The earth shape controversy revived

This is as close as the Washington Post is going to come out and call Will a liar.

I do think that calling for the abolition of newspapers on the basis of a bad experience with the Washington Post might seem a little bit over-hasty…

May I point out that being led to a steadily more negative view of the question of whether we actually need newspapers and whether we should regret their seemingly inexorable decline is neither a “rant” or a “flame” (per SF) nor is it “calling for the abolition of newspapers” (per engels).

I second John. Seth, you’re looking at a decided non-rant, which is based on a context of repeated failures and corruption on the part of the elite MSM, and calling it a rant.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Well, to be highly pedantic, I said it “hits upon something”, not “is a specific example of the following”. Implication aside, I think the competing overall ideas are clear. To respond to El Cid, I think it’s entirely possible we could end up worse off than currently.

Saying it’s possible we could end up worse is beside the point. “We” don’t control what’s going to happen to the newspapers anyways. The only thing that “we” choose is whether we’re going do our bit to provide rhetorical cover for the newspapers in our little corner of the blogosphere.

And I say no. Let the newspapers die if they’re going to die. We should go strictly on a principle of “what have you done for me lately?”, and what have the newspapers done for us lately? Nothing.

Well, John P., John Q. does seem to imply that he would answer “no” to both questions (whether newspapers are needed and whether their decline is to be regretted) – he has a “steadily more negative view” of both questions. If John Q. had said he had a “less positive view,” I think this would have a different implication. Given his further claim that blogs are doing the much-needed work that newspapers should be doing, it’s not so great a leap to see this as a form of calling for the death of the newspaper (as engels glossed it). He’s saying, I think, that their loss is not to be mourned, but not because, say, they are going to a “better place” (this would clearly have a different implication), but because they suck at their job.

The problem with Seth’s rant is it’s the same old “Better than Hitler! Better than Stalin!” argument, which works for everyone except Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Teodoro Obiang.

And it’s not as though Quiggin had his hand on the lever which would drop the trap to send the Post and the Times to their eternal reward. He’s a powerless and disreputable internet troll, even as you and I, though I’m not sure that he completely understands that.

Not mentioned is that we’re used to thinking of the Post and the Times as actually good media, by contrast to the dominant TV and radio media, but increasingly we’re seeing them converge to the norm.

13: yes, that’s why I said it.

No one should revise Seth’s wiki page, if he has one. Joke.

John Protevi — up to a point, Lord Copper. Isn’t the underlying attitude that newspapers are inevitably going to disappear and we should all be glad to see the back of them? Interestingly enough, this is the same attitude orthodox Marxists have to capitalism. I suppose you could claim that orthodox Marxists don’t ‘call for the abolition of’ capitalism but that might strike some people as being a bit pedantic.

Anyway, I do think you can generalise too much from the condition of the Washington Post and the New York Times (both abysmal imho) to the that of the press as a whole, including in places outside of the US. Which is not, I hope, to be under any illusions about the latter but only to believe that a world where I was forced to get my news from the ‘blogosphere’ is too horrible to think about.

Anyway, I do think you can generalise too much from the condition of the Washington Post and the New York Times (both abysmal imho) to the that of the press as a whole

Not within the US you can’t. In terms of covering the news they are two of the best three papers in the country, hands down. In editorial policy they’re average, with the Times if anything a little to the left of the norm. In integrity they’re probably below average, but only because most US papers rarely write anything original about major world news, so their lapses of integrity are on local stories and don’t have anywhere near the impact.

The problem with Seth’s rant is it’s the same old “Better than Hitler! Better than Stalin!”

In fact, I’m going to agree with you that’s the argument, and say it’s a good argument! And thank you for bringing up Hitler and Stalin, so people don’t jump all over me for using them as examples. There’s reasons people turned to Hitler. There’s reasons people turned to Stalin. Notably, they presented themselves as alternatives to a corrupt regime. And it’s usually accepted that turning to them resulted in the societies being worse off than otherwise. Something similar (not identical of course, but metaphorically harsh) is entirely possible with the evolution of media.

“Sometimes you’re an asshole, Seth” – Huh? I thought my original comment was colorful, not hurtful.

So Hitler and Stalin came into power because people had a bad attitude about newspapers? Karl Kraus’s attacks on the Neue Freie Presse were caused Hitler?

Ha, Karl Kraus, “es bilden sich Gruppen”, wonderful stuff – but clearly his point was not that the press should go out of business, rather that the press should be independent.

Do you really think Kraus would support the blogosphere as the sole source of information? I’m rather inclined to see it as a bad thing that groups are being built in pro- & contra-blogs; keeping everybody cosy and unchallenged in its own sphere of truth.

Damned, we should revive him – it would be bloody interesting to hear from Karl on the now.

I’ll certainly second J. Quiggin’s sentiment here. The George Will imbroglio was despicable on the part of the Post from start (the column itself) to finish (Mooney’s response, which was late and only tangentially acknowledged the corruption in the Post’s decision-making process).

Sensible people are not going to be endeared to old-line journalism if this is the sort of hairball that old-line journalism is going to cough up. Hiatt’s idea seems to be that publishing bullshit is not an offense against the Post’s professional standards. To the extent that you agree with Hiatt’s opinion of the Post (and I don’t), there’s not much reason to fret about the demise of the Post.

(And yes, I get how presumptuous it is of me to propose that I might have a more accurate opinion of the Post’s professional standards than Hiatt. But still …)

John, you go from columnists in 3 major newspapers in one country & then you wind up in “the print-media side” presumably including journalists alongside columnists & all newspapers with these 3 & the press globally with that in the US.

Aren’t you giving yourself not too much free rein here? At least as far as extending low standard of opinionating to low standard of reporting.

You mentioned Karl Kraus – wouldn’t you see similarities in the groups he saw trying to use our language to their partisan benefit & at least some of the internet? In fact isn’t a lot of the blogs a whole lot like the columns in the 3 major newspapers?

So Seth, if you assume political constraints on not publicly opposing the “paid liars” that leave you free to a publicly oppose the “unpaid liars”, why do we not see (afaics) public support of the “unpaid honest people”? Or is the political constraint merely to oppose the unpaid, via any workable attack?

There is some terrible journalism being done on the web by unprofessional (or semi-) sources, both in terms of quality and accuracy. There is also some of the absolute best. Should that be sacrificed in the name, if not the fact, of supporting newspapers?

As far as I can see, the decline of newspapers has little or nothing to do with amateur web journalism at all (though a fair bit to do with advertising revenues plus craigslist and friends). Newspaper journalism quality has been sharply falling since long before that was even arguably a factor.

But are newspapers declining, or is it that since Gore invent the internet, they are [used loosely] evolving? Pretty much all the current griping and grousing about papers slants, inclusiveness/exclusiveness have been going on for some time [read as, well before the electronic age]. I know we discussed it in 8th grade civics or social studies [had the same teach for both…] way back OMG in the 60’s. Just as some folks like their paid jobs and do indeed entertain many things to try and keep them many of the “unpaid” masses are indeed paid. Perhaps not directly or immediately, but the Pentagon is not the exclusive owner of the revolving door.

There’s certainly an argument for *new* newspapers, just as there is an argument for new banks. Note that the US papers that have gone bust recently have basically done so because of the debts they contracted, or rather, that their proprietors contracted and loaded on them in order to be Press Barons by the power of leverage. Well, the debts die with the papers, and the barons with’em up to a point. Anywhere where the paper was cashflow positive before debt service can support a new newspaper/newspaper-like entity.

Further, it’s depressingly typical that the newspaper business should discover all the causes of its problems except the quality of its product, the appropriateness of its pricing, and the wisdom of its financial structure.

The ideological gap between the news articles and op-ed pages in the Washington Post rivals that of the Wall Street Journal.

Somebody thinks Teodoro Obiang wasn’t better than Hitler or Stalin?

The newspapers and pundits have been all over the place trying to describe or inform readers about the demise of newspapers, but they invariably leave out the most important one – not informing readers with objective information. Instead the publishers have decided to become the propaganda wing of the U.S. government, the intelligence community, the military, law enforcement, and big business. In our newly formed upside down world a free press means the freedom to deceive its audience. The freedom to misinform, mislead, misdirect, distract, anything but inform its readers is now sacrosanct.

I remember a time when there was a morning paper and an afternoon paper. The morning paper was basically conservative, but by no means like the present, and the afternoon paper represented democratic interests. Regardless of whether the papers stood behind one political party or the other there was an effort to be reality based. The free press’s original intent was to contain government and big business so that they too had to play within the rules established for all Americans.

As a reader can easily see there is little or no attempt toward accuracy in journalistic reporting. Most of our so-called journalists are nothing more than writers who disrespect their audiences enough to lie to their faces daily. The propaganda is relentless and merciless. Those two aspects of modern journalism are all I need to inform me that what we read, hear, and see today is nothing more than big business propaganda.

How betraying the American people, (as if they are an enemy,) by spying on them, misleading them, and treating all of them like suspects is a matter of projection. Since the press is criminal, unethical, and corrupt so too must be the American people; therefore, any lengths they use to oppress the people, before they wake up to the reality that they are being screwed, is permissible.

Americans are being forced to accept a two tier legal and political system with one set of rules that apply to the aristocracy and another set of rules that apply to the common rabble. Apparently the only established rule was at one time not to be caught, but this has changed. Now, if someone among the aristocrats is caught they simply change the rules. It is rule by men; therefore, it is arbitrary. This is a push to the opposite extreme of the Constitution’s original intent, but the plutocrats believe that as long as citizens are unwilling or unable to defend the way of life so many have sacrificed for they do not deserve the freedom that they took from the robber barons.

The right wing in this country is seeking nothing less than the absolute right, without consequence, to exploit the American people. This is based on the beliefs that human dignity does not exist, presumed innocence is a fantasy, and due process is a waste of money. Its intent is to turn America into a cult, rather than a nation of free and independent thinkers. After the failure of leadership, in America, to persuade the people to follow them blindly into the valley of death, (unnecessary wars,) and let the people push back, because a vocal minority did not agree, as was the case with Vietnam, the leaders swore that other world leaders would never see this presumed crack in the walls of power again.

