When they don't have the facts, they just make stuff up. George Will, one the more serious members of the non-fact-based community, does it again in his scarily-titled "horror story of a column" on global warming Dark Green Doomsayers.
As the researchers said (see below) about George Will:
We do not know where George Will is getting his information
That's a good question from the climate researchers at University of Illinois,
and TPM catalogues the errors here.
.
The scientists' responses are below, but let's first treat ourselves to the acerbic with of Climate Progress' Joe Romm.
I don’t know whether it is more pathetic that Will believes this or that the Washington Post simply lets him publish this lie (about global cooling)again and again. As a 2008 review article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society demonstrated definitively (see "Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus"):
There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
No surprise that Will doesn’t cite a single scientific paper on his behalf. If anything, Will’s documentation merely proves how bad media coverage of the climate was three decades ago.
Now, let's get to the content of the lie in "Dark Green Doomsayers"from the researchers themselves.
The University of Illinois Web page specifically correcting Will's recent column can be found here.
"February 15, 2009 In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." We do not know where George Will is getting his information,(emphasis added) but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined. It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
The World Meteorological Organization has not specifically rebutted Will's erroneous claims about their temperature data, but they have clearly said that global warming is continuing: http://www.wmo.int/...
"The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century."
Will the Washington Post print a correction? Why don't you give them a call or a note?