The Pachyderm Post

Poor George Will.

He has been for decades one of the most thoughtful and articulate social and political commentators on the media scene.

I have for a long time tempered my own generally liberal views with considerations of his opinions.

Space prevents my chronicling the many times his views made me think again about my opinions on everything from affirmative action to the war in Iraq.

He has never changed my mind on any issue of significance, but he has often stimulated me to think deeper.

I always felt that I should be prepared to effectively respond to him if I were sitting across the table from him on Sunday morning television.

The highest praise that I can give George Will is that he inherited the mantle of conservative thoughtfulness and reason that William F. Buckley had once occupied for me.

Listening to Bill Buckley and his guests every week on Firing Line was a necessary part of my political and intellectual education. Buckley often infuriated me, but I could never dismiss him.

As I have, with regret, begun to do with George Will.

Said another way, Will has lost my respect.

Will’s views – like Buckley’s – were often outrageously wrong to me, but he usually seemed to at least acknowledge the facts of an issue.

His conclusions may have often seemed wacky, and sometimes dangerous, but I at least believed that, more often than not, he had at least absorbed the facts.

I no longer believe this.

I don’t believe it primarily (but not only) because of his – pun intended – Will-ful refusal to acknowledge global warming and the role that humans almost certainly play.

What – years ago – seemed to be a conclusion on his part based on the facts has transformed into what now seems to be an arbitrary, almost truculent attitude.

This attitude that was on display again today, in the face of this month’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s premier scientific authority on global warming.

The report warns about the possibility of more than 1 million dead and hundreds of billions of dollars in costs by 2100, in a world adapting to more extreme weather such as droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires.

And if nothing is done soon to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the experts said, by 2100 the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet would become inevitable. Over the following centuries, the world’s seas would rise by more than 20 feet.

All of which only seemed to irritate George, who repeated the same doubts, with the same apparent conviction.

When he behaves this way, he seems to be broadcasting from an asteroid in the same vicinity of the one from which George W. Bush receives and sends his strategies for democracy in Iraq.

The name of that asteroid, and George Will’s Pachyderm Problem: Irrelevance.

vb