More Dishonesty from Will and the Post on Global Warming

George Will has responded to the accusations of falsehoods in his recent article on global warming. However in the classic style of a crank, he misrepresents the information, and quotemines the correction issued by the organization he misrepresented in the first place.

Recall that Will took a statement from the Arctic Climate Research Center about Arctic ice levels on January 1st, and proclaimed it true of Arctic ice levels as of his article date, February 15th. However, the statement was not true then (this frequent change in data is why short term trends are irrelevant to the AGW hypothesis), as the ACRC made clear:

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, 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."

And how does the ever-honest George Will represent the ACRC's response? As follows:

So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying "we do not know where George Will is getting his information." The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center's Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.

There you have it: classic quote mining. Will plucked out the one sentence, left out the content that demonstrated objectively that he was wrong, and repeated the falsehood.

Looks like the cult of AGW denial has claimed another victim: George Where-did-my-credibility-go Will and whoever is foolish enough to trust what his columns say. Apparently Will has been rotating crank talking points on Global Warming for quite some time, oblivious to the ever-changing nature of science. And the science-deniers wonder why the rest of the world is leaving them behind.