The leaders in this country to this day do not think of Americans’ independence as strength, but a weakness due to an inability to completely control citizens’ behavior. If the leaders order soldiers to attack an orphanage for physically challenged children that is run by nuns, they don’t want them to ask why; they want them to do or die. Evidence for this can be seen in the promotion of torture, “If the president does it, it is legal.” Then and only then will U.S. leaders have proven to the rest of the world who is in control, for that is the measure that tyrants use to evaluate power. The corporate run newspapers are assisting in this goal; therefore, they are responsible for the betrayal of American values and Americans. Since many newspapers have become the distributors of propaganda there is no reason for Americans to buy them or use their advertisers, because to do so is to support authoritarianism.

Well, WTF right back at ya then ;-)

I leave you to your personal space & beg forgiveness for not being absorbed in a world according to John’s gripes.

Wouldn’t want you to stoop so low as to come near my level where applause is not the spontaneous reaction to your ideas.

44: More meaningful and intelligible responses in 31, 41, and 44 would have been welcome. I’ve actually made a fair number of substantive comments here, of which you’ve chosen to comment glancingly on 3 or so.

But you did answer my question. It’s the cootie thing. I’m sort of like a tar pit or quicksand sink, and anyone who pays attention to me is in dire risk of being absorbed in a world according to John’s gripes, a fate which few survive.

On the occasions over the years when I’ve been an insider to a story, and these have ranged from how the Labour Party elects its leader to the restructuring of Heinz Australia, what has been published in the newspapers has been so far removed from what was actually going on that I sometimes wondered where on earth the stories as published had come from. Newspapers may have entertainment value but I think they are esentially works of fiction.

A refusal to mourn the death from revenue attrition of print journalism in the US.
The numerically largest demographic gets its news such as it is from the cable news shows.
Actual reading by actual readers is shrinking everywhere not just in current events journalism.
That plus the internet is shutting off the revenue stream for newspapers.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Etc.

Just for the record of defense, I wish to strongly deny I’ve done anything “disruptively”. Please note John Emerson just made a comment that is purely personal attack on me in #51, and I’ve done nothing of the sort to him or anyone in the thread. I do have many critical views, but I argue them in appropriate contexts (i.e. it is simply false to charge “anything related to the Internet”) and I believe I take much more grief for them than is objectively justified, per the two examples just noted.

I was just keeping the Wiki joke rolling.

The decline of television news was incremental. Like the frog that does not know it is being boiled until it is too late television audiences have grown to accept the ten second sound bite, because all that the viewer needs to do is add his personal emotional take on any given report and in so doing believes he has a complete picture.

The disappearance of the raised brow when a person being interviewed is obviously speaking falsely. The upgrading of known political hacks to supposed objective pundits took place over a period of a few months. There is a recognizable singular perception that runs through most of the news and it is a corporate one.

Americans are like the silent witness to a murder. The victim is a democratic republic. There is an ongoing silent coup taking place that is usurping commonly held beliefs and values with a cynical and callous view of events and people. Olaf Stapleton referred to this view being similar to a parasite. The parasite is the hatred that is held for other human beings. When hatred has gained dominance over citizens minds there a very few things that can be done to them that one will not accept. It is the greatest threat to Western democracy since the Cold War.

The focus on opinion pieces is odd, considering the generally discreditable job most pundits did before the invasion of Iraq. I resolved then to ignore any who supported the war, since they were clearly either more ignorant than I was, had worse analytical skills, or were simply dishonest. It’s since become clear that my objections were mostly beside the point: they don’t perform any analysis at all! They simply observe the positions others have taken and choose theirs accordingly.

I want to take issue with Emerson’s dismissal of the L.A. Times (which, by the way, opposed the war, unlike the big three). Back in 2003 I spent a week in a hotel in Washington where the Post was free. It seemed as thin and insubstantial as the S.F. Chronicle, barely one coffee’s worth of reading. I had to buy the N.Y. Times just to get through breakfast. It was no surprise to see the L.A. Times on sale at the nearest corner. Its war reporting was some of the best, and at least it didn’t promulgate lies as the N.Y. Times did with Judith Miller and Michael Gordon.

It’s interesting that literally the next post after this one didn’t link to a piece of paper, but a place on the web. Rupert contends that the WSJ matters as a brand and not as a printed news outlet. I have no idea if he’s right, but I think there’s a fairly strong presumption that he’s an expert, and that he doesn’t have an incentive to lie about this.

George Will isn’t a journalist. He doesn’t write newspaper articles– he writes an opinion column. He is one of the stable of cranks that American newspapers have always kept around to appeal to various tastes. Think Westbrook Pegler, David Lawrence, Colonel McCormick– there were hundreds of these guys since at least the ’30’s, and given that newpaper publishers tend to be to troglodytes the political columnists tend to be right-wingers, which means that they are usually wrong.

Will has nothing to do with newspaper reporting. He has hardly more to do with the state of American journalism than a department store display ad or the word-jumble puzzle or horoscope or the special color of a sports section’s newsprint. He was a minor political science academic who got into the business bloviating in National Review. He is irrelevant to the discussion in most of this thread. What you want a newspaper for is the people paid to report on real events. George Will is lagniappe. Just a clown in a bow-tie.

“If newspapers are unwilling to take a stand on which stories are true or false”
And this is new? SoWilliam Randolph Hearst started off as a stringer for Rupert Murdoch.
“True or False” On this page, when it comes to Israel?
Can someone please tell me why the proposition “Zionism=Racism” is not “true”?

There is no “truth” when it comes to language. It’s in there somewhere but we all lose sight of it, and always will. People defend what they want to believe, but some are more sophisticated than others.
“We want it in black and white!!”

Thanks to the web we have web pages and blogs by experts who write about what they know. Journalists are amateurs on every subject they cover. They’re writers not mathematicians, not lawyers, not economists, not historians. It amazes me that no one points that out. Experts can be deluded, but they’re still experts.

The amateur blogosphere is actually less important than the expert one. We have a world of blogs by people who used only to appear in the press as the authors of op-eds.
And they’re in direct communication with their readership. Quiggen and Chris Mooney are angry experts and we can bypass Will, who isn’t.
But still, “true or false.” Don’t make me laugh. Read up on the AMA in the next post if you don’t believe me. The AMA are experts. And I’m a “nothing and a nobody”!!!
And anonymous sourcing includes “Deep Throat.”

What you should be asking for is not truth but maturity from the editorial staff of a supposedly serious newspaper in our society. Maturity is still relative but at least there’s an attempt. “Why is the Washington Post reading like the NY Post!!?”
That’s the question. “Why are serious people[normative] behaving like idiots [normative] !??
The problem with Platonism in intellectual life is where it leads.
You follow?

Will has nothing to do with newspaper reporting. He has hardly more to do with the state of American journalism than a department store display ad or the word-jumble puzzle or horoscope or the special color of a sports section’s newsprint. He was a minor political science academic who got into the business bloviating in National Review. He is irrelevant to the discussion in most of this thread. What you want a newspaper for is the people paid to report on real events. George Will is lagniappe. Just a clown in a bow-tie.

He was published on one of the most-read pages of one of the nation’s most-read, most-authoritative journalistic publications. He may have been wearing a “opinion” hat instead of a “reporter” hat, but his piece was factual, except that all the facts were wrong. And the WaPo will not repudiate that.

The independence of columnists from management sounds like a good thing, but as I pointed out, it isn’t a good thing at at if they’re political commissars reporting to a political party (or to wealthy groups hiring them to make speeches at what, $200 / hr.?

Waving a magic wand doesn’t work.

What people should be saying is the the big newspapers do the detailed reporting that requires footwork and extensive research and digging. A nice compromise would be just to get rid of the editorials and columnists entirely.

your pet belief that the internet can replace all newspapers

Sigh. Seems like an odd reading of the conversation so far.

There are interesting extant questions about the economics of newsgathering and the value of newsgathering under current economic arrangements. There are two sets of circumstances under which – in Mr. Quiggins’ words – we might take

a steadily more negative view of the question of whether we actually need newspapers and whether we should regret their seemingly inexorable decline.”

We might regret the demise of newspapers less if web journalism continues to improve. Likewise, we might not regret the demise of newspapers as much if they continue to decline.

There seems to be general agreement here that there’s not much worth saving in “opinion journalism” in its current form. The acknowledged benefit from newspapers is their focus of professional manpower on discerning questions of fact. However, two examples on this thread – the Geithner Plan and the JAMA controversy – could have just as well been handled by “amateurs” like Delong or Calculated Risk or whomever.

One could argue that the JAMA story required professional reporting – but given the WSJ’s dry, routine handling of the story – “Medical Journal Decries Public Airing of Conflicts” – it wasn’t written to attract attention. It seems as though you need the web to put these things in their proper light: “The Journal of the American Medical Association Does a Fine Impression of Vito Corleone (or is it Fredo?)”

The good stuff in that story – the threat of retaliation against a whistleblower – was buried at least 15 paragraphs in. And look at this paragraph:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis called Dr. Leo “a nothing and a nobody.” In the editorial Friday, Dr. DeAngelis and co-author Phil Fontanarosa, JAMA’s executive deputy editor, said her comment about Dr. Leo “was erroneously reported” and that Dr. Leo “certainly is somebody doing something very important.”

You have to read the article pretty closely to see that the WSJ is calling DeAngelis and Fontanarosa a pair of liars.

Dr. Leo is obviously interested in publicizing this case. What about this article leads us to believe that, absent the WSJ, Dr. Leo wouldn’t have found another outlet? The whole controversy started because Dr. Leo did, in fact, seek another outlet than JAMA to discuss the matter.

I wonder, comparitively speaking, how much genuinely productive manpower is expended on reporting now vs. 20 years ago, if you include the time spent by amateurs exposing useful information. I’m not sure it’s less.

