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What's Your Excuse?

It's almost possible to forgive Alexander Cockburn's latest column in the Nation, denying the fact that humans are warming the planet. I mean, here's a writer who doesn't know much about science, frolicked around on a cruise ship with some old dude who once worked for the Navy, and was dazzled by his spiel about how "CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures" (misleading) and how climate scientists don't account for water vapor in their models (um, false). As for the Nation's editors, maybe they don't have the energy to edit Cockburn's column, or just figure no one pays attention to him anyway.

But I'm not sure what Steven Hayward's excuse is. Hayward is an AEI scholar who bills himself as a "reasonable" skeptic of global warming. He's no head-in-the-sand denier, you see, he's just troubled by the overblown claims of "alarmists." He even wrote a Weekly Standard piece complaining that anyone who accuses skeptics like him of spreading disinformation is conducting an "inquisition."

But over at Planet Gore today (a blog ostensibly devoted to critiquing wrongheaded claims about climate science), Hayward approvingly links to Cockburn's column--which contains so many falsehoods it's hard to know where to begin--without his usual array of objections and corrections. How strange.

Update: Now that wasn't so bad, was it?

--Bradford Plumer