You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

Wapo Newsflash: George Will Is Still Wrong

Dave Roberts notes that The Washington Post's own news reporters—in this case Juliet Elperin and Mary Beth Sheridan—are explicitly calling out their co-worker George Will in their piece on the decline of Arctic sea ice today:

The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

You don't usually see news reporters criticizing their own papers' op-ed columnists, but in this case, it was long overdue. Meanwhile, one of the Post's in-house bloggers, Andrew Freedman, just wrote up a more thorough takedown of Will's misleading climate columns. (I did an early post when Will first tried to revive the "scientists predicted an imminent Ice Age in the 1970s!" myth—short version: no, they didn't—but I didn't have the heart to keep following up...)

--Bradford Plumer