What are Wapo’s ethical responsibilities—if they do not agree with you, if they do not agree with Will, if they don’t know what the truth is?

Tom, these are interesting questions, but they aren’t in play in this case. The question is: What is the Washington Post’s obligation if the newspaper knows that it has published, as fact, false information.

I say the newspaper has a professional obligation to provide the correct information, and to be sorry that it provided incorrect information, and to strive not to do so again in the future. Hiatt disagrees. What do you say?

Hi all

What I actually think WaPo has an obligation to do is to push George Will to further address the issue–which he did two weeks later, albeit in much the same vein as his first piece. I would then probably commission an internet-only blog debate between Will and perhaps someone like Chris Mooney. But I’ll bet big money that George Will is an independent contractor and has a contract to write what he pleases for WaPo, who probably can only refuse to run a column, not edit it (except for typos and space).

I have seen no evidence that WaPo is a climate warming skeptical organisation (and remember that I am a skeptic myself–I don’t think they agree with me.) I think what you all are arguing for is something that no established syndicated opinion columnist would agree to, and that their agents would resist, and that the editorial boards of newspapers are not in a position to fight.

Unless you think the WaPo has consistently, over time, refused to cover global warming, reporting the statements of those who think this is the paramount issue of the age (and you’ll have real trouble convincing me that that is the case), I think that you are making a mountain out of a molehill, and taking time away from issues such as the JAMA case, which to me is far more serious.

Tom, it’s not really about climate change, it’s about whether or not untruths should be blithely ignored.

The Washington Post cannot force George Will to do anything.

It’s not about forcing George will to do anything either.

I have seen no evidence that WaPo is a climate warming skeptical organisation

Leaving aside that this is a troubling use of the word “skeptical”, what would this even mean? WaPo as an organization doesn’t have opinions; all that we can do is look at what they print and see whether it reflects a systematic bias. I think it’s clear that if you look at the collection of articles and op-eds that they’ve published that contain a substantial treatment of global warming, the fraction of “skeptical” views far outweighs the fraction found in the community of experts on the subject (among whom there are, essentially, none who would hold views comparable to Will’s).

Leaving aside whether WaPo is systematically biased, Will’s column was a collection of blatant lies, half-truths, and misdirections from start to finish. Any newspaper deserving of respect should be ashamed to have published it.

A few quotes lifted from Tom:

I consider myself a progressive liberal
proposing constraints that will hurt the progressive liberal cause
in a way that does not come back to haunt liberal writers

To the extent that liberals feel no need to honor factual accuracy, then they, too, ought to be held up to public ridicule and scorn. The complaint about Will in this instance is not that he is insufficiently liberal, but that he has fallen short factually.

The Post is not compelled to knowingly publish falsehoods – but if it were, that would make it more, not less, expendable.

I honestly think there is a disconnect that prevents people from identifying the actors in George Will’s mini-drama. He is an independent contractor with an agent. The Washington Post has a contract with the agent and Will. George Will is offering his opinion. That he cites published reports that he thinks support his point of view does not change the fact that it is his opinion. The Washington Post does cover climate change extensively, and offers a forum for advocates–far more space than is ever devoted to skeptics.

10 years down the road when liberal writers are offering opinion about public protest in China and using clandestine Chinese blogs as back-up, a new Republican administration will look to this event as a guideline on how easily they can suppress opinion.

And finally, if you honestly think the Post offers more space to climate skeptics than those who are concerned about warming, please share some of what you’re smoking.

… and the fact that Will was recycling crap widely available on denialist websites does not exactly add weight to the case for the unique role of newspapers.

The rhetorical moves are familiar from anti-Darwinism, anti-MMR agitation, and the promotion of all kinds of pseudoscience: (1) deliberate obtuseness with regard to conceptual and evidentiary rigor, (2) conflation of rigorous skepticism (how could this be wrong) with undisciplined ontological relativism, (3) spurious appeal to protocols of debate appropriate for difficult questions. This covers both the woo artists and mere cowards like the WaPo ombud.

The deliberate confusions that Will and other denialists spread are net subtractions from informed debate, and harsh response seems more than appropriate.

Actually, I don’t think that is true, nor do I really think it should be true. I think that newspapers have an obligation to present opinions, especially contrary opinions, and that honest opinions can be based on things that are not ‘facts in the public domain,’ and that the Washington Post should be left out of your argument with George Will. Lord knows there are enough other reasons to criticize the Post.

I don’t agree with your characterization of Will’s citation as falsehoods. One was a slight exaggeration, implying a consensus of scientific opinion when it was actually exaggerated debate. The other was a six week time difference in measurements of the Arctic ice. This is common and accepted in opinion writing, and you’re exaggerating hugely to call it falsehood.

And finally, if you honestly think the Post offers more space to climate skeptics than those who are concerned about warming, please share some of what you’re smoking.

I, for one, never said that, because I haven’t done a careful digging through their archives to figure out if it’s true. What I said was that they offer far more space to climate “skeptics” than the fraction of the expert community that those skeptics occupy (which is more or less negligible; almost every “skeptic” I know of is a lying fraud).

As far as I can tell, everything Tom says could be equally well used to defend, say, WaPo printing an op-ed about the incredible healing powers of homeopathy. So let’s take that as an example, to decouple from the political aspects of global warming: if WaPo printed an op-ed citing spurious “science” to argue for homeopathy, Tom, would you not think they are compelled to either refuse to publish or issue some correction for the factual inaccuracies they have printed?

Eh, this is a waste of time. I see from Tom Fuller’s link above that he approvingly links to Watt’s Up With That, which means he’s full-on drinking the denialist kool-aid. Experience shows such people have no interest in the facts.

Tom, your argument distills to “newspapers don’t have an obligation to present facts, but they do have an obligation to present fiction.”

I don’t agree with your characterization of Will’s citation as falsehoods.

In two editorials, George Will has systematically changed references polar ice *surface area* to “sea ice levels,” even though the research he pretends to cite specifically refers to that cap as “younger” and “thinner” and says that ice volume is the relevant measure, for that very reason. This is how I know he’s lying.

In two editorials, George Will has used a 30+ year old popular press quote to pretend that there was a contrary scientific consensus. This is how I know he’s lying.

This reminds me of Will’s hack job on Wesley Clark back in 2004. Despite being told by several colleagues that he was wrong, Will insisted that Clark had written about a Canadian think tank that did not exist, meaning that Clark was paranoid.

Will is a lying sack of crap. That’s his profession. There’s nothing there to salvage.

No, it doesn’t.

Just for fun, then, I’ll modify the distillation of your argument: “Opinion pages don’t have an obligation to present facts, but they do have an obligation to present fiction.”

”I think that newspapers have an obligation to present opinions, especially contrary opinions”

That should read informed opinion, and one should be able to assume [foolish as that is nowadays] that the quality of [how well] informed should or does mirror the quality/status of the delivery mechanism. Of course will could care less what ‘we’ think so long as he gets a well paid forum to dispense from. One need only look back to the sound science that propelled Big Tobacco for so long; after there was no question of the science it shifted to rights of individuals to tax/black market issues. I wonder if we have the Will to quit?

As a ‘skeptic’ myself, I regret that the fools in town are on my side.

If you are an honest skeptic, more power to you. However, your coreligionists are about to give you more to cringe about.

I do not envy you.

The discussion will either continue to go nowhere, or it will stop.

But I’ll bet big money that George Will is an independent contractor and has a contract to write what he pleases for WaPo, who probably can only refuse to run a column, not edit it (except for typos and space)…..Yes, I understand that—but the contractual relationship between Will and the Post is really the driving force behind this dispute…..

If true, it was a bad contract. Especially because Will is not editorially independent, but is responsive to outside benefactors.

Anything less than a renunciation of Will’s column is too little, contract or no contract. Firing Will would be OK — he’s got a long list of various offenses. Not publishing erroneous columns would be fine too. The opinion/reporting distinction cannot be used to allow columnists to misrepresent facts. That distinction is inside baseball and people don’t read the paper that way.

As a GW skeptic Fuller would say what he’s saying.

Hi all,

JM–thanks for that. Sigh. I put the skeptic in quotation marks for a reason… I don’t consider this a religious argument at all, despite the nature of the discourse on both sides.

Political football: I doubt very much if the Post felt compelled to print it. In all probability they printed it and when controversy started they spoke with Will, and he came out with a second piece two weeks later that didn’t resolve the issue–and then they offered a platform for Mooney to respond.

Mr. Emerson, I don’t see why you feel that you or we have the right to demand anything of the Post. Don’t buy it. Tell everyone you know you think it’s a rag. Don’t patronise the advertisers–and tell them why.

Righteous Bubba–again, distinction between news reporting and editorial. I don’t honestly know if Will is an employee or freelancer, but I still think the distinction is important.

George Will’s been corrected on the facts before:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A56316-2004Feb19&notFound=true

pc-73,

Maybe an odd reading to you but not necessarily an odd reading (see e.g. lp 78) to all. I do not pretend to know a lot on this specific WaPo issue – but I do pretend to have read things here that overstretch the specific issue in ways that are detrimental to what I am guessing we all agree on: getting the facts out & allowing critical discussion.

Contra the implicit assumption that the internet blogosphere is better at that than, and even able to replace all of newspaper journalism, I have argued. If somebody here isn’t subscribing to that implicit assumption, no quarrels from me. If somebody believes it’s necessarily so that what I say implies that I hold the blogosphere has no added value, it doesn’t imply that (& my writing this here is testimony at least to my not holding it).

Journalism is a m̩tier Рone that requires more than what self-organization via internet is able to provide. Newspapers provide an organization that allows journalism, but that is not to say that newspapers are made up of only journalism. There are adds, there is a lot of entertainment, some comics, the TV-listings and there are, increasingly under an enormous pressure from the blogosphere, opinion pages.

