When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon "young Americans" to "get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon," another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade."
Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.
Global temps have been trending up for over a century, but in any particular year they can spike up and down quite a bit. In 1998 they spiked up far above the trend line and last year they spiked below the trend line. So 2008 was cooler than 1998.
Of course, you can prove anything you want if you cherry pick your starting and ending points carefully enough. For example: The year 2000 was below the trend line and 2005 was above it. Temps were up 0.4°C in only five years! The seas will be boiling by 2050!
So...is George Will an idiot? Does he really not understand these simple concepts? Or is he purposefully disingenuous? What stuns me is that these people are toying with a planetary catastrophe.
Whoa! It looks like the Republican party fax was busy this morning sending out marching orders to the rank-and-file. Today's topic? Cap and trade!
First, I saw this bit of Eric-Cantor-inspired agitprop on Dennis Rehberg's Facebook page, claiming a cap-and-trade system would cause job losses and be, in effect, a tax on middle-class households. George Will lays it on, too, citing a study from a Spanish libertarian (and paid commenter for a US energy industry front group) claiming Spain's unemployment rate stems from its commitment to green energy projects. (Odd, no mention of investment banks.) Michelle Malkin, naturally, can't stand being left behind, and piles on with a gratuitous sliming of Al Gore, comparing him to a pig.
In response, I present you with a pair of Ezra Klein posts.
First, the CBO scored the current cap-and-trade bill in the House, and found it would cost households about $165 for the average household per year.
Which is cheap if you consider the CBO's analysis of climate change literature, and the projected change in temperature to the end of the 21st century...and you realize how much economic damage climate change would do, if unchecked.
I haven't really looked into the present cap-and-trade bill. (I will.) I admit there may be problems with it. (Is it being rushed?) But in a sense, this issue is even more crucial than health-care reform. After all, if climate change science is correct, we're headed towards eco-disaster.
So, yeah. The GOPers and their minions are trotting out the "taxes" line - but, again, it's a very selfish, very self-centered philosophy, isn't it? And it's grossly irresponsible. When you hear some conservative spout off about morals being the root cause of American decline, just nod and say, yeah, there's too much short-sighted selfishness and greed.
This George Will screed against...er, Portland?...is a prime example of the lazy, selfish, and slow-thinking elements that are dragging this country down.
The money paragraph:
Once upon a time, government was supposed to defend the shores, deliver the mail and let people get on with their lives. Today's far-seeing and fastidious government, not content with designing the cars Americans drive to their homes and the lightbulbs they use in their homes (do you know that, come 2014, the incandescent lightbulb will be illegal?), wants to say where their homes can be. And to think that Republican Ray LaHood, Secretary of Behavior Modification, is an enthusiast for this, well, cozy relationship between Washington and Peoria, and everywhere else, too.
What a friggin' ridiculous argument. What, George, do you think our highway and street system is made out of sparkly unicorn pellets?
Believe it or not, George, the midcentury urban flight of middle-class white families was paid for by the American taxpayer. And, yes, George, we still pay for this outmoded, mid-20th-century transportation system with our hard-earned US dollars, even if, say, we bike or walk everywhere or use public transportation.
That's the thing. Many folks simply do not have the option to choose alternative transportation. Bike lanes are often nonexistent, communities surrounded by a grid of highways, housing far-flung from the basic amenities they depend on, isolated from necessities by antiquated zoning laws that were designed - ironically - to protect them. And worse still, those that want to escape from their grandparents' infrastructure still pay for the street grids that imprison them. George, your view of "normalcy" is suppressing the freedom of millions of Americans to choose how and where they live and commute.
I'm not surprised Will doesn't get this. We're talking about a man who pines for an era before anyone wore jeans. It's obvious he doesn't muck around in places like Peoria - the town Will marks as a good ol' American city that doesn't want to be Portland, thank-you-very-much - or else he'd have discovered Peoria already has a pretty damn good network of bike lanes and some of the best mountain biking in Illinois. But then ol' George was never good at research and fact-checking.
