Is it possible for the Washington Post to be embarrassed by George Will? After a series of erroneous claims in a column about climate change, Will is at it again today (4/2/09), laughing off the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs as a poor fix for a nonexistent problem:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Sigh.

This has been explained before; Will cherry picks the hottest year among other relatively hot years as his starting point. The 11 hottest years in the past century and half have all occurred in the last 13 years--but 1998 was the hottest year so far, so there's no such thing as global warming.

What's perhaps most interesting is that the Post ran a long letter (3/21/09) from the secretary General of the World Meteorological Association, spelling this out and explaining that Will just doesn't know what he's talking about:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record -- as was done in a recent Post column ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, February 15] -- and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit.

At this point it's obvious that George Will is not going to let a bunch of scientists tell him about climate science.  The real question is why the Post continues to print this stuff-- and give him cover when critics point out his inaccuracies.

The paper, it should be noted, did run a recent op-ed from Chris Mooney debunking some of Will's climate misinformation. But Will will still have his regular platform to write whatever he wants to write about climate science--no matter how wrong he is.

Stating that "a lot of funny things can happen when the media translate science for the public," science writer Chris Mooney (Nation, 3/6/09) looks over more evidence that the U.S. public got really lucky when CNN's Sanjay Gupta was not made Obama's surgeon general. Mooney's list of Gupta "approaching medical coverage through 'one the one hand, on the other hand' equivocation, the selling of medical entertainment, following the pack or simply getting it wrong" clearly illustrates "what always made Gupta's nomination worrisome":

Consider a few of Gupta's journalistic missteps. In late December 2002--a slow news week after Christmas--an outfit named Clonaid, run by a member of a UFO-obsessed group called the Raelians, decided to hold a press conference announcing the first cloning of a human being. The media responded like a herd and ran off a cliff. Many outlets, including CNN, covered the group's press conference live, even though numerous scientists and bioethicists could have told them the claim wasn't credible. Yet there was Gupta, breathlessly interviewing Clonaid's "clinical science director" about "the possibility, a big possibility, that a human clone was actually born." Gupta and CNN contributed heavily to a media scare with little foundation; to this day, we've never seen proof of the existence of baby "Eve."

And of course Mooney features Gupta's infamous "'reality check' on Michael Moore's 2007 film SiCKO"; see the FAIR Action Alert: "CNN vs. SiCKO" (7/11/07).