Discover's Carl Zimmer Takes On George Will On Climate Change

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Ice, Ice Baby: When Fact-Checking Is Not Fact-Checking

For the past couple weeks, I've been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example I've focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.

I have argued that George Will's claims would have not have passed the standard fact-checking carried out by many magazines. He even manages to add extra errors in his second column, which is just a defense of his first. A number of other bloggers have also criticized the Post on similar grounds. The Washington Post editorial staff has responded on three occasions, most recently and at the greatest length this morning. As I'll explain below, it's not much of a response.

The first reaction was reported last week in Talking Points Memo. Andrew Alexander, the new Washington Post ombudsman, checked with the editorial page editors and told TPM that they have a "multi-layered editing process" in which columns are fact-checked to the greatest extent possible. They had, in other words, been satisfied that the information in George Will column factually correct in advance of publishing it, and now saw no reason to print any corrections. Then the editorial page editor Fred Hiatt was interviewed Thursday in the Columbia Journalism Review, where he stated that Will may have made inferences from the data that scientists didn't agree with, and that it was up to those scientists to debate Will. Again, he saw no need for any corrections, and even suggested that pieces like Will's column helped the public appreciate the uncertainty on issues including global warming, along with other fields like medicine.

I'm not going to deal in detail with these responses here, having already done so yesterday. Instead, I want to take a look at the latest response that came out this morning: a full-blown column in the Washington Post by the ombudsman Andrew Alexander–in fact, Alexander's first official piece in his new job. You can read it here.

As I read it, I kept hitting one puzzling statement after another. For example, Alexander starts out the piece by focusing his column on what he calls "a key paragraph" about the global area of ice. As I've explained before, that paragraph is indeed in error, both in the specifics of the data, and in the way Will uses it as evidence that global warming has not been occurring. It became all the more striking because the scientists whom Will named as his source for the data rejected his claims, and, as I later showed, neither Will nor any of the fact-checkers bothered to contact the scientists to confirm their information. Instead, they pointed to another statement from the scientists as confirming Will's claim–while ignoring the parts of the one-page statement that showed why Will was wrong.

But as vivid as that case may be, it was only one of numerous errors in the piece. If Will's columns had indeed been properly fact-checked, the fact-checkers would have drawn attention to other errors in his columns.

For example, Will misrepresents an article by the late great Walter Sullivan in the New York Times in 1975, pretending that it trumpets an imminent plunge into an Ice Age:

The New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that "a major cooling of the climate" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

Here is how that article actually starts:

The world's climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.

The whole article is here [$]. For more on all this, see here and see "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus," (free pdf) published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I write frequently for the Times, although only once about global warming.)

Here's another error Alexander doesn't address: Will tries to use a recent satellite sensor glitch as evidence that skeptical scientists get attacked for questioning global warming. I explained how scientists have dealt with that glitch and corrected the record, and how the scientists themselves state that the glitch doesn't affect their conclusion that the Arctic has shown a three-decade trend of shrinking ice area–a result that also comes from climate models.

But Alexander never addresses anything beyond Will's claims about the global area of ice now and in 1979. When fact-checkers write up their reports, they do not just look at one paragraph and call it a day. I don't understand why that is acceptable for a report from an ombudsman about the accuracy of a newspaper column.

But even within this narrow scope, Alexander's conclusions puzzle me. He states:

My inquiry shows that there was fact-checking at multiple levels.

What Alexander then describes is not fact-checking.

It began with Will's own research assistant, Greg Reed. When the column was submitted on Feb. 12 to The Washington Post Writers Group, which edits and syndicates it, Reed sent an accompanying e-mail that provided roughly 20 Internet reference links in support of key assertions in the column. Richard Aldacushion, editorial production manager at the Writers Group, said he reviewed every link. The column was then edited by editorial director Alan Shearer and managing editor James Hill.

Next, it went to The Post's op-ed editor, Autumn Brewington, who said she also reviewed the sources.

Fact-checking descriptions of scientific research involves a wee bit more than perusing Internet reference links. It is not just a pattern-matching game, where you see if a sequence of words is the same in two places. Anyone who has actually fact-checked for a magazine like Discover (where I fact-checked for a few years) can tell you that you need to get familiar with the scientific research to see if the description is a good representation of the science itself.

more...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/cat...global-warming/

Edited March 2, 2009 by Mister Fancypants

[HAL 9000 96]

Why fact-check when you can just align science to one's favorite political agenda?

Ha (thanks for this one, NickD)... I'm going to go play scientist for a couple of minutes.