Walter Russell Mead has fabricated an anti-scientific revisionist history of the environmental movement, which is why the pundit king of the ultraconservative anti-science climate disinformers, George Will, loves it.

First, though, my favorite line in today’s op-ed by Will begins

Mead, who says that he is a skeptic about climate policy rather than climate science….

That’s like saying you believe in the science that says cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema, and cardiopulmonary disease, but you don’t believe in quitting smoking.  Mead certainly tries to create the impression that this is what he believes in his Orwellian post, “The Big Green Lie Exposed,” where he says:

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Simon Lewis debunks another flawed Wall Street Journal editorial

The WSJ pushed a new meme in its editorial, “Climate of Uncertainty:  Global warming science is still evolving; will future IPCC reports reflect that?“  Ironically, if the WSJ actually followed the scientific literature, rather than the disinformation campaign’s twisted version of it, they would know that global warming science is indeed evolving away from the 2007 IPCC report — but not in the direction they think.

In a AAAS presentation this year, William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.” You can see a review of many of the most important such studies here:  “An illustrated guide to the latest climate science.”

Since the WSJ piece bases part of its conclusion on research into the Amazon rain forest’s vulnerability to drought, I asked forest science expert Simon Lewis for a comment, since he has written widely on this subject (see Scientists: “There are multiple, consistent lines of evidence from ground-based studies published in the peer-reviewed literature that Amazon forests are, indeed, very susceptible to drought stress”).

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But Dave, though well-informed, gets one of his facts wrong

The founder of 350.org and the author most recently of the must-read book Eaarth “” has a great interview with David Letterman.  Dave is more knowledgeable on climate and energy issues than the vast majority of ‘real’ journalists, though he makes one mistake:
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Four women in San Francisco coined the term “locavore” in 2005, and since then many similar groups have popped up all around the country. Each has the same idea: eating locally helps the environment, improves health, stimulates the local economy, and simply tastes better. For these reasons locally grown and produced food has been called “the new organic.” The New Oxford American Dictionary even named locavore their word of the year in 2007.

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