The environmental left’s outrage over George Will continues over at TNR, where Jonathan Chait declares:

First of all, nobody says that reducing carbon emissions will “reverse” global warming. The point is merely to slow the process. This is pretty fundamental. Second, Will (again) cites the unusually hot year of 1998 to prove that the planet isn’t warming. He fails to understand a very basic concept in data that you don’t need any particular social science expertise to grasp, which is that trends don’t always move in a perfectly straight line. The planet has been getting warmer, and there was an extreme spike in 1998. Both these things can be true. I’m all for newspapers giving their columnists latitude, but at some point I wonder if some very basic, low level of factual knowledge ought to be required to propound upon a topic in their pages.

Well, I’m not a journalist (thank God!), but I do know that if you’re going to talk about fundamentals, checking the clips is one of them. So no one has talked about emissions reduction “reversing” global warming? What about Gary Hart in the Huffington Post, speaking on behalf of the Presidential Climate Action Project? Or Barbara Boxer? Or the 61 Nobel Laureates who want to “reverse climate change” — and they’re not talking about geoengineering. Now, as it happens I agree with Chait that it is fundamental that reducing emissions won’t reverse global warming (whether or not man has anything to do with it — see Jerry below), but there’s no denying that one side has made pretty big hay out of selling an idea that reducing emissions will, in the words of one rather important player, “heal the planet.”

As for the tired old 1998 argument, I just wish people would stop using that data point as it allows the nitpicks that Chait uses. The fact is that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, which makes the arguments about whether 1998 is an outlier or not moot. If Chait wants to argue this point, and whether or not it amounts to “a basic, low level of factual knowledge,” I suggest he takes it up with Richard Lindzen.