A few weeks ago, I noticed a few bloggers debating which Wall Street Journal editorial was the most fundamentally dishonest. There are almost too many pieces to choose from, but I’d argue that today’s gem on global warming is at least as bad as anything I’ve ever seen the paper run.
You know the story: NASA slightly revised its record of average annual temperatures in the United States since 2000 after a Canadian blogger and global warming skeptic found a small computer error. The glitch altered the overall global mean temperatures by one-one-thousandth of a degree, NASA corrected its charts, and the agency gave the person who noticed full credit for the catch. The trends remain the same, and scientists’ understanding of climate change is entirely unaffected.
Limbaugh, Fox News, and conservative blogs threw a fit, but their whining had no basis in reality. Once the right’s claims had been thoroughly debunked, conservatives moved on — and today the Wall Street Journal editorial board moved in.
The new data undermine another frightful talking point from environmentalists, which is that six of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. Wrong. NASA now says six of the 10 warmest years were in the 1930s and 1940s, and that was before the bulk of industrial CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere.
Look, this is just silly. The minor computer error was entirely inconsequential. As Brad Plumer recently explained, “The global temperate record, in which 2005 is still the hottest year and Al Gore’s claim that nine of the ten hottest years in history have occurred since 1995 is still operative…. Nothing’s really changed. All told, it’s a tempest that deserves a very tiny teapot.” But the Journal keeps hacking away.
If nothing else, the snafu calls into question how much faith to put in climate change models. In the 1990s, virtually all climate models predicted warming from 2000-2010, but the new data confirm that so far there has been no warming trend in this decade for the U.S. Whoops.
It’s hard not to appreciate the WSJ’s use of the phrase “calls into question.” The point is to just blur the line and create confusion, so that the audience will throw up its arms in frustration and look at this as a he-said/she-said controversy. That’s the m.o. global-warming deniers have been using for quite while now.
The Journal’s claims are just wrong. Worse, the paper must realize it’s wrong, but it’s making the claims anyway.
Kevin posted a very helpful chart a couple of weeks ago showing the global warming trend, accounting for the corrected glitch. It’s unmistakable — and easy enough to read that even a WSJ editor can understand it.
The Journal added this fascinating observation in its editorial:
So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency’s Web site.
Got that? The Wall Street Journal is disappointed that NASA didn’t issue a press release to highlight a statistically-insignificant change to a computer model that continues to show the same global warming trend that existed before.
The Journal’s editors better enjoy this now, because once Rupert Murdoch takes over, there’s no way he’ll tolerate sloppy, uninformed, breathtakingly dishonest editorials like this one. Oh wait….