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For the past couple weeks, I’ve been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example I’ve focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.
I have argued that George Will’s claims would have not have passed the standard fact-checking carried out by many magazines. He even manages to add extra errors in his second column, which is just a defense of his first. A number of other bloggers have also criticized the Post on similar grounds. The Washington Post editorial staff has responded on three occasions, most recently and at the greatest length this morning. As I’ll explain below, it’s not much of a response.
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