George Will Should Know Better
The title of George Will’s column in the December 23, 2004 Washington Post is “Global Warming? Hot Air“. Will refers to Michael Crichton’s new fictional novel, “State of Fear,” to suggest that scientists’ concerns about global warming are no more that “chicken-little” fear mongering.
In his novel, Crichton selectively incorporates some scientific information in order to convince his readers that many of the scientists studying climate change have reached the wrong conclusions as part of some environmental conspiracy. Crichton has used scientific information to great effect in past novels (and inspired films) including “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park”. But this time Crichton does not just extrapolate scientific information he selectively uses information to denigrate scientists and scientific research.
George Will falls for Crichton’s line by selectively referring to news reports and scientific articles from 30 years ago (a common tactic used by anti-environmentalists).
George Will should know better. Of course scientific understanding improves over time. Citing old reports and articles from major newspapers and scientific journals is a time-honored tactic used by critics of science to show the “fallibility” of scientific research. When those reports came out 30 years ago, I was just starting graduate school and Keeling’s work indicating yearly increases in carbon dioxide concentrations on Mauna Loa was just beginning to be discussed in my graduate classes.
We also knew from paleontology that in about the last half-million years there had been 4 or 5 ice ages (glacial periods) lasting each around 100, 000 years with interglacials lasting about 10,000 years. Given that it has been perhaps 18,000 years since the last glacial maximum and that historically interglacials lasted around 10,000 years, it was not unreasonable to suggest that the Earth perhaps was due for another global colling in the near (geologic time-frame) future.
Let’s remember than when Keeling started his carbon dioxide measurements in 1958, it was just five years after Francis Watson Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England and announced that he and James Watson “had found the secret of life” (the structure of DNA). (I still had old textbooks dating from the 50’s in college that stated that generic inheritance might have something to do with nucleic acids or proteins in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells!).
Will forgets that less than 50 years after Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA, scientists had been able determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA
One would think that in the past 30 years our understanding of global climate processes, like our understanding of genetics, might have improved significantly.
That Naomi Oreskes only this month published her essay reiterating the scientific consensus on climate change is something that Georg Will should not have overlooked by Will, a well-known columnist and (1970’s) Pulitzer Prize winning commentator.
See the point-by-point rebutal to George Will we posted on RealClimate.org:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=90