I found George Will’s latest column against global warming to be pathetic and ironic. He relies on the same wispy curiosity of history as do the other desperate neocon global warming deniers: that a few scientists in the 70’s thought we were going through a cooling period. He even refers to a New York Times article which implied that cooling was “widely considered inevitable” and was “well established” without citing by whom. In truth, global temps fluctuate. The graph is not a smooth line but a squiggly one - a squiggly one with a definite trend upward. In the early seventies, there was a fluctuation downward that reversed itself within a few years. The overall record is one of clear and accelerating increase, most notably since the beginning of the modern industrial and automobile age. Simply put, if you drive a gasoline powered vehicle, or use coal produced electricity, you’re taking stored carbon from underground and putting it up into the atmosphere, where it makes the temperature go up.

Even Gregg Easterbrook, whose “Law of Doomsaying” Will extols in his column, said in a 2006 article, “As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I’m now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert.”

But what truly makes Will’s latest screed ironic is not just the wonderful Speak Out column by Rev. Tafoya that appeared right below Will’s, encouraging people to take action against global warming. No, it is the report that was released almost simultaneous to George Will’s piece in Sunday’s paper. Professor Chris Field, speaking to the American Science conference in Chicago, reports that greenhouse gas emissions increased in the last eight years far more rapidly than previously thought, and that previous predictions on the rate of change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were significantly underestimated.

In other words, global warming is real and its severe. Denying it won’t help address the problem or meet the challenges. Nor, it seems, will it stop the continuing flow of these types of columns from George Will and his cohorts.