They say a picture is worth a thousand words right? Depending on what you are trying to present, that picture can make or break any presentation.
So it was with great interest that I noticed this picture in the article from the UK Telegraph with this alarming title:
Climate change is ‘faster and more extreme’ than feared
Arctic sea-ice in September 1979 and 2007, showing the biggest reduction since satellite surveillance began. Photo: Fugro NPA Ltd
Hmmm…right below it there was a link to the World Wildlife Fund, and in the body of the article, was the source of this “news” story.
WWF’s report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is accelerating far beyond the IPCC’s forecasts.
I didn’t realize that the WWF was a scientific organization, and that they could update the data and conclude our current situation worse that findings of the IPCC. How stupid of me to not pay attention to this.
CNN also picked up this WWF press release. See CNN’s story here.
Maybe WWF should “update” their findings with this picture from 2008:
Click for a larger image direct from the source
Yes a picture is worth a thousand words, isn’t it? For those of you that visit these other blogs, be sure they see this updated picture and send my regards. While you are at it, ask them at the Telegraph to provide the source data and methodology for the creation of the two images used in the report. They look more like artist renderings than data based 3D models. The images were not part of the WWF report.
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I expect the claims of the alarmists to become more bizarre as the evidence continues to “fail them”.
Why? I would suggest the following…
1. Cognitive Dissonance for the true believers.
2. Cynical Manipulation for the charlatans and con-men.
3. “Catastrophy Sells” for the MSM editors seeking to keep their jobs.
@barbee butts, Steven Hill,
Can you point me to some of these scare stories? I have already located the 1975 Newsweek article about global cooling. But I would rather see some peer reviewed science. Thanks in advance.
Arctic is on way to major re-freeze
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=19&fy=2005&sm=10&sd=19&sy=2008
The picture is gone from the Telegraph replaced by a picture of a power station.
I went bizerk last night when I saw a 60 second spot about polar bears going extinct by guess who….. WWF! I didn’t know they we even around anymore. Looks like a concerted effort to get more donations. Does anyone know why the WWF uses a panda bear as a logo? Are they going extinct too?
Shenanigans!
Okay, so this one is way O/T, but, speaking of journalism science:
http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24524304-5014239,00.html
Now, I don’t know about other readers here, but I find a cell phone works best when held up to my ear. I’ll refrain from posting any one-liners inspired by this article. I’m sure other readers here can come up with their own little gems…
For Thomas Gough; not too surprising for the Arctic to be cloud free. The air is much colder than the surface and the humidity is likely too low most of the time for cloud formation. And a lot of the land in that area is at considerable elevation too. But I’d be surprised if those cameras haven;t been updated since 1979. The Telegraph doesn’t say exactly which satelite(s) took which photo.
If you want to get really cloudless freaked out, just read Al Gore’s book where he has some BS PS photos, with all the clouds removed all over the globe. Average global cloud cover is aorund 505 so I’m told.
Take a look at the famous earthrise shot from the moon to see how the earth is dominated by clouds. If the air wasn’t so blue light scattering, most of the oceans would look near black, since they are quite close to black body radiators with about 975 emissivity (based on surface Fresnel reflection), and Kirchoff’s law.
Ok…it seems to me that either the images at the top of this post are bogus, or the Cyrosphere images are bogus…something has to line up somewhere, or they are both bogus.
I saved the newspaper images to my pc, then opened them up and rotated them 180deg so that the orientation matches what’s displayed over on Cryosphere Today.
The “1979” image comes pretty close to matching a Sept 1979 image over on Cryo, but I can find no month on Cyro for 2007 that shows anywhere near the amount of open water shown in the newspaper images.
All of this is pretty much meaningless anyway. We don’t know the source, but more importantly, if confronted with irrefutable proof that the images were intentionally altered, the retraction would likely be printed on page 36.
When images/headlines like this come out, the damage is already done.
I believe that what real science needs to do is go on the offensive, instead of continously playing defense.
Not sure what that game plan would look like, but it would be great to watch.
Jim
make that 50 uppercase 5. The albedo seems to be cloud dominated to me, with not a whole lot of influence from polar ice; I’m sure the experts have data on that, and I’m just guessing from the visual appearance of satellite photos.
Total outer space photos of earth are relatively uncommon, because even at stationary orbital altitudes of 23,000 miles or so, the earth still subtends a sizeable angle (40 deg). Many of them were from returning moon missions so somewhat ancient cameras.
Leon Brozyna (16:40:51)
I guess one might refer to that as a seminal study.
Leon Brozyna: Thanks for that link. Very funny.
@Anne
You could try here: http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/yet-more-evidence-of-global-cooling-consensus-in-1961/
This site also has a few blog entries with further evidence.
Speaking of links on the Arctic, how’d the Polar Bears survive this?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm
@PearlandAggie
Agreed.
Unfortuanately the assumption that the government will be able to actually solve the problems that they have created is just that – an assumption.
I note that your solve is “Solve” – nuanced.
I went looking for the report at the WWF UK (and US) site, but all I could find was the press release at http://wwf.org.uk/news_feed.cfm?uNewsID=2274 . That page does _not_ have the Telegraph’s image, just a photo of a gorgeous summer day at a glacial pond.