The issue that gives rise to this discussion is about something that went wrong on some opinion page of some newspaper of some country – the type of wrongness is something is something that happens on many posts of many blogs in all countries. That’s just not a sufficient ground for throwing out the baby. It’s not even sufficient ground for strong criticism of newspaper opinion pages: their purpose is to have citizens know what kind of opinions there are, philosophically the fact of the opinion pages are the opinions & it would be really heinous if somebody misrepresented their opinion there.

PS: the strict response to the WaPo incident is that WaPo journalists investigate Will’s abuse of facts; if they don’t, another newspaper should — I know this is what happened recently over here: a newspaper journalist reporting on factual errors made by one of the same newspaper’s opinionators

Mr. Emerson, I don’t see why you feel that you or we have the right to demand anything of the Post. Don’t buy it. Tell everyone you know you think it’s a rag. Don’t patronise the advertisers—and tell them why.

Words fail me. Your statement doesn’t make sense. I’m doing nothing other than what you told me to do. In what way am I “demanding” something, and what would “not demanding” be, and what is wrong with “demanding”, and why don’t I have the “right” to do it? That’s a heap of quibbles with no real meaning.

We desperately need opinion to remain opinion and not to demand factual proof of what is being expounded.

Nobody is demanding that every opinion statement be backed by “factual proof.” What we’re saying is that it’s bad to knowingly publish demonstrably false information.

The standard Moynihan quote is: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Well yeah, Tom B: you will have noticed that there is a terrible shortage of opinion.

“The opinion/reporting distinction cannot be used to allow columnists to misrepresent facts. That distinction is inside baseball and people don’t read the paper that way.”

This seems to assume a pretty high level of stupidity and illiteracy of people who are reading newspapers. Will’s work is rather clearly labeled as Opinion. If someone doesn’t know what the word opinion means and that it is different from Facts/News, s/he probably ought to pick up a dictionary before a newspaper.

I can agree with every word Quiggin is saying about Will’s hackishness and still disagree completely that this kind of conflation:

The standard claim is that without reporters, we in the blogosphere would have no material to work on. But Will’s recycling of long-refuted Internet factoids (something very common among rightwing pundits in particular) shows that, in important respects, the opposite is true.

is appropriate. Will is not a reporter. He’s never been a reporter. He’s been a professor, a political staffer and an opinion columnist. If you want to go off on how useless reporters are, try attacking an actual reporter. Tell us how Jeffrey Gettleman’s work in the Congo — the kind of thing I’ve NEVER seen a blogger do — is not providing useful material for bloggers (and also for non-bloggers who nonetheless are interested in what’s happening to human beings outside their own neighborhoods).

Opinion pieces in newspapers are not of the “I think chocolate ice cream is tasty!” variety, where one can’t contest the opinion-holder or the grounds on which the opinion is based. I think the word “opinion” is unfortunate here, because it’s leading people to reason really poorly about what’s going on. What newspaper opinion pieces tend to be is advocacy pieces. A good op-ed should be an argument in favor of some position, and like any good argument, it should be backed up by robust facts. That Will is using the op-ed to argue in favor of a position, rather than just report “objective” facts, is no excuse for him to distort the truth. If anything, I think one could make a case that it’s worse to deploy untruths in support of convincing people of substantive policy choices than it would be to report those untruths somewhere else in the newspaper, unlinked to any suggestions about how they should be acted on.

I’m well aware that most newspaper op-eds fall well short of substantive argument supported by robust facts, but I think it’s the criterion against which they must be judged.

This seems to assume a pretty high level of stupidity and illiteracy of people who are reading newspapers. Will’s work is rather clearly labeled as Opinion. If someone doesn’t know what the word opinion means and that it is different from Facts/News, s/he probably ought to pick up a dictionary before a newspaper.

Your statement is pretty fucking stupid itself. Most people do not think that “opinion” means “license to make up facts”. And they don’t think that major newspapers habitually publish opinion pieces full of misrepresentations. I know both these things, but it isn’t widely taught or common knowledge, and it’s completely counterintuitive to people who still have a misplaced faith in the US and its institutions.

Your contempt for newspaper readers less sophisticated than yourself is despicable, and I don’t really believe that you have the requisite level of cynicism about the state of the nation. Your cynicism is of an entirely different kind.

Will’s errors were not caused by a lack of reportorial ability. They were caused by his desire to push an agenda even at the cost of deliberately misleading his readers. And the Post allows this.

127 is completely right. If your opinion is based on beliefs that are provably false, newspapers are not benefitting anyone by inflicting your opinion on them. However, one could argue that they serve a function by representing the voices of the community they serve when they print misguided letters by average joes.

But it’s totally indefensible if your “opinion” is based on “beliefs” that you yourself know are false but are representing because it’s your job to lie (e.g. the spokesman for Monsanto, George Will, the lawyers for John Gotti), and the newspaper assists you in A) promulgating your “opinion”
B) acting as if your “opinion” is actually something you believe and not just propaganda
C) acting as if you are someone who should be listened to in the first place.

Bush = Will. Honkies all look alike.

Mr. Emerson, you are a piece of work. For someone who is perfectly willing to characterise ‘most people,’ it doesn’t seem you know too much about them, either in aggregate or in selected correspondence. I feel much better about disagreeing with you on, oh, just about everything.

Mr. Quiggin,

Your exact words, which I quoted in my first comment on this thread:
“The standard claim is that without reporters, we in the blogosphere would have no material to work on. But Will’s recycling of long-refuted Internet factoids (something very common among rightwing pundits in particular) shows that, in important respects, the opposite is true.”

I assumed that the “But” was meant to conjoin the two sentences in this paragraph in some way, and that therefore there was some relationship between reporters and George Will (an opinion columnist). I thought you were saying that the columnist’s recycling of rightwing falsehoods shows that it’s untrue that reporters provide factual material on which bloggers can expand. Apologies if this was a misplaced assumption on my part.

John Emerson,

So you don’t know any of these “most people” to whom you feel so superior in your knowledge that newspapers are imperfect? No names? You just know they’re out there in anonymous masses, a proletariat whom you must protect in their naivete from the corruption of the MSM?

Emerson says:

People whose primary source of information is the Times or the Post or any other mainstream publication do not know how corrupt their source is.

This is true, but it’s also indicative of the odd turn this conversation has taken. I suppose it mitigates the damage done by the Post if everyone understands that the Post is dishonest; but it doesn’t excuse the Post’s dishonesty, nor does it make the Post a more useful source of information.

Joe says:

His facts are fine- they just offer weak support for his argument.

This is an error. The key distinction is not that Will is a hack who supports his conclusions poorly; it’s that Will makes demonstrably false factual claims. I don’t think that the Post is right in publishing people who make careless arguments, but I can understand how it happens. However, the Post is rightly reviled for publishing falsehoods and refusing to correct them.

Anonymous accurately points out the shortcomings of Thomas Friedman, but by-and-large Friedman is a nitwit who is applying a limited intellect and a gift for bullshit to the problems of the day – he’s not a fabulist in the vein of Jayson Blair or George Will. Friedman is vile for different reasons. I think a newspaper crosses an extremely important line when decides consciously to transmit false information.

And in case anyone doubts that Fred Hiatt is defending the publication of falsehoods, please note the letter sent by environmentalists to the Post:

“George Will is entitled to his own opinions, but he is not entitled to his own facts,” the letter concluded.

And Hiatt’s response:

“We looked into these allegations, and I have a different interpretation than [those who signed the letter] about what George Will is and is not entitled to,” said the paper’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt.

Hiatt then refuses to give one example of a thing that Will is not entitled to, and completely ignores the accusation that Will has presented incorrect information. Hiatt says falsely that the issue is whether Will should be permitted to draw “inferences” from correct information.

Yglesias had a nice post on it at the time that highlighted the damage done to the Post as an institution.

I don’t know if anyone is still following this thread, but a couple of other points. The business model of newspapers needs to be changed, obviously. It would be nice to say that this is because weblogs in particular are making the opinion pages obsolete, but there is no evidence for that–in reader surveys, opinion of all types is still regarded as important. It is the local power of the web that is killing newspapers, not the global, as other websites prove more effective at stimulating local action in readers, replacing classified advertising, etc.

The endgame for this will probably be a double handful of national titles with clearly expressed political philosophies, as in the UK. The Washington Post is almost certainly going to be one of these papers. Moving their business model regarding opinion should not be overwhelmingly difficult. People are already pushing against the homogenised composition of their columnists, noting how few people of color and females are part of the Pantheon. The smart response for WaPo is to bulk up their OpEd contributor list and rotate through for the print edition on a more regular basis. This would obviously work well with any of the other titles with the potential to distribute nationally.

I remember when conservative columnists truly dominated, with Safire, Buckley, Will and Krauthammer owning print, with Novak impatiently waiting for Anderson to hang ’em up. It’s a lot different now.

At the end of the day, I still do not believe we should dictate the work rules for editorial writers and that we should not impose the same standards of factual accuracy on them as we do to reporters. But I also think that we should wait and see which business model survives before we waste any more energy on this topic.

Finally, George Will pontificates just as loosely on a number of topics, but the firestorm was reserved for his column on global warming. I will never understand that as a rational allocation of your resources. With all of the topics Will is wrong about, why rage on this one? Every time I comment substantively (in my mind, at least) on global warming issues on other blogs, there are one or two commenters who so obviously cut and paste pre-prepared diatribes about anyone who does not think that global warming is killing us all that it looks a bit silly. One fellow pasted in a comment that the organisation I referred to was a Japanese think tank funded by energy sources. I was referring to JSTOR. Is this a real issue or a manufactured one?

So you don’t know any of these “most people” to whom you feel so superior in your knowledge that newspapers are imperfect? No names? You just know they’re out there in anonymous masses, a proletariat whom you must protect in their naivete from the corruption of the MSM?

WTF, you want me to a door-to-door poll and collect names? For Christ’s sake,I know people who take Fox News seriously(alas) — they’re 20-40% of the population. I’m assuming that there are people too smart to take Fox seriously, but not smart enough to discount Will. I’ve met a fair number of them, but I didn’t take down their names and it wasn’t part of a controlled study. Do you actually believe that such people don’t exist? What a sheltered life you have led!

