Well it is that time of year again, the Arctic ice begins to melt, as it does every year, and all sorts of crazy talk starts coming out. This time from Greenpeace. I am encouraged though, as they have come around to the idea that maybe they are doing more harm than good by overselling the alarmism.
NSIDC also has taken a more moderate tone, announcing that there will “likely be no record low ice extent in 2009“. This is a sharp contrast to last year’s ridiculous press statement from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze about an “ice free north pole”. Now that Greenpeace has come clean on their statement, maybe Dr. Serreze will finally admit his statement was “a mistake”. – Anthony
From Not Evil Just Wrong:
The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.”
Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.
Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.
“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake,” he said.
Sackur said the claim was inaccurate on two fronts, pointing out that the Arctic ice is a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle, and that it had survived much warmer periods in history than the present.
The BBC reporter accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism.”
Leipold’s admission that Greenpeace issued misleading information is a major embarrassment to the organization, which often has been accused of alarmism but has always insisted that it applies full scientific rigor in its global-warming pronouncements.
Although he admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of “emotionalizing issues” in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion.
Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world. He said annual growth rates of 3 percent to 8 percent cannot continue without serious consequences for the climate.
“We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth. … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model,” Leipold said. “If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary.”
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(Watch the full BBC interview with Leipold here.)
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So maybe Leipold’s admission that Greenpeace issued misleading information has his superiors wishing he’d ‘calibrated words differently’.
This is the same Greenpeace that spent 20 years trying to get chlorine banned from drinking water (and everywhere else)(how you can ban a chemical element is beyond insanity).
From John Brignell:
“As I wrote in a book called Sorry, Wrong Number! in 2000, chlorine is essential to life on earth, not only in the form of its sodium salt, but as a constituent of more than more than 1500 vital compounds in plants and animals, including our digestive juices. The chlorination of drinking water has saved more human lives than any other hygienic measure.
However in 1991, Greenpeace activist Christine Houghton said: “Since its creation, chlorine has been a chemical catastrophe. It is either chlorine or us.” Even by Greenpeace standards this was a pretty remarkable piece of ignorant, hysterical nonsense. When chlorination was stopped in Peru in 1991 as a result of pressure from the EPA and Greenpeace, an epidemic broke out that spread through Latin America. Some 800,000 people became ill with cholera and 6,000 people died. Millions of people are still dying all over the world because of dirty water.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/24/numberwatch_chlorine/
I wonder if they apologised for that lot?
Maybe ‘Browndeath’ would be a more accurate name than ‘Greenpeace.’
John W. (09:54:27) :
“Did he, perhaps, describe how he proposed to lower his standard of living?”
It appears that he is saving a little money, not to mention the trip to the mall, by cutting his own hair.
@ur momisugly Richard 11:55
“The next step is to alter your data…”. Surely not!! Al and his mates would never do such a thing. What?? We can earn how much brokering Carbon Offsets?
Bring on the hockey sticks!
“”” Sam the Skeptic (11:12:18) :
DouglasDC
Didin’t Greenpeace scuttle Rainbow Warrior after the French turned it into a heap of useless metal in NZ? “””
This was the replacement…
Love it about the moron getting trapped in the ice. But as a Canadian, I am “irritated” at my tax dollars being consumed by a Canadian ice breaker having to go and rescue this ship of fools. Let the polar bears have them, after all, they are supposedly starving due to the lack of ice (which apparently has ensnared another gang of idiots).
Does anybody have a map of what Greenland looks like without any ice on it. I seem to recall having read that it is really a group of islands, and most of that ice is not sitting on any land that is above sea level (even without the sea level rise that could result from melting it all.
But I could be wrong; I was wrong once; but I can’t recall what that was all about.
May I remind you all that the color of bovine semi-solid body waste is, after all, GREEN.
IIRC, Greenland was one piece, but the accumulated weight of the ice has compressed it so much that it would be a bunch of islands if the ice vanished (even without the accompanying SL rise).
“George E. Smith (16:09:23) :
Does anybody have a map of what Greenland looks like without any ice on it. I seem to recall having read that it is really a group of islands, and most of that ice is not sitting on any land that is above sea level (even without the sea level rise that could result from melting it all.
But I could be wrong; I was wrong once; but I can’t recall what that was all about.”
I believe that Greenland is an Island but that the central region is below sea level, largely due to compression from the ice mass sitting atop its land. If the Ice sheet were to completely melt off, There would be some rebound to the land mass beneath, though it would likely become a large freshwater lake surrounded by mountains. Like an Atoll but with a fresh water centeral region
Has anyone read the earlier comments? You know, the ones about mixing up the Arctic with Greenland? Might be worth doing before spouting more nonsense…
But maybe the land would pop back up!
/Mr Lynn
Stephen Sackur’s mistake is understandable. While the “ice-free by 2030” remark apparently refers only to the the sea ice, most of the press release is about melting glaciers on Greenland. It also refers to the northern “ice cap” which could easily be interpreted as including Greenland. It’s possible some readers of the press release misconstrued it as predicting early Greenland melting, so Mr. Sackur has done them a service.