Does anyone know where the report is?
Other coverage:
CNN wrote their own story and interviewed “the report’s author, geoscientist Dr Tina Tin,” see http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/20/wwf.climate.report/
http://euobserver.com/19/26962 says “The WWF report was issued to coincide with a meeting of EU environment ministers in Luxembourg on Monday, who are to discuss new proposals aimed at tackling climate change.”
“Summer sea ice is now forecasted to completely disappear in the summer months sometime between 2013 and 2040 — something which hasn’t happened for over a million years.”
Exactly how do they know it hasn’t happened for over a million years? Most likely the north pole was free of ice before the onset of the most recent series of ice ages (which may have sparked human evolution) over 3 million years ago, but I seriously doubt the pole has been iced over the entire 3 million years.
Bill Marsh,
See the link in my last comment (17:40:10).
Shame on UK Telegraph, with its lies and propaganda!
(This AGW bandwagon is so huge now. A law student recently commented on my blog that I have no right to blog because my interrests are wrong. Every day politicians says we shall force evil industry to shut down – happy Asia…)
Anyway, a tip:
At Niche Modelling Ferenc Miskolczi shows an analysis of optical depth, which shows that during the last 60 years there has been no increase of greenhouse gases!!!!!!!!!!!
All the CO2 increase is compensated by less water vapor! (…which probably further prove Miskolczi’s model.)
http://landshape.org/enm/significance-of-global-warming/
(And meeanwhile no listen to the truts about the emperor’s new clothes the politicians in the western world talk about (Gore’s) the climate emergency, and about draconical emission cuts from cars and industries, which makes industries less competative and force them to be replaced by Chinese plants.)
Leon Brozyna – I spent several thousand flying hours sitting atop a 2MW radar transmitter and subsequently fathered two sons, so this study is rubbish (mind you, my kids can see through walls…)
Anne,
I graduated from High School in 1978 and it was the mantra of the decade. Peer review? Look at any Science Text Book from that time. They crammed it down our throats much the same as the reverse is being done today.
Personally, I bought that story hook, line and sinker and was AFRAID to move from Miami to any other part of the country…for DECADES.
Peer review and Science textbooks. Now that would be a novel concept.
Seriously, though, I did find a handy-dandy ‘timeline’ published by Farmers Almanac that documents the see-sawing of scientific/political/public opinion over the past century. You may find it informative or at least as a spring board for you to do your own investgations.
Here’s the address, I don’t know how to do links-yet.
http://www.almanac.com/timeline/
Technically, the WWF is a BINGO (big international non-governmental organization).
Founded in 1961 in Switzerland, in 1986 they changed their name to the World Wide Fund for Nature. The national divisions of World Wildlife Fund in the United States and Canada refused to change their name, and after the resolution of a legal battle with the U.S-based World Wrestling Federation, the universally adopted name became WWF.
Presently headquartered in Gland, Switzerland, the WWF had a reported operating income of $160.8 million in 2007. They have a staff of ~4,400 and operate in over 90 countries. Investments are over $1 billion.
According to Source Watch, the WWF is sponsored by numerous multinational corporations including Weyerhaeuser, Alcoa, Citigroup, Bank of America, Kodak, J.P. Morgan, Bank of Tokyo, Philip Morris, Waste Management, Coca-Cola, and DuPont. They present an annual conservation award funded by and named after the late oil baron J. Paul Getty. The WWF routinely subverts national governments in Africa and SE Asia, pandering (a pun) to First World interests by usurping property rights of indigenous Third Worlders.
This latest propaganda is designed to do exactly that: raise false alarms about wildlife in order to justify and fund land grabs in poorer countries.
As BINGO’s go, WWF is one of the Big Five but a small fry compared to the giant, The Nature Conservancy. TNC has income of over $1 billion per year and assets worth ten times that. TNC is in the land grab business worldwide, but especially in the U.S. where former TNC Chairman and current Sec. Treasury Hank Paulson just engineered the largest robbery of the US Treasury in history. TNC is all about real estate, and receives over $100 million per year directly from Congress to purchase private land in this country.
Just so you know. It’s always a good idea to keep tabs on the enemy. Don’t for a minute think that AGW is a science project. It’s all about shakedowns, takeover, and global-scale robbery.
WWF are world-class envirocrits. They arrange expensive tours for the well-to-do to go around the globe, but their website has stuff about carbon credits, etc. Outfits like this just jump on the bandwagon to keep the money rolling in.
When scientists are using their grant money to explore the vagaries and unknowns of Nature, they are, more often than not, “surprised” by the “unexpected” “extremes” and “faster changes.” 🙂 /sarc off
A simple trick used by 3-D photographers is to fuse the two images by crossing the eyes. The alterations to the 1979 image instantly stand out in bold relief while the rest of the image lies flat indicating that one or the other was indeed manipulated.
Is the ice growing or shrinking? Doesn’t matter now. The WWF’s lies in the name of their socilalist agenda are exposed. The ironic part is that their shenanigans intended to bring attention to the plight of the polar bear will probably do more harm than good.