Do I “feel superior” to these people the way you feel superior to the seemingly very rare idiots who fail to understand that lying is OK in major-media opinion pages? Not really, but I do acknowledge their existence and recognize them as a negative factor in American political culture, and as victims of the Post and Times.

I guess better Will than me… although I’m sure my turn is just around the corner.

Have I argued with you before, at EOTAW? Is there a super-duper new book or academic paper out arguing what you’re saying? I’ve heard this before, that’s for sure.

People conditioned to assume Will is a liar disbelieved him because it fit with their biases even if they don’t know squat about global warming

Absolutely true!

What you left out: the more they know about global warming, the more likely they are to believe that Will is a liar.

You’re looking worse and worse, Mr./Ms. Anonymous Blog Commenter from Permission Denied Blog.

OK, I never claimed what you said I claimed. And your revised statement hardly meshes with your accusation that I’m wrongly contemptuous of the average newpaper reader; you seem to believe that the average newspaper reader is not gullible, but a f anatic impervious to reason.

In any case, I think that the idea that media do not influence people’s political ideas is bogus and silly. It pops up here and there as a kind of new scientific discovery, and I’d be happy to be told where it comes from.

Likewise your equivalence assumption is wrong. The two sides are not equally dishonest and equally thoughtless.

What’s in question:
1. Was Will’s first column dishonest? His followup?
2. Was the Post’s response to critics adequate?
3. Should the Post correct factual misrepresentations in opinion columns? Does the label “Opinion” allow unchallenged misrepresentation of facts?
4. Do factual misrepresentations in the media have a harmful effect on the political discourse? Do even the best American newspapers do too much of that?

Yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes.

5. Should the newspapers all be abolished and destroyed forthwith?

No, but I don’t think that that was ever on the table.

Well, we’ve had the frank exchange of views. You are absolutely welcome to your load of assertions, which range from wrong-headedly contrarian to unintelligible. But then, you have your academic schtick (“paradigm”), and you have to capitalize on it somehow.

Sorry, I mistook you for Steve Fuller, an academic with a similar troll. I thought he was diversifying into other contrarian areas.

Will is neither lazy nor ignorant. He’s a malicious and very effective Republican operative. At times he enjoys pissing people off just because he can do it. For all I know, he enjoys making the WaPo look bad, because he knows they can’t touch him. But then, maybe the WaPo enjoys pissing people of too.

This isn’t carelessness or incompetence of anyone’s part. It’s recklessness at best, and most likely malice.

Will’s been around for awhile and has a long track record.

I can’t remember the name of the movie, but this reminds me of Timothy Hutton obsessing about John Houseman’s opinion of him during law school, only to find out Houseman didn’t really even know his name. The WaPo uses Will to sell papers. Will uses the WaPo to maintain his visibility. It’s really easy to assume malice, but the fact is, he’s just on the other side. Will does have a track record. It’s not a good one. But assuming evil just ‘denies agency’ to us–it means instead of making a better case, and by god on global climate change you need to make a better case, you can complain about the evil ones. Who gives a rat’s *** what his motivation is? If I were Will, I wouldn’t be laughing at my readers–I’d be laughing at my critics. Is this the best you (we) can do?

It was the Paper Chase!

I never claimed what you said I claimed.

“The opinion/reporting distinction cannot be used to allow columnists to misrepresent facts. That distinction is inside baseball and people don’t read the paper that way.”
=/=
“they don’t know the difference between the News and Opinion sections”
?

Evidently I didn’t understand what you meant by “inside baseball” and “people don’t read the paper that way.” I thought the idiomatic phrase “inside baseball” referred to things unknown to most spectators but understood by the players in the game. Are you saying that actually the distinction between news and opinion IS known to most newspaper readers?

you seem to believe that the average newspaper reader is not gullible, but a f anatic impervious to reason.

Why not try engaging what I’ve actually said (quotes are helpful!) instead of what I “seem to believe”? You’ve assembled an excellent track record thus far of inaccurately assessing what I believe. For starters, there’s a big difference between suspending skepticism for one’s team and heightening it for the opposing team (what most partisans do) and being “impervious to reason.”

I just provided you with an example, regarding the Guardian’s claim about lobbyists and climate change, of the skepticism differential: if it fits with your worldview, you accept it and move on; if it doesn’t, you check the source and discover that the claim is wrong. That doesn’t mean that you’re impervious to reason: the person who accepted the claim uncritically, if confronted with the source, will probably revoke acceptance of the claim. But given the echo-chamber nature of media consumption, the kind of person who uncritically accepts the Guardian’s claims about the vast power of climate-change-deniers never will encounter someone pointing out that the Guardian was wrong.

Tom, supposing that the Washington Post were to correct a factual statement made by George Will, would he have an actionable legal case against them, or would they just be moral lepers to be shunned by all decent people? Would it be wrong of us not to form a support group for Will if he were treated in such a fashion. If we were to just look on silently and do nothing, could we be forgiven? Would the Washington post be guilty of a a mere offense against contract law and worker’s rights if it did such a thing, or would it be journalistically unprofessional , or would it be a crime against humanity? Should a law be passed against this sort of offense, or is one already on the books which just needs to be enforce?

I think that the problem that PF and I are having is mostly in trying to figure out what makes you tick and what you’re getting at, and what you possibly could mean by the things you’re asserting with such confidence and conviction. Frankly, I’m coming up empty; we seem to be in the uncanny valley. The best I can come up with is Broderism presented with Lyndon LaRouche’s brilliant self-assurance and down-to-earth common sense, but that can’t be right.

I just provided you with an example, regarding the Guardian’s claim about lobbyists and climate change

PG, I’m a little puzzled about what you’re going for with the Guardian thing. Are you trying to say that the Guardian is behaving appropriately or inappropriately in presenting false information? Do you think the Guardian should publish a correction? Do you think the Guardian should try not to publish false information, or that the Guardian should be indifferent to the truth or falsity of its news columns? Or what?

Here’s Emerson:

“The opinion/reporting distinction cannot be used to allow columnists to misrepresent facts. That distinction is inside baseball and people don’t read the paper that way.”

And here’s PG’s restatement of Emerson;

“they don’t know the difference between the News and Opinion sections”

I think this may be one place where the conversation went astray. PG believes that the distinction between News and Opinion is that in Opinion, direct factual falsehood is acceptable, where it is not in news. (I say this pending PG’s explanation of his Guardian example, which seems to suggest that misrepresentation is okay in news, too.)

But PG’s presentation of Emerson’s view begs the question. Emerson is saying (or should be saying) that, regarding factuality, there is no difference between Opinion and News. And if Emerson’s not saying that, I am. And so is the Post, which, as Righteous B points out, has a policy of issuing corrections on opinion columns.

Yes, Opinion does (and should, in my opinion) allow license to speak wrongly on issues of fact.

Well, that’s just wrong.

Amazing what people will do when they grab on to the losing side of a discussion.

“PG believes that the distinction between News and Opinion is that in Opinion, direct factual falsehood is acceptable, where it is not in news.”

This is a particularly striking example of how badly astray one goes in relying wholly on paraphrase and never directly quoting anyone. WHERE did I say that I believed this? I don’t believe it. I think direct factual falsehoods are bad, categorically, where’er they may be, yea even when assuring one’s wife that bright orange doesn’t make her butt look bigger than black does.

What I have said consistently throughout this discussion is that people who read newspapers are aware of the distinction between News and Opinion, such that Opinion is more likely to have facts that are misstated, twisted, turned to fit the writer’s advocacy, while News is less likely to do so because news writers are not supposed to engage in advocacy.

Opinion is more likely to have facts that are misstated, twisted, turned to fit the writer’s advocacy

…so, let the buyer beware? Some people have gone so far as to state, explicitly, they no longer trust anything in the Washington Post. These people have been widely ridiculed for overreacting. Since the Post’s (publicly available) policy on correction of articles does not distinguish between their News and Opinion sections, a “let the buyer beware” attitude translates fairly reasonably to “the buyer should trust neither News nor Opinion sections from the Washington Post.”

If the Post clearly stated, “we do not verify factual claims or correct verifiable false claims made in our Opinion page articles, but will continue to correct verifiable false claims made in articles in all other sections,” and/or if the Post published a caveat at the top of the Opinion section reiterating “we do not verify factual claims or correct false claims of articles on this page,” then perhaps PG and Tom would have a stronger point.

PG, at this point I think you have to assume that political football and Mr. Emerson are jerking us around to see how long we stay on the line.

Awesome.

Tom, it’s just weird to try and understand what you are defending. It seems to me that you and PG are defending the right of newspapers to publish wrong facts and not correct them, without getting criticized by us for it. Sure, you’re going on and on and on and on and on about the difference between News and Opinion. We are aware of the difference between News and Opinion, thank you. We are aware that facts may presented selectively by an Opinion piece writer, thank you. We are also aware that people with agendas may write an Opinion piece that distorts reasonable interpretation of an event or idea by reporting extremely selectively chosen facts about that event or idea. Thank you.

However, up until a little while ago, I was not aware that the Post had ceased its longtime policy of correcting verifiable factual errors in its Opinion pages. Many people were not aware of this sudden, unannounced, and yet-to-be-codified change in editorial policy. So there was outcry. There still is outcry, as people (sensibly) point out just how stupid this change in policy is.

So, many of us have been critical of the Washington Post. You seem to be arguing that we were wrong to be critical. Let’s presume we all agree that every person should take a fully skeptical “let the buyer beware” attitude about everything, individually speaking. Stay safe in a rough world, be street smart, all that. OK.

Socially speaking, it’s necessary to speak up when there’s something we all should be wary of. Like a newspaper that has suddenly started to publish verifiable false statements, without verification or subsequent correction, in its Opinion pages despite having an explicit, publicly available policy to the contrary.

Has he taken his football and gone home?

