George Will forcefully advocates science—but mocks scientists’ climate consensus
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8142
How should scientists and science’s supporters view the work of Washington Post syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator George F. Will?
In 1974, not long after earning a political science PhD at Princeton, Will was serving on a US senator’s staff when Post editorial-page editor Meg Greenfield saw potential in him as a columnist. She must have been right. By 1977, he had earned a Pulitzer Prize. Today the Post declares that with “more than 450 newspapers and his appearances as a political commentator,” Will might well have earned stature as “the most influential writer in America.”
In recent years, though, his energetic scoffing at scientists’ climate consensus has earned him the ire and contumely of many consensus advocates. Yet his 4 October column calls to mind a long record of serious advocacy of science generally.
Will puts sarcasm into his climate scoffing, but earnest eloquence into his columns advocating science. The 4 October column sought to persuade readers of the importance of the veteran Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and “its much more capable successor,” the James Webb Space Telescope, named after a former NASA administrator. Consider a passage illustrating Will’s hope to inspire readers concerning space science—and reflecting his belief that Webb will “express our species’ dignity as curious creatures":
Our wee solar system is an infinitesimally small smudge among uncountable billions of galaxies, each with uncountable billions of stars. Our Milky Way galaxy, where we live, probably has 40 billion planets approximately Earth’s size. Looking at the sky through a drinking straw, the spot you see contains 10,000 galaxies. Yet the cosmos is not crowded: If there were just three bees in America, the air would be more congested with bees than space is with stars. Matter, however, is not all that matters.
The United States’ manned moon expeditions ended in 1972, but modern cosmology began with the 1965 discovery that the universe is permeated with background radiation. This, like everything else, is a residue of the Big Bang, which, in a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, set stuff—some of it now congealed into galaxies—flying apart. The recipe for our biophilic (friendly to life) planet was cooked in the universe’s first one-hundredth of a second.
At the end he offers a thought often seen or heard when physicists defend expensive national research tools:
Space exploration began from Cold War imperatives, producing rocketry, intelligence satellites and national prestige. Webb, which only the United States could make happen, does not contribute to the nation’s defense, but, as its creators say with justifiable pride, it makes the nation all the more worth defending.
Two years ago, Will published another physics-research-praising column . It began with an extraordinary prediction:
PRINCETON, N.J. In a scientific complex on 88 bucolic acres near here, some astonishingly talented people are advancing a decades-long project to create a sun on Earth. When—not if; when—decades hence they and collaborators around the world succeed, their achievement will be more transformative of human life than any prior scientific achievement.
The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s (PPPL) focus—magnetic fusion research—began at the university in 1951. It was grounded in the earlier work of a European scientist then living in Princeton. Einstein’s theory that mass could be converted into energy had been demonstrated six years earlier near Alamogordo, N.M., by fission—the splitting of atoms, which released the energy that held the atoms together. By the 1950s, however, attention was turning to an unimaginably more promising method of releasing energy from transforming matter—the way the sun does, by fusion.
Any survey going back through decades of Will’s columns will turn up consistent evidence of his thoughtful science cheerleading. And he doesn’t imagine that a science cheerleader can separate science from politics; that’s one reason someone needs to lead the cheering. Last year, when he published a postelection column suggesting next steps for the Republican Party, he joined others in calling for renewed action on the long-envisioned nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Will charged that the “signature achievement” of Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s then-waning career had been “blocking this project, on which approximately $15 billion [had] been spent.” The column continued: “So, rather than nuclear waste being safely stored in the mountain’s 40 miles of tunnels 1,000 feet underground atop 1,000 feet of rock, more than 160 million Americans live within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where 70,000 tons of waste are stored.”
OK, so George Will boosts science and science-informed politics. What about his often sarcastic, and in any case adamant, criticism of scientists’ climate consensus?
Will’s outlook certainly draws criticism itself. At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait declared last year that to watch Will “grasp for rationales to cast doubt on an established scientific field,” climatology, “is a depressing, and even harrowing, study in the poisonous effects of dogma upon a once-healthy brain.”
Chait might have meant, in part, this smirking paragraph from a February 2014 Will column :
Consider Barack Obama’s renewed anxiety about global warming, increasingly called “climate change” during the approximately 15 years warming has become annoyingly difficult to detect. Secretary of State John Kerry, our knight of the mournful countenance, was especially apocalyptic recently when warning that climate change is a “weapon of mass destruction.” Like Iraq’s?
Later, in early 2015, a Will column ‘s opening again showed what Chait was criticizing:
We know, because they often say so, that those who think catastrophic global warming is probable and perhaps imminent are exemplary empiricists. They say those who disagree with them are “climate change deniers” disrespectful of science.
Actually, however, something about which everyone can agree is that of course the climate is changing—it always is. And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity?
Just last month, Will charged that the famously climate-consensus-advocating Pope Francis “stands against” science with “fact-free flamboyance” concerning environmental sustainability.
There’s more, which is why energetic criticism of Will’s climate pronouncements isn’t new. Nine years ago, the climatologists at the blog RealClimate, condemning a pair of Washington Post columns including one by Will, charged that the Post lacked “quality control … that ensures minimal journalistic standards, such as intellectual honesty and basic fact-checking.” In the online discussion that followed, one of the bloggers—the climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf —made clear that he would have expected the Post simply to take the almost unheard-of action of rejecting those routine submissions from two long-established national columnists, Robert Novak and Will.
Sometimes conservatives extol the myth of the lone inventor, not only toiling in nobly unsupported obscurity, but supposedly proving that technoscientific advance mostly doesn’t require public funding. Will knows better. At the end of the fusion column cited earlier, Will demonstrated one conservative’s enthusiasm for federally funded Big Science:
Because the fusion energy program lacks [the Apollo space program’s] immediacy, transparency and glamour, it poses a much more difficult test for the political process. Because of its large scale and long time horizon, the fusion project is a perfect example of a public good the private sector cannot pursue and the public sector should not slight. Most government revenues now feed the public’s unslakable appetite for transfer payments. The challenge for today’s political class is to moderate its subservience to this appetite sufficiently to enable the basic science that will earn tomorrow’s gratitude.
Will has been commenting that way about science for decades. Maybe it’s a mistake to scant or even ignore, as some seem to do, his science views generally by focusing on his climatology views only.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.