Today, Media Matters President Eric Burns joined Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski, and Friends of the Earth President Brent Blackwelder in issuing a letter (PDF) to Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander asking him to address several blatant falsehoods in George Will's February 15 column about global warming. The joint letter rebuts several falsehoods in Will's column.

As Media Matters recently noted, Alexander reportedly responded to one of these claims with further distortions of the facts.

Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post has more on the story:

Pressure on the Washington Post over a controversial George Will column, entitled “Dark Green Doomsayers,” has escalated from being the passion project of media watchdog groups to a core concern of environmental leaders. These figures have launched a coordinated campaign against the Washington Post, seeking a correction of the record.

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The basic thrust of the column in question, published on February 15, 2009, goes something like this: a long time ago, scientists thought that the planet was poised to undergo a calamitous period of “global cooling,” and also some other scary stuff about armadillo migration and the price of copper, and all of this proves that as the scientific community is so prone to lapsing into trendy, chi-chi “doomsaying,” there's no real need to heed any concerns about global warming.

Basically, it's an attempt to zero the balance of Will's objections to environmental initiatives by asserting, “once upon a time, these higher minds thought precisely the opposite, so this is just some great comedy.” In reality, the article only proves that if you multiply a germ of scientific inquiry with George Will, you get zero. Throughout his piece, Will misuses his cited sources, misrepresents their findings, and omits the essential conclusions they reached.

In addition to the joint letter, the League of Conservation Voters blog notes:

We do not expect Mr. Will to apologize for the failings of his column. We do hope that the Washington Post, one of America's great bastions of top-notch journalism, will publicly retract and correct inaccurate information that appeared in its pages.

Despite several documented inaccuracies, Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander continues to stand by Mr. Will's column. That's why the folks over at Media Matters brought together the leaders of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and LCV: to try one more time to set the record straight.

While Friends of the Earth encourages their members to take action and email the Post ombudsman:

George Will's February 15 Washington Post column, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” contained numerous factual errors that painted a highly misleading picture of scientific knowledge about global warming. This is not the first time the Washington Post has published demonstrably false statements written by propagandists who wish to deny climate science.

Please use the form below to send a message to the ombudsman of the Washington Post – the paper's “internal critic” whose “job is to represent the interests of readers, hold The Post to high standards and explain its inner workings to an often-suspicious public” – to demand that the paper formally correct Will's column and stop publishing falsehoods.

Does your local paper carry George Will's column? Have you contacted the Washington Post and asked that they correct Will's column?