Proposal : Have a upper-level undergraduate Thermodynamics final exam selected at random from a large collection of reputable Universities.

Administer the exam to Will and Hiatt and to, say, Energy Secretary Chu. Grade the papers with the names covered up.

Reveal the results .... drinks all round !

If you don't know science, do not pontificate about it. If you don't know economic theory and history, leave it to the experts.

If you have a political agenda to pander, then comment on anything and everything that "proves" your case.

Pretty simple, really.

...then this one "misleading" column gets distributed, uncorrected, and appears in a number of the remaining daily local newspapers across the land, provoking screeching by the local flat-earth contingencies who then submit their own letters to the editor, citing the aforementioned misleading column as proof that global warming is hooey.

Round and round and round she goes....

A few years ago a Federal appeals court ruled that a Fox News station had a legal right to lie in its broadcasts. So we should give George Will and the Washington Post a break here. They are merely exercising their constitutional right to lie in the guise of informing the public. On the other hand, that's not much of an incentive for anyone to read what they publish.

Send the information to the new Washington Post ombudsman. See if you get a reaction from that office.

This is not the first time Will has done this. I've noticed that since Will is a historian he regularly uses very obscure historical events to make some point in his columns, and since nobody has usually never heard of them, he can take them out of context and spin them to back up his point. He recently did this with an Einstein quote "god does not play dice" to argue that quantum physics showed proof of a god (and science in general). Only what Will never said that Einstein was wrong in his statement since quantum physics does rely on statistics and probabilities, and not yes/no answers. The quote was actually an embarrassment for Einstein, who never really accepted quantum physics, but Will spun the whole thing contrary to what happened, and since it was so obscure no one really noticed.

It is at moments like these that I do not lament the precipitous decline of broadsheet media.

There is a crisis in journalism. Irresponsible bloggers who do not understand the professional ethics may get to ask questions at news conferences.

WaPo's glory days died with Katharine Graham. Since her departure the paper has been a floundering, pusillanimous mess, and this latest bit of absurdity comes as no surprise. Once upon a time the paper had reporting and editorial standards that could be respected. No more.

As someone who regularly proofs material from the Washington Post group, the notion that the Post doesn't fact-check columnists doesn't surprise me at all. I've excised or rewritten paragraphs from Post columnists that containeed misleading or outright wrong information.

I don't consider myself to be some super-genius in public policy or politics, either. So an fairly Ordinary Joe like me finding these errors was disturbing.

That said, the Post's writers are a load better than those clueless cretins in the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Has anyone pointed out that this clearly calls for a blogger ethics panel?

Thanks for covering this and please continue to do so. These creeps have no compunction about lying.

I don't think we'll see a correction from the Washington Post here. Only one of the two misrepresentations identified by TPM is technically wrong, and that one is only wrong by two months time.

Regarding the World Meteorological Organization information, as TPM notes above, Will's statement is technically true. Will put a misleading spin on the facts, but that seems fairly common in opinion pieces.

Regarding the Arctic Climate Research Center (ACRC) information, Will's statement was apparently based on this January 1, 2009 article from Michael Alsher's blog at DailyTech. Mr. Alsher claims that, based on ACRC data, global sea ice levels ended 2008 at the same level as 1979, meaning that the global sea ice area variable was the same on December 31, 2008 as it was on December 31, 1979. The ACRC has responded to Mr. Alsher that reliance on the global sea ice area variable is misleading because it masks changes in the northern versus southern hemispheres. The northern hemisphere icea area was almost 1 million sq. km below values from late 1979 with increases in the southern hemisphere partly offsetting the difference. (Apparently, this is consistent with some climate change models that predict a temporary increase in sea ice in the southern hemisphere.) Although contending that Mr. Alsher's article is misleading, the ACRC does not appear to dispute that his narrow claim is technically true.

Thus, to be technically correct (albiet misleading), Will's sentence needs change only to: "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels ending 2008 equal those of 1979." (Will's actual sentence was: "According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.") I doubt that the difference between "now" versus "ending 2008" will be enough to persuade the Washington Post to issue a correction.

George Will is a disgusting liar, yes. But does Hiatt sleep with Matt Drudge?

Let's step back for a moment and contemplate the enormity of Will's criminal behavior here. What he is doing is the moral equivalent of yelling from a position of authority "there's no fire!" in a crowded theater the size of the planet, when the theater is actually on fire.

Hopefully, if worst comes to worst, and that is at this writing the most likely although entirely unnecessary scenario, the human race will leave a memorial to itself with the names of those who betrayed it engraved for an eternity on a desert planet that once was our green world, and George Will's name will be prominently displayed.

If Dan Rather lost his job for a clearly correct story that utilized documents that could not be authenticated or proven false, why should Will be permitted to retain his job when he invents facts to suit his ideology? How about it, ABC?

Just to mention it: I've refused to read Will for literally decades over this very thing. I used to love his wit, but in time, I came to realize he made things up. If you took on board what he was saying or God help you, quoted him, you were making a fool out of yourself.

Now some others have noticed, too. A bit little and late for me, though it needed to be said.

I wonder if Will also believes --like Cheney-- that the Chinese are drilling for oil off the Cuban coastline?

Hilzoy at Washington Monthly's blog Political Animal pointed out an even more egregious example.

As part of the column, Will makes the claim that scientists used to be concerned about Global Cooling (with the implication that if they reversed course completely like that, why should their new conclusions be trusted). To support it, he includes quotes from several sources, including one from Science magazine (the only peer-reviewed source in his list).

In the original article, the sentence Will quoted from reads "When such a model is applied to Vernekar's astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

Only the bolded text was excerpted by Will.