Green Energy Reporter

His column followed comments by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who last week in the Los Angeles Times, warned of dire consequences if carbon emissions kept rising at their current rate.

Responding to Chu, Will asserted:

“Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.”

The Center for American Progress’ Climate Progress blog bluntly asked, “Is George Will the most ignorant national columnist?” The answer, according to the blog, is “yes”.

Climate Progress also said:

“Believing in climate science doesn’t make one a pessimist. It is Will who is the eco-pessimist, since he doesn’t believe eco-technology can solve our problems. I am not ‘weirdly optimistic’ — I am unjustifiably optimistic, given the blinkered refusal of conservatives to admit there is even a problem.”

Will’s column also highlighted that in the 70’s, environmentalists panicked at the prospect of another climate change issue: the cooling down of the planet. But Ezra Klein on his blog at the American Prospect debunks this parallel assertion, noting that while climate cooling gained media traction, the scientific community never embraced that theory.

Klein writes:

“There needs to be some sort of Godwin’s Law variant for conservatives who try to argue against global warming because they remember that Newsweek dipped into pop-science in the mid-70s and touted ‘global cooling’. Call it Will’s Law, after George Will, the supposedly cerebral conservative who brings this up every time he doesn’t have a better column idea.”

Bradford Plumer at The Vine, The New Republic’s environment and energy blog, also notes that this is not the first time Will writes about  “global cooling”.

“[George Will] peddled the ‘global cooling’ canard numerous times before, and it’s been debunked again and again. Why George Will would want to use his platform to mislead readers rather than enlighten them is his own business, I guess, but someone has to sweep up the wreckage.”

In his column, Will, citing a decades old study by the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, also argued that  “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

Talking Points Memo posted a stark response by the ARC itself, which in a statement wrote, “it did not know where George Will is getting his information… ” and found it disturbing  “that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts. ”

The U.S. is about to set on an unprecedented spending spree to halt climate change and the debate continues.