Well, who knows. At least I’m happy because this afforded me the opportunity to clarify (also in my own mind) what really bothered me about the “controversy” over Will’s article. If the Washington Post issued a revision to its editorial policy about Opinion pages that makes it clear they’re no longer going to verify factual claims or correct falsehoods, I would feel completely satisfied. I would never bother to read a Washington Post editorial again, but I’d feel the Post was commendable for their editors’ honesty.

For more fun, we can debate the ethics of the NYTimes printing this article about Freeman Dyson that gives him a platform for bashing the work of climate scientists, despite his lack of expertise in the field. (Dyson, unlike Will, is a liberal, and seems to get to his opinion about climate change by thinking that it’s better for the poor to suffer the effects of global warming than to be denied unlimited use of fossil fuels.) He’s more slippery, since he doesn’t make false statements so much as just imply that all climate scientists are incompetent and should bow to his superior intellect.

salient,

“It seems to me that you and PG are defending the right of newspapers to publish wrong facts and not correct them, without getting criticized by us for it.”

Nope. Still having problems when you “seem” instead of quote or at least specify to which comments you are referring. I have made two assertions, beginning with my first comment @ 123:

1) Newspaper readers know the difference between News and Opinion. I added in subsequent comments that newspaper readers also know that Opinion writers often shape facts to fit their advocacy, while News writers for unknown reasons sometimes misstate the facts. Newspaper readers tend to notice the fact-shaping more when it’s done to fit advocacy that goes against the reader’s own biases, and not so much when it’s done in the News section and/or for advocacy that aligns with the reader’s biases.

2) One cannot logically base an argument about the usefulness of newspaper reporters on the truthfulness of newspaper editorialists. After I said this a couple of times, Quiggin @ 139 acknowledged that he had left a rather crucial point out of his argument, which is that with regard to climate change, reporters generally fail to do any real analysis of the science and end up relying on bloggers and other people who are engaged in advocacy. Once he stated this, I at @ 1456 said he probably was right and that this phenomenon often extends into other fields.

onymous,

“it’s better for the poor to suffer the effects of global warming than to be denied unlimited use of fossil fuels”

This sounds like a retread of Lomberg’s proposal that instead of spending money avoiding the melting of Antarctica and the further desertification of heretofore arable land, let’s spend money relocating people from the areas that will suffer from global warming to the ones that supposedly will benefit. (I hear the British wine industry is set to revive.)

No one has explained yet why anyone objected to the idea that opinion writers who misstate facts should be corrected, and that the Post was remiss in not doing so. This was one of the big issues here, but we’ve been led on this incredible wild goose chase.

For more fun, we can debate the ethics of the NYTimes printing this article about Freeman Dyson that gives him a platform for bashing the work of climate scientists, despite his lack of expertise in the field.

I don’t know. The part about Supertrees was completely fun. And there’s this:

In “roughly 50 years,” he predicts, solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and “there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal.”

So, eh. If I believed the world would largely run on solar energy within my lifetime, I wouldn’t be nearly so worried about climate change. I think this is the key point of disagreement or at least consternation: what will make solar energy cheap and abundant? Why is he so confident about these developments?

Sorry for being out of the room while so much fun was going on. Let’s see:

I don’t mind you criticizing Will or the Post for his inaccuracy. My point depends on it. It’s when you demand that action be taken to insure it doesn’t happen again that I think you’ve lost touch with reality.

I’m happy for the Post to correct errors when they see fit. Or not.

The fact that you people see fit to criticize Freeman Dyson because he has views on climate change… well, you amaze me. Do you all just hate science? I thought academics hung out here… But then I had some troll come after me when I pointed out that Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever said he was a skeptic and that global warming had become a new religion. He said that Giaever had never published on climate change and hence couldn’t comment on computer models.

But back to the subject. You didn’t like my hypothetical about a liberal opinion writer ending up in some court some day because he relied on illegal weblogs. What would satisfy you that freedom of opinion is more important to Dems than Reps? Give me some ground rules and I’ll give you a hypothesis.

Mr. Emerson, Ari Fleischner probably doesn’t know who you are. We super trolls get our marching orders from a much higher authority…

Salient, since I think you weren’t around for the sloppy part of this, no, we are not criticizing you for criticizing the Post. Or Will. But some of the participants here said up above that they demanded the Post do this and that and issue retractions and hang George Will–I exaggerate a bit–and that if somebody said something in an editorial that turned out to be inaccurate that the Post had an obligation to do something–retract, publish the truth, wear sackloth and ashes.

I seem to be somewhat out of favor because I hold the wrong opinion. That’s fine–I hold the wrong opinion (apparently) on global climate change, too. But I find it hard to understand that people don’t understand what I’m saying, which is that opinion is different from news reporting, and that it calls for different standards. Bad opinion, when it cannot be laughed at (which was probably the proper response in this case), and it cannot be ignored (which would have been a close second), should be responded to in appropriate fora such as this. Holding a gun to WaPo’s head and demanding change is absolutely over the top and would come back to haunt us in the long run.

You can disagree, think I’m facile… but how can this be hard to understand?

I am criticizing people …. who think that other readers aren’t aware of the distinction between Opinion and News, in terms of whether the writer can be expected to cherry pick and twist facts to suit himself. I think most readers are in fact aware of that distinction, though when they’ll perceive that the writer has done such twisting probably tracks with their own biases and knowledge base.

I disagree with PG about the degree to which factual deception should be allowed on opinion pages. “Making a case” (which ipinionators do) is one thing, and misrepresentations of fact are an entirely different thing.

I disagree about the degree to which ordinary newspaper readers actually do know how much deception is allowed in opinion pieces, and especially as to whether those who don’t understand this are somehow to be blamed. I really hate sharp cookies who sneer at the victims and chumps.

If PG is one of those who deny that the Post should publicly correct Will, I disagree with him* on that.

I’m not sure I know exactly what he thinks about the influence of newspaper opinion writers on public opinion, but I suspect that he’s far wrong. I still would like to see some documentation of the now-common truism that this influence is slight.

I suspect that PG is unaware of the fact that the Post and George Will have been under criticism for performing badly for many years in the first case, and for decades in the second, and that these criticisms are valid, and that this post was something like Part LXXXI of a series, adding more evidence and reaching a conclusion supported by far too much evidence already. If he is aware of this, he probably thinks of it just means that people are biased. He also seems unaware of, or in denial about, the state of global warming science, journalism, and politics).

His iterated mentions of the Guardian misrepresentation (or not) is a triple red herring. First, because of the seeming parity claim, which is false; second, because of the implied claim that liberals and radicals do not criticize the Guardians, which is egregiously and laughably false; and third, just because it’s irrelevant.

*If the elusive PG / Bertrand Russell dot com person is a lady and I have been assuming wrongly, she has my abject apologies.

And hey, where’s Tom? (I confess that I mistook Tom for PG a few times, and vice versa.)

Mr. Emerson–may I call you John?–I have indeed come back from other chores. Let’s talk briefly about the real world. Most people get what news they consume from television, and in this segmented age are probably stuck on Hannity/O’Reilly or Maddow/Olberman for what passes for opinion. Those who read the news are probably focused on the latest outrage or tragedy. Those who have a preference for opinion columns are a) old–about as old as I am, I imagine, b) set in their (our?) ways, and unlikely to faint if we see George Will in error. I think the population you describe and seem to want to defend from dastardly truthbreakers is heartbreakingly small.

WTF are you talking about?

This, I think, is kinda the deal with Tom.

WTF once more.

Oh, fine. People who worry about global warming are like the people who failed to oppose the Iraq War. WTF squared.

Googling Glaiever + “global warming” gets dozens or hundreds of iterations of the same two or three articles.

I’m guessing that even though the entire population of the Soviet Union knew that Pravda was a lie, that it still served as an effective propaganda tool. People forget where they heard things, so an oft repeated lie is easily mistaken for the truth.

Okay:
John, does your characterisation of Glaiever also extend to Mann and Hansen? How about Al Gore? Hansen’s an honest scientist, but he was as wrong as a human could be in his testimony before Congress in 1988. Look at his charts. Mann is a number-changing hack and people still point at his charts. Has Al Gore been right about anything since he began talking about climate change? He’s as bad as George Will. Since I agree with Glaiever, I doubt if I’d be objective in characterising his remarks, but I like his Nobel better than Gore’s.

As for your conflation of those worried about global warming with those who failed to oppose the Iraq war, don’t… you… think… you… missed… the… point?

As for comment 184, I’ve said several times that I think public criticism of Will’s idiocy is exactly the correct response. I think it’s for the Post to decide if they want to publish a correction, but I think offering Mooney space to respond was certainly adequate.

Did I miss anything?

What I said was that firing Will would be fine. That is my crime.

Is Mr. Fuller not aware that many, many liberals, columnists but also reporters, have been let go over the last several decades, often for accurate reporting? There’s a whole literature on that. The unfortunate precedent he so terribly fears is a standing operating procedure. The precedent is already there. It’s been set.

But precedents don’t apply to Republicans, especially when they’re employed by Republicans.

I’m actually quite aware of the firing practices in journalism, which is why I think opinion writers should not be fired for saying what they think (or even what they want other people to think that they think).

The fact that you people see fit to criticize Freeman Dyson because he has views on climate change… well, you amaze me. Do you all just hate science?

I guess I am “you people” here, and yes, I see fit to criticize Freeman Dyson because he sees fit to criticize Jim Hansen on subjects that Hansen knows infinitely more about than Dyson does, and doesn’t even seem to appreciate the basic issues involved.

As for “hate science”, ha! I actually work in the field Dyson made his biggest contributions in, so I assure you I have the greatest respect for the highlights of his scientific career. (Would you like to hear my really enthusiastic and detailed explanation of Dyson’s argument that perturbation series are asymptotic, not convergent, and how it links into all sorts of fascinating stuff like renormalons and nonperturbative corrections in QCD? No, you wouldn’t, but I assure you, it would be very enthusiastic and full of respect for Dyson’s insight.) That’s no excuse for him to bash the work of other scientists that he doesn’t understand.