And ol' George's views represents a slice of Americans who feel so oppressed by common-sense regulations or government spending that DESTROYS their LIVES! Like, say, a law that makes your dishes not so sparkly! Never mind that the phosphates used to make sparkly dishes have massive negative impacts to the environment and human health. And never mind that dish soap companies can make sparkly dish soap without phosphates but never got around to it before.
No, my friends. The United States is not in a state of decline because we like to shag for fun, or because we wear too much denim, or because of the Intertubes or television or hip-hop. The end won't come about because people dare criticize their government for torturing or starting unnecessary wars, or they don't worship at your church, or because of the designated hitter. If there's anything that symbolizes the sorry state of the country, it's this: Americans are destroying rare and irreplaceable ecosystems so they can have soft toilet paper.
So while ol' George et al bluster and rant for their "freedoms" and prerogatives - never mind ours, mind you - the world disappears up our *sses.
Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?
Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities.
In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult.
Mooney's solution?
Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.
Yeah, and the newspaper publishing the new, more rigorous commentaries will be delivered by a fleet of flying pigs.
Seriously, if we want to take action on climate change, we can't wait around for utopian journalistic ethics to kick in. Right now, the very existence of climate change has warped into a political issue and calls for a political solution. But what? A massive grassrootscampaign to educate voters and pressure lawmakers to respond to the science?
Local action? Of course, local action doesn't help when the neighboring town installs a coal-burning electricity plant while you're spending municipal dollars weatherizing city buildings, does it? At some point, we need federally-enforced standards for carbon dioxide pollution.
What have you got? Do you know of any other grassroots orgs tackling this problem? Possible solutions to the current political morass?
Check out Steve Benen's post questioning George Will's accuracy. I don't really want to jump on the attack, though. Yes, Will's column on global warming was worse than shoddy, and it looks like Will's ego prevented at least one other correction of a column, but in general Will is one of the better columnists.
But why do we trust columnists? Bloggers -- at least the good ones -- link to the information or data that support their arguments. Objectively that makes blogs more trustworthy than print columns. (Yet, still, I wouldn't trust a blogger further than I could throw her.) What guarantee do we have that a syndecated columnist doesn't invent facts to support predetermined political bias?
Like Steve Benen noted, a correction for Will's column has yet to appear.
So...George Will's op-ed today "debunked" global warming, largely by referring to a belief in the 1970s that "a major cooling of the planet was inevitable." You know, first they say it's cooling! Now they say it's warming! Make up your mind already, and spare us the hysteria!
A number of folksquickly and thoroughly dismantled Will's claim about the 1970s scientific community and global cooling. (Not to mention his claim about arctic ice levels in 1979 -- and that rebuttal came from his supposed source.) In short, Will -- besides cherry-picking, misinterpreting, and inventing data -- based his column today on a dumbed-down, out-of-context re-telling by Newsweek of a 1970s scientific study about long-term climate forecasts.
In short, Will is writing a piece that misinforms the public about science based on a news report that misinformed the public about science.
And hasn't that been one of the inanities of this "debate," how the media has almost crimanally fumbled the topic? Unable -- either from lack of ability or lack of funds -- to research the issue and discern good from bad argument, the media has generally placed the scientific community's consensus on the issue against a handful of denier groups in an attempt to "balance" the "debate." Worse still, many of the data and groups that claim global warming are financed by industries that stand to benefit financially if global warming is thought to be a hoax -- and we also know that, for some energy corporations, exploiting the media to spread doubt about global warming was a condoned strategy.
Essentially, global warming has become just another talking point in a long and growing list of talking points that the conservative movement uses to keep apostates out of their fold (shrinking that big tent) and to berate liberals with, rather than viewing warming as both a real cause for worry, and as an opportunity to demonstrate honest governance. Apparently obstructionism and denial are better tactics.
...Conservatives should be reading these pieces and paying heed to the vast consensus on global warming. Even if there areome holes in the larger argument, that's still no excuse to ignore what very well may be the global crisis of the coming century. Conservatives ought to be conserving things, and the environment should be at the top of the list-even above rugged individulaism and the "right" to low taxes.
That's the thing, we're stuck debating whether global warming even exists. And that's exactly how conservatives -- weirdly beholden to the short-term interest of a small segment of the big business community -- wants it. And the media, always attuned to the insider echo chamber, presents this as a viable alternative...
