George Will's latest column in the Washington Post affords us a fascinating insight into how certain climate change myths pass through the media unchallenged

Does anyone have a hope of beating John Tomlinson's fantastic record? Can the other climate change deniers catch up and snatch the beautiful Christopher Booker prize from him before the competition closes on 31 December? Not on current form.

I don't mean to do them down. They're doing their best, as today's nomination shows, but Tomlinson has set a remarkably high bar.

I have put George Will forward not because his latest column on climate change has a hope of winning this prestigious award, but because it affords us a fascinating insight into how certain myths pass through the media unchallenged.

All these howlers are examples of stories that, for climate change deniers, are too good to check. They come up again and again on websites and in newspapers, which accept them without examination. Perhaps because George Will is one of the paper's star columnists, they have now found their way into the Washington Post, which prides itself on fact-checking.

Claim one:

"In the 1970s, a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" … "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age"

Fact:

A recent paper (pdf) in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society shows that"

... despite active efforts to answer these questions, the following pervasive myth arose: there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent ... A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth's basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then.

Interestingly, this paper cites two of George Will's earlier columns as perpetuating the myth. He seems to have ignored the journal's attempt to put him right. But what does the American Meteorological Society know?

Claim two:

Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began.

Fact:

I can find no evidence of this. The published evidence suggests that the increase in Arctic sea ice this year has been significantly lower than the average since 1979, and follows a very similar trajectory to that of 2006-07.

Claim three:

According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Fact:

When I contacted to the Arctic Climate Research Center to ask if this claim was correct, the Center's Bill Chapman wrote this:

No, it is not correct. I don't know where they are getting that. As of today, there are 1.43m km sq less Arctic sea ice than this same date in 1979. (Roughly the size of two Texas-sized states).

You might remember that John Tomlinson made the same claim. So where and how did this myth originate? All clues gratefully received.

Claim four:



According to the UN World Meteorological Organization [WMO], there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.

Fact:

The most recent WMO statement (pdf) shows a continuing warming trend over the past decade, and reports that "the linear warming trend over the past 50 years (0.13C per decade) is nearly twice that for the past 100 years."

Credit where it's due: Will's article didn't contain many facts, and he managed to get most of them wrong. Sadly, there was just too much padding.

To compete with Mr Tomlinson, he will either have to write much longer articles, or pack more into his columns. He knows what he has to do: will he now rise to the challenge?

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