What Dyson criticised was Hansen’s work in advising Gore on an Inconvenient Truth. As that film emerged riddled with errors, Dyson’s pointed criticism of Hansen on this was apropos.

I have three versions of one comment in moderation, but “asshole” is the magic word, I guess.

The gist: what Glaiever says is based on an afternoon’s googling which dredged up all the contrarian stuff.

Physicists aren’t as smart as they think. You can’t refute a life work by Googling.

Physicists have effed up econ and done their best to eff up linguisitics. They should stay out of climatology, (unless they actually want to study it).

On all further questions I refer you to Dsquared.

Tom, if you’re aware of hiring and firing practices, why did you refer to the present standard practice as a terrible problem that might be unleashed on us if anything mean were done to George Will?

The “hate science” slur was especially “WTF?” Thanks Onymous.

Tom, you don’t happen to be a LaRouchie or Scientologist, do you? I ask merely for information. Your unflappability is awesome. I could not do that.

I would go into more detail about the 1988 Hansen projections, but since they’re a standard denialist talking point (they cherry-pick Hansen’s “worst-case” curve and ignore the fact that there was a big volcanic eruption which led to temperatures basically following Hansen’s projection for what would happen if there is a big volcanic eruption), it looks like I nailed this back in 97 with “full-on drinking the denialist kool-aid”.

I checked out Pielke, and he looks extremely unpromising.

Did you get Roger Sr? He’s a very reputable scientist–he doesn’t dispute CO2 as global greenhouse gas, contributor to global warming. His son is a bit further out (although still not bad)–are you sure you didn’t get him by mistake?

No, I preferred Forrester for my CS. Does it ever strike you as strange that Lewis and Tolkien were essentially making up their own fairy tales in the same place at the same time and Tolkien had Grima Womtongue while Lewis had Wormwood proposing a toast? Just asking.

Roger Sr is hard to find, even on Prometheus.

Hansen was out by a degree in 1988, even though CO2 emissions were higher than he postulated.

Or not: scenario B slightly overestimated forcings, and had a trend consistent with observations. Notice that error bars on all of the numbers are pretty large, but it’s clearly getting the right trend within a reasonable uncertainty band.

At any rate, very little of the case for anthropogenic global warming and estimates of its severity actually depends on general circulation models, although they are useful.

I don’t see much point in arguing further; you seem to be repeating talking points, I’m citing RealClimate for responses. Neither of us are expert enough to have a very serious discussion (I’ve been making a semi-serious effort to build up real expertise on climate, but I’m still far better off just pointing people to RealClimate). But what’s clear is that Hansen has been doing solid science for decades, with an impressive track record of matching theory to data. Dyson has no comparable track record on climate.

I will resign also, though if Tom wants to respond to 184/208 I’d be happy to read his response.

Mr. Emerson, good night. I replied to 184 at 213, and you responded to it.

God forbid we ever know what Tom thinks about the issue. Only H.P. Lovecraft could imagine that.

In short, Jesus, you’re full of shit.

Oh screw you John.

Hi Salient
Thank you for your patience, at the very least. I reacted strongly to Mr. Emerson’s call for Will to be fired. I think this would be dangerous. As he points out, it has been used in the past to devastating effect against liberal journalists.

It should be fairly obvious that I do not advocate dishonesty on the part of writers in any forum. This includes the Washington Post. To claim that I do is just playing games. I believe that reputational risk is adequate incentive to move senior management at newspapers to push for corrective measures.

Case in point: It seems to be commonly held here that Hiatt and other senior management types at WaPo are conservative hacks–or worse (please tell me if I am unfairly characterising the comments and indeed, Mr. Quiggin’s original post). And yet, in one month they managed to convince Mr. Will to write a follow-up article, and when that threw gasoline on the flames, they offered Mr. Mooney space to respond. What further corrective action is appropriate? What is broken here?

John Emerson @ 199,

I can’t debate someone who even after repeated requests that he quote my actual words instead of paraphrasing, continues to make arguments based on what it “seems” I think and what “implied” claims I’ve made. It’s absolutely futile to keep saying over and over But I didn’t say that and don’t think that, and indicative of a lack of good faith on your part, as well as that of political football and salient, that you’ve necessitated my saying that over and over. It would be one thing if you were quoting me (as I have done when I criticize) and I realized that what I’ve written is easily misinterpreted or misunderstood (as Quiggin acknowledged), but that’s not what’s happened.

So yay, you win!

I did not call for Will to be fired. What I said was “Firing Will would be OK —he’s got a long list of various offenses. ” And that set you off.

People get fired all the time. Kristol just now, and lots of better people than Will or Kristol. Will has conflicts of interests sufficient to justify firing and has always had a weak appreciation of journalistic ethics. He was a political operative when hired and I don’t think he’s ever stopped being one. This isn’t the first time he’s misrepresented facts.

What is broken here?

It’s still at the “He said, she said — opinions on the shape of the earth differ” level. Various steps were taken, but there was no correction issued.

I would like to suggest that repeatedly stating that one hasn’t shared one’s opinion, and then mocking others for trying to decipher one’s opinion, is possibly the most aggravation-inducing approach to blog commenting I’ve seen.

No shit. Sympathy with global warming is the only motivation I can see for Tom’s uncanny-valley argumentation. Everything else he says is too lightweight and peripheral. Without the premise that Will is just plain wrong, which Tom does not accept (or is on plausible-deniability deep cover about), most of what people other than Tom and the mysterious PG have said on this thread makes no sense.

Your number writing ability is as suspect as other elements of your writing style. Are you a numerologist, perhaps?…..It’s not that they win, it’s more that they are left in possession of the field of battle. Which can often be true of corpses.

At last we got a non-oily human, nearly- response out of the little shit. Tetchy, Tetchy, Tom.

The relentless, weaselly argumentative style does remind me of C.S. Lewis’s ingenious, evasive, unbearable apologetics and polemics.

Kieran Healey has to be cackling. I have been outtrolled. I am no longer the Alpha Troll. **sniff**

I came here to talk about ethics in journalism

Not to praise, but to bury.

A little to the left.

Let’s imagine John Quiggin is writing for a major newspaper. He typically writes editorial comment, but dabbles in investigative journalism. In 2016 a Republican administration takes over and restarts many of the illegal, immoral and fatuous policies of Bush the Younger. Specifically, the administration requires the EPA to take their hands off CO2 as a pollutant. Imagine further that you are all absolutely correct about global climate change and that I am sadly mistaken. Quiggin writes a week’s worth of columns detailing brilliantly the error of the administration. Unfortunately, most of his sources are anonymous employees of the EPA and other government offices that post on little know blogs. The administration goes directly to the senior editor of the newspaper and demands a retraction and front page publication of their official data, which is at odds with what Quiggin reports. Who wins this fight? At what point do they begin to reference this kerfuffle as justification?

Tom, most of what you say makes little sense to anyone who’s not a global warming skeptic. I just can’t believe that for you this is all about journalistic ethics and freedom of opinion, because the argument you have concocted is too flimsy.

Why do you invent a 2016 future hypothetical to exemplify a situation which is actual now and has been indefinitely? Liberals get fired for being wrong already, and sometimes for being right too, whereas conservatives don’t. You have inflated a hypothetical firing which I have stated would be OK with me (and have not demanded) into a world-changing event, which it would be only in the sense that a conservative was being held to the same rules as a liberal. And you’ve gotten nearly hysterical about it, representing my opinion as worse than it actually was and also assuming that lots of people were saying what I said. The vehemence and intensity behind your arguments is still hard for me to figure.

You have also elevated an invulnerable Republican operative planted on the WaPo editorial page into the goldmine canary of free speech, which is laughable. My guess is that because of outside connection Will is bigger than Hiatt now, accounting for the feeble institutional response.

Well, at least the oily publicist has been replaced by the Jack Palance simulacrum tough guy.

Tetchy, tetchy.

Tom, what most people proposed was a correction, a relatively small thing in itself with prior precedent, and which the paper encourages you to think is possible and reasonable.

Your mania seems to inflate this into some catastrophic situation. It makes you look nuts.

Following along though, it’s fun wondering what you think a firing offense for an opinion journalist might be.

This is the thread that never ends, isn’t it?

There is no question, thanks to Arrhenius, that greenhouse gases exist, that CO2 is among them, that more CO2 will tend to push trend temperatures upwards. Its implications for the future are serious and worthy of much more study.

That’s a good start….

The theory that increased CO2 will trigger a positive feedback cycle in other temperature forcing mechanisms is interesting, but there is little to no evidence of this actually taking place.

On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence. Would you like me to dig up references from paleoclimate data, to start?

This is the thread that never ends, isn’t it?

It’s entertaining and full of irony:

“Even some journalists sympathetic to Kristol say his Times writing was often predictable and not his best work, and noted that he had to correct three factual errors,” observed The Washington Post in a story that also announced the paper would begin publishing monthly columns by Kristol.

Do you want to include those references that show CO2 lagging temperature change?

Definitely! It’s an example of the positive feedback effect. You already admitted that CO2 makes temperatures increase. The fact that CO2 increases tend to follow temperature increases shows that increased temperatures lead to more CO2 in the atmosphere (e.g. emerging from the oceans, where the solubility of CO2 changes in response to temperature changes), and that increased CO2 in turn drives temperatures up further.

That’s absolutely the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. Thanks, RB.

It’d be funnier if I could link properly. The source, if anyone cares:

http://newmexicoindependent.com/21397/nyt-hires-youngest-ever-conservative-columnist

Knock down clown, onymous.

LAst time Onymous and I met, he hated me. But a greater threat has arisen.

The enemy of my onymous is my friend.

Salient and PG, sorry to intrude on what is actually an interesting and germane response to the topic of this post (how dare you?). Emerson, if you consider me a threat, you are not yet ready for the real world.

Er, that would be the friend of my enemy is onymous?

