The chart I created above was intended to make things blinding clear. But anyone at all can see that they were already blindingly clear, just by looking at these two charts from NASA (one of land-ocean temps, the data underlying the above chart, the other of weather station data) that show yearly averages along with 5-year running totals, which provide a middle range of smoothing:
The big difference on these charts now that NASA's announcement has come out is that the final dots representing 2009 have been added to each chart. Big whoop. This story has not really been in doubt for about 20 years now. Just like the S&L crash told us not to deregulate financial markets 20+ years before Lehmann Brothers, Goldman Sachs & AIG.
Our problem isn't that these problems can't be seen. Or that they're too difficult to understand or deal with. Our problem is that these problems discomfort those who wield enormous power--and that others who also wield enormous power are willing to give their fellow elites a pass, even though the results are going to be disastrous for them as well as for all the little folks like you and me. This is our problem: an elite that's totally lost all sense of everything except protecting one another, even--or, rather, especially the psycho-killer stuff.
When Will lied about global warming, and the Washington Post editorial establishment backed him up, it lead to a furious response that echoed across the blogosphere. (When Think Progress contacted the Post's ombudsman, he told them the Post "checks facts to the fullest extent possible." Apparently accessing NASA's website wasn't possible... for the Post.)
The notion that Will had a good-faith difference of opinion was absurd, given how he cherry-picked quotes and misrepresented basic facts, as pointed out, for example, by Albuquerque Journal science writer John Fleck ("Cherry-Picked Facts Heat Up Climate Debate"), who had actually (wearing a different hat) helped write a detailed scholarly examination of Will's false claim that climate scientists in the 1970s had been convinced we were in an era of global cooling, and had forwarded a copy to Will the last previous time Will had repeated this lie. Will had responded with a prefunctory "thank you," but evidently ignored and/or failed to read the detailed debunking of his lie.
It was so bad, that fellow WaPo dude Eugene Robinson even went on Rachel Maddow, and openly repudiated him. Eventually the pressure was such that the WaPo was forced to publish a "rebuttal of George Will's lies" as blogger Adam Stein put it. But the rebuttal itself, by Chris Mooney, was far more decorous than that, and Stein went on to give a pretty fair account of why, and what this meant:
I have two comments on this.
The first is that the letter-writing worked. It's unusual for newspapers to rebut their own columnists, but the uproar demanded a response. And beyond the immediate controversy, both Will and the Post are likely to act with a little more consideration before promoting demonstrable falsehoods about climate change.
The second is that this conclusion is wholly unsatisfactory and demonstrates the sharp limits on the effectiveness of dueling op-eds. Part of the imbalance is structural. George Will's column is syndicated nationally, and Will can push his views weekly on television. Mooney was granted a single column, which wasn't even enough space to unpack all the dishonesty in Will's original piece.
But more broadly, Will and Mooney have mismatched aims, and they're playing on a field that is fundamentally tilted.
Mooney's goals were two-fold: to correct the specific inaccuracies in Will's column, and to make a more general point about the misuse of science in journalism. He succeeded in these goals to the degree possible in the space available to him.
George Will also had two goals: to portray environmentalists as scaremongers, and to cast global warming as a confusing phenomenon based on a shaky foundation of contradictory observations. He also succeeded.
That's the rub. They're talking past each other, so they can both get their points across, and Will can still win the messaging war despite being wrong in both fact and implication. Will can call environmentalists "doomsayers," but Mooney can't call Will a liar. Mooney can point out that the specific arguments in Will's column are scientifically inaccurate, but he can't undo the general impression that climate science is inherently uncertain. Round and round it goes.
Stein has described the situation perfectly. It's a system designed to make sure that even if truth somehow, accidentally, gets heard, it doesn't have more than a momentary impact at best, scarcely more than if someone had farted--with all the attendant social dynamics of quickly pretending that nothing had ever happened.
Which leads to my far from new, much less novel point--that the problem is the system. This is evident not just from the analysis above, but also from a longer quote of what the Post ombudsman (Andy Alexander) told Think Progress:
I sought clarification from the editorial page editors. Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will's column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.
Alexander, inside the system, thinks that the multi-layer editing process proves that Post acted responsibly. But any high-school science student outside the system (who not only knows how to Google but also how to bookmark!) is likely to draw the opposite conclusion: such a horrendous and transparent mangling of the facts proves that the "editing process" is part and parcel of the problem--and no part of the solution. The "editing process" is the ass-covering process, part of the system that lies systematically, part of the system that is the problem--and the problem that is the system.
And not "just" when it comes to global warming. The problem is the system when it comes to everything. The "war on terror", the financial system, the broken Senate, the dictatorial Supreme Court, all of these are ultimately nothing more than symptoms of the underlying fact that the system is the problem. Because the system simply does not care about the truth. Which means it doesn't care about anything or anyone, other than covering its own sweet sociopathic ass.
And Barack Obama is impatient with folks like you and I, who keep pointing this out, rather than just trusting him to tweak the system ever so slightly to get it back on course.... the very same course that brought us here in the first place.
JFK once said that those who make non-violent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And George Orwell once said that "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." We are fast reaching the point where non-violent truth-telling may become impossible. It's not that folks like me will start smashing things up. The dying planet will do that. Droughts and floods and plagues and all that good Biblical stuff.
Cue (and queue!) the locusts, stage right.
And we'll still be trying to "catch bin Laden", in order to make ourselves secure. If we can just get rid of one more piece of the Constitution... |
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[Author's calculations from NASA data]