It is interesting that Greenpeace is funded by Standard Oil money and so is Sierra Club and also the group much in the news these days ACORN. Don’t you love hypocrites?
Rockefeller Brothers Foundation
Greenpeace $1,080,000.00 1997 – 2005
Sierra Club $710,000.00 1995 – 2001
ACORN $10,000.00 2002 – 2002
Rockefeller Family Fund
Greenpeace $115,000.00 2002 – 2005
Sierra Club $105,000.00 1996 – 2002
ACORN $25,000.00 1998 – 1998
Rockefeller Foundation
Greenpeace $20,285.00 1996 – 2001
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
Sierra Club $38,250.00 1997 – 2000
SOURCE is http://www.activistcash.com/index_foundations.cfm?alpha=R
Thomas J. Arnold. (14:21:02) : “Green peace? I used to hold a certain sympathy for their whale conservation stuff,…” I watched “Whale Wars”, or whatever it’s called, on A&E, I believe. I found myself rooting for the whalers [“ram those scruffy hippies”]. I didn’t like myself for that, so I stopped watching [whoever the “father figure” on that program is, he is insufferable].
So the Greenpeace Misanthropes admit that they lie and exaggerate….. Not that it is much of a revelation to most of us.
Their figures on human sustainability are about as reliable as their AGW figures….. You cannot believe a word these people say. If their mouths are moving….. They are lying.
“Leipold said later in the BBC interview that there is an urgent need for the suppression of economic growth in the United States and around the world.”
Who the H-E-double-toothpicks does he think funds Greenpeace!?! And where does that money ultimately come from? (Hint: any guess besides mining, manufacturing, or agriculture is wrong.)
redneck (11:37:38) :
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (13:04:41) :
Richard (12:19:56) :
Bryan (12:35:22) :
Thanks to all who responded to my question.
If they were indeed referring to the Greenland ice sheet, then the 3km becomes more believable. And if referring to arctic sea ice, then 3meters sounds much closer.
Mr Lynn (17:12:51) :
evanmjones (16:21:48) :
IIRC, Greenland was one piece, but the accumulated weight of the ice has compressed it so much that it would be a bunch of islands if the ice vanished (even without the accompanying SL rise).
“But maybe the land would pop back up!”
It would. For example, Scotland and Norway are still ‘rebounding’ from the last ice age.
Greenpuss
In recent days I’ve begun to fear that climate alarmist propaganda and the attendant distortion of public discourse is finally succeeding in driving me completely around the bend. I have in the last month or two found myself feeling heartened by reports of colder summers, of expanding glaciers, of polar ice possibly being resurgent, and other phenomena whose only positive grace is that they offer a counter to the continuing hysteria of the climate Cassandras and the collectivist politicians who are exploiting them to inflict their pernicious philosophy on the world. This is as close to the boundary of insanity as I really want to venture. In any truly sane and reasonable world reports or predictions of declines in the global supply of ice would be greeted with the same emotional response as reports of declines in the populations of rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes, yet, due to the looming disaster of ascendant collectivism, I find myself in the position of wanting to root for the ice. The alarmist’s success at inverting human thought has been so nearly complete that it is hard at times to recall what it meant to live in a more rational world. Warmth which has been sought, embraced, and celebrated since the dawn of humanity has been so denigrated that daring to rise to its’ defense merits your characterization as a person of such Hitlerian evil that you deserve to be shunned, jailed, or even killed. Ice, which has been as much the enemy of humanity as warmth has been its’ friend, is now a commodity whose loss we must dread. Truly we are approaching a state of complete cultural insanity.
Gail Combs (17:27:43) :
“It is interesting that Greenpeace is funded by Standard Oil money and so is Sierra Club and also the group much in the news these days ACORN. Don’t you love hypocrites?
Rockefeller Brothers Foundation
Greenpeace $1,080,000.00 1997 – 2005
Sierra Club $710,000.00 1995 – 2001
ACORN $10,000.00 2002 – 2002”
&etc. This is an example of ‘Affluenza’ the onset of guilt over what the or more likely
the ancestors did.-rather than taking that money and giving it to research to say, cure cancer or a limitless power source-something useful…
Yep. The inmates are running the asylum. We are in grave danger when such fits of irrationality take over those in charge of governments. Though the political and academic elites who are promulgating the ‘climate change’ ideology are still perfectly capable of seeing their own short-term interests, just as the apparatchiks in Stalin’s Soviet Union did. You bow and scrape and repeat he correct catechisms, and you are rewarded by progressing up the hierarchy. Remember Lysenkoism in science, ‘socialist realism’ in the arts. The new mantras are ‘world governance’ in the service of ‘the planet’.
/Mr Lynn
Erratum: That’s “THE correct catechisms.” But I did fix Dave’s possessives. /Mr L
Dave Wendt (19:16:41) :
I second that emotion