Salient (why does this feel off topic to me all of a sudden?) I don’t know why you assume good faith in opinion writers. I certainly don’t. I don’t think I’ve seen reader surveys that suggest that most people do. I think they deserve space in which to operate, but I certainly do not see in the opinion pages extant today much sign of its existence.

All laudable expectations and behaviour, I guess. But I am assuming you came to some reasoned judgement of Mr. Will some time before this episode, is that correct? I guess my point is, isn’t this to some extent being angry at a dog for barking?

Knock down clown, onymous.

Unfortunately, today I keep getting distracted by work (i.e. doing Real Science, not just Fake Internet Science). But my understanding is that the climate sensitivity error bars have been shrinking, partly from paleoclimate and partly from other things — again, I’m no expert, but I have read some relevant papers and might find the time to dig up the references soon. The point is, there’s some simple greenhouse estimate of the warming effect of CO2 assuming no feedbacks. Climate sensitivity includes the feedbacks, so is more a measure of the actual warming effect of CO2, and is determined not only from models but from past measurements of temperature and CO2 concentrations (which are what I would like to list some good references for). Climate sensitivity has a slightly weird definition because it’s an equilibrium response including fast feedbacks, for some definition of “fast”, but we’re not in equilibrium (and changing the forcing much more rapidly than in typical past eras!) and there’s also observational data on things like thawing permafrost and melting icecaps that are also relevant to the question of how large feedbacks are. Google will turn up details that I don’t have the time to supply at the moment.

But I’m still a little puzzled, since Tom has agreed that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we are emitting CO2, the CO2 does drive temperature increase, and that there are positive feedbacks. Maybe the word “other” was doing all the work in the thing about doubting that CO2 leads to positive feedbacks “in other temperature forcing mechanisms”?

But I am assuming you came to some reasoned judgement of Mr. Will some time before this episode, is that correct?

Mr. Will, perhaps, but not the Post. Oh, a further corollary. I also hold newspapers to the same standards, via their editorial staff. I will admit, I figured the Washington Post was at least verifying the factual information in their Opinion pages, and would correct any emergent errors in accordance with their published, publicly available policy. It’s that policy, and their adherence to it, on which their credibility and authority relies.

They have refused to correct themselves, in a high-profile case. Who knows what happens in low-profile cases; digging around I found some ombudsman’s evidence of stories dating back to 2004 with systematic substantive errors, complained about through official channels, that have gone uncorrected. Hmm. Some of this I can understand — finite resources, priorities — but in a high-profile case, Hiatt did a cost-benefit analysis and decided to not issue an explicit correction. Weaseled out instead by offering someone a chance to rebut.

Furthermore, the editors and editor-in-chief (Hiatt) have refused to update their corrections policy to reflect any difference between News and Opinion in corrections policy. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume the Post won’t follow its own corrections policy anywhere in the paper (or, to be more accurate, they’ll follow it inconsistently and thus unreliably).

Hence, for now, I’m not relying on the Post for news information. They lost a reader of their newspaper (and from the sound of it, not just me, so not just one). Furthermore, I feel perfectly justified in raising a stink wherever it’s generally appropriate to stink-raise about the issue (i.e. wherever it’s on-topic).

Some discussions of global warming fail to explicitly mention methane, and thus are, for internet debate purposes, simply wrong.

Salient, FWIW, I quit anything more than casual perusal of the Post at about the time of the Iraq invasion. However, they do still have some good reporters there. If I can say anything here, it is do not expect a news media organisation to be a font of wisdom or diligent on post publication fact-checking. These people are losing money, and they rush through the fact checking before a story goes to press. The last thing they want is to check numbers after they’ve sold the day’s soap. Don’t tell Emerson, but there is no person and no function for fact checking opinion. Period. It comes in, it gets proofed, it goes up, everybody gets paid, it’s a convenient way to fill a hole. It’s cheaper than reporting.

Emerson, you actually said something almost intelligent. The Post plays no significant role in American public life. That’s pretty close to true. Your schtick, however, is getting stale. Not rep, not freak not even troll, just little ol’ me, LoL…

If you actually saw how George Will makes a living… he does the column for little or no money (maybe $50K/year, max) to keep him viable for TV opps and the lecture circuit. Because he’s paid what he considers peanuts, he’s not going to spend time fact-checking his own stuff. When he does, his bow tie revolves excitedly because he used one of those internet linkie things. Invulnerable Republican operative… The Post has a reliable source of conservative comment and occasional controversy, but most importantly it has a predictable cost base for one filled hole. For them, that is the key consideration. The Post hopes Will doesn’t screw up. Will hopes he doesn’t screw up. Those internet linkie things can really turn on you. But if he does, everybody deals with it as best they can and it’s on to the next one.

If you actually saw how George Will makes a living…

Compare and contrast:

I don’t honestly know if Will is an employee or freelancer, but I still think the distinction is important.

Hi Salient,

My point is that if WaPo died tomorrow, your friends would easily get news somewhere else, and George Will would find some other journalistic bastion to publish him. RB, what Will does on a daily basis is not dependent on whether he gets a W2 or a 1099, in my opinion.

My point is that if WaPo died tomorrow, your friends would easily get news somewhere else, and George Will would find some other journalistic bastion to publish him.

No, your point has been (for example) that people should not encourage the WaPo to fire George Will (245); that writers of opinion pieces have a license to lie and should have a license to lie and that editors ought to bear no responsibility for correcting these lies (158.3); that we should see license to lie in opinion pieces as a good thing (158.4); that newspapers like the WaPo have no substantial effect on discourse (158.5). These are the points you have made, that I have taken issue with.

But I’ll respond to your latest point, #297. My reply: So what? Points of the form “if X disappeared, we’d all get on” are usually not worth making. Random example: If CT went permanently offline for some reason, we’d go find something else to do. If the U.S. monetary system spontaneously collapsed this moment, we’d find some way to reconstruct some kind of economy that keeps us alive and variously employed. Why should I let that kind of fatalism guide my reactions to events in the world?

Your schtick, however, is getting stale.

Noted without comment.

294: Salient, facts only muddy the waters. Cut it out. Besides, you didn’t do a controlled study.

I think my view of the world of news is more accurate, and it leads me not to rage, cynicism or fatalism.

The antidepressant approach to reality. If it works for you…..

…but I must say I didn’t think CT was one of them.

Must be nice to get to use the editorial ‘we’ for once, eh?

John, they’ve identified your fatal weakness — you are unable to quit an argument. They have you pinned here in a diversionary tactic while the main body of forces have attacked elsewhere. Trollblog already has ten posts on the joys of romance in the springtime.

Tom Fuller, just so you know, Emerson is going around elsewhere on the Internet saying that in an epic battle of trolls, he fought you to a draw here. Emerson is a powerful and influential troll, effortlessly able to befuddle the minds of lesser folk, and I fear you may never get proper credit among the stupefied masses for what you have accomplished in this thread.

Please know that we who witnessed this, we understand that your evasions, provocations and unpredictable illogic were relentless. You wield a non sequiter the way that Frazier employed his powerful left arm in the fifteenth round against Ali in their first fight.

Be assured that you have earned an honored place in the Troll Hall of Fame. A magnificent performance. Well done.

As promised, I’ve been looking into the literature a little bit. It looks like for the one number characterizing climate sensitivity (i.e. equilibrium temperature response to doubled CO2, including fast feedbacks), paleoclimate data doesn’t provide very useful constraints. (Paleoclimate data is useful for all sorts of things, like testing models, exhibiting various feedbacks, etc., but not so useful for getting a precise numerical value of this one number.)

Constraints on climate sensitivity come, among other places, from the observed 20th century warming, cooling after volcanic eruptions, the climate of the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago, and the Maunder Minimum when solar activity was low around 300 years ago. In general, temperatures are more easily measured than radiative forcing, so the uncertainties tend to come from characterizing the forcings (how much CO2, how much sulfate aerosols, how to translate their concentrations to a forcing in W/m^2). Another difficulty is that the observed temperature isn’t the equilibrium temperature response, as the oceans take up heat and one has to adjust for what the eventual atmospheric temperature would be once that heat is released.

Some of the literature:
Forest et al., Science 295, 113 (2002): use recent climate measurements to estimate 5% to 95% confidence band of 1.4 to 7.7 K for climate sensitivity. Use ocean temperature observations to help reduce the uncertainty from ocean heat uptake. (The 7.7 K end of that estimate is disturbingly large, but see below.)

Gregory et al., Journal of Climate 15, 3117 (2002): put 5% confidence lower bound of 1.6 K, using surface temperature data and ocean temperature observations. Their probability distribution has a long upper tail.

In fact there was a paper by Roe and Baker, Science 318, 629 (2007) that recently argued that these long tails in the direction of large temperature increase are an inherent property of the climate system, and are very difficult to constrain further.

On the other hand, Annan and Hargreaves, Geophysical Research Letters 33 L06704 (2006) put together various other estimates from observed warming, volcanic cooling, and the LGM to conclude that there is less than 5% probability that climate sensitivity is above 4.5 K. Urban and Keller, Geophysical Research Letters (in press) also argue that the fat upper tails can be reduced by measuring ocean heat uptake and aerosol forcings more precisely.

In short, it seems that observational constraints tend to agree with the 1.5 K to 4.5 K estimates of climate forcing from GCMs. As far as I can tell from this quick look at things, the probability distributions emerging from the data say very clearly that the climate sensitivity is highly unlikely to be smaller than 1.5 K, and as I mentioned above, “climate sensitivity” by definition omits slow feedbacks that potentially make the problem worse. Also, it seems that progressively better measurements and statistical techniques are chipping away at the high end of the fat tail. A most likely value somewhere in the neighborhood of 3K seems like a good bet.

Hi,er, Onymous,

Many thanks for scaring this stuff up. Most of these I have not seen and I will look at them. My prior reading on this left me with the impression that the early consensus was around 1.5, and that as the issue got politicised (that’s purely my subjective characterisation, obviously), the forcing got jacked up. But, hey–it could be the science, and the papers you’ve found. I owe you one, and again, many thanks.