be taking a different tack.  Morano is simply not part of the legitimate discussion about climate science and policy.  Marc Morano is unquotable and uncitable.

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The Washington Post published a terrific article, “New Data Show Rapid Arctic Ice Decline,” on page A3 today by reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan.  The piece begins by noting that “the region is warming more rapidly than scientists had expected.”

In a stinging rebuke to columnist George Will and editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, it contains this remarkable paragraph:

The new evidence — including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s — 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.

Wow!  I have never seen a major newspaper so overtly contradict the lies misstatements by one of its own columnists in its news pages (as opposed to its editorial page). I’d be interested if any readers have seen anything like this before.

But this isn’t just a rebuke to Will, who, after all, is a widely debunked anti-scientific extemist when it comes to global warming (see “Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist?” and “Washington Post publishes two strong debunkings of George Will’s double dose of disinformation“).

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The Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a toxic pollution front group founded by the Richard Mellon Scaife fortune, recently hired Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) climate denier guru, Marc Morano, to set up shop at ClimateDepot.com. Morano’s slanderous Senate releases were notorious for their enthusiastic formatting. Thanks to DeSmogBlog, the Wonk Room has received his pitch to the media as an “anti-Gore Global Warming Expert,” seemingly qualified by his ability to creatively use the toolbar on his word-processing software:

Here’s your counter guest debater to Al Gore and Global Warming Climate change disinformation plus how Obama’s Policies are affecting our economy.

For your on-air expert contributor talent files: Credentialed “Counter Guest” to popular global warming ideology: Here’s your anti-Gore Global Warming Expert who offers the science to counteract partisan and ideologically driven Environmental entities and issues.

Yes, that’s right, if you have as little respect for aesthetics and the rules of grammar as you do for science, you can get your very own “counter guest” for a “lively, fair and balanced discussion” about flat-earth lunacy. Roll Call TV was his trial run last week, to the great excitement of Morano joker Noel Sheppard.

Morano’s new site, Climate Depot, “aims to redefine global warming reporting,” by attacking professional science journalists like “ABC’s Bill Blakemore, the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein, Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, CBS’s Scott Pelley, NBC’s Anne Thompson” as lackeys of Al Gore and praising Sen. Jim “Hoax” Inhofe as “Churchillian.” Climate Depot is sure to fit seamlessly into Morano’s alternate-reality right-wing universe of Newsbusters, the Drudge Report, and Glenn Beck.

Full release: Read more

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Monday:

[Arctic] ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the ice cover at the end of February.

So it is “thinner and more vulnerable than at anytime in the past three decades,” as the AP reports. “The amount of thick sea ice hit a record wintertime low of just 378,000 square miles this year, down 43 percent from last year.”  Why is that a concern?

“That thick ice really traps ocean heat; it keeps the planet in its current state of balance,” said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief ice scientist. “When we start to diminish that, the state of balance is likely to change, tip one way or another.”

Sounds like a tipping point to me — and to NSIDC and IPY (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did.” and The International Polar Year: “Arctic sea ice will probably not recover.)

Why should we care about Arctic ice disappearing?  Because, as a major 2008 study found, Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss:

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