Is George Will Just A Shill?

I've generally found George Will to be an interesting member of the Round Table discussions that make up the back half of This Week With George Stephanopoulos every Sunday. He's very right-leaning and therefore I often don't agree with his values, but he usually provides a well-reasoned position that utilizes more data and logic than rhetoric and vitriol (making him rather unique, among Republican commentators).

Therefore I'm somewhat surprised to hear about this recent Washington Post column and the firestorm of controversy (in some circles, at least) that's resulted from it.

In a nutshell: Will wrote a column in which he denounces Global Warming as being just another crackpot prediction (he compares it to the Global Cooling "scare" in the 70s). To support this unconventional view (uncommon outside his antiquated party, anyway), he cites two sources of data. The first responded within hours to specifically state that Will's interpretation of their findings was completely wrong and called his integrity into question (which would embarrass most people in that position, I'd think); and the second example of "data mining" was really just a disingenuous statement. In concluding that "there has been no global warming for more than a decade," Will was abusing the fact that 1998 was one of the hottest years on record to essentially say, "See? Compared to that, it hasn't been getting any warmer!" That's like saying "there haven't been any unemployment issues in the U.S. since the 1930s" just because the country hasn't seen 25% unemployment in any of the decades since.

Most confounding to me, in all this, is the silence that's been emanating from Will's direction ever since he pushed the "Publish" button on Sunday. At the very least, you'd think that having one of your data sources disown your use of their information, just hours after your publication, would be enough to warrant some sort of statement. The fact that Will's taking the low road (so far, at least) is going to seriously tarnish his reputation, I think. It really makes him look like he's just shilling for that same tired old political group that's driven his country into the ground for the past 8 years with its head-in-the-sand approach to science and conservation.