By Steve Goddard
Readers will surely recall when WUWT was the first climate news outlet to publish this story:
Oh no! Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan
In it, an admonition: “Watch the media now as this story is only about an hour old.” So far the media (and foot in mouth politicians) haven’t disappointed in their zeal to make this “business as usual” for a glacier into a poster child.
Image from The Arc
Professor Andreas Muenchow became a media celebrity this week with his quote about an iceberg in Greenland being “four times the size of Manhattan.” This iceberg has become a poster child for global warming, even though a much larger one broke off the same glacier 50 years ago.
From the Kansas City Star
Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile chunk of ice that calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland’s far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation. The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south. Changes in the ice sheet “are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated,” said NASA’s Isabella Velicogna.
Others took the misinformation one step further:
In what he calls ‘a manifestation of warming’, Dr Richard Bates who helps monitor the Greenland ice said he was ‘amazed’ to see such a huge area of ice break off the Petermann glacier. Reported in the Telegraph a team from the University of St Andrews said that a huge 106 square mile chunk of ice had broken away at the start of August. This is the largest ever seen to come from Greenland. The US National Ice Center has named the iceberg the ‘Petermann Ice Island’. They also report that the Petermann glacier, which is located in North West Greenland to the East of the Nares Strait and one of the largest in the Northern hemisphere, has retreated back to a level not observed since 1962.
What the press is not widely reporting is that Professor Muenchow also said :
years of data on the glacier itself show that after this month’s event, the mass of ice is still, on average, discharging about the same amount of water it usually does – some 600 million cubic meters a year, or about 220,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. “Even a big piece like this over 50 years is not that significant. It’s just the normal rate,” he said. Muenchow warns people not to jump to conclusions. “An event like this, this specific event, all flags go immediately up, ‘Oh, let’s explain this by global warming.’ I cannot support that,” he said.
So what we know is that the glacier is where it was 50 years ago, a bigger chunk broke off 50 years ago, and the rate of ice moving to the sea has not changed. There is absolutely no story here. Our warming friends get more desperate by the day. It is pathetic.
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Muenchow warns people not to jump to conclusions. “An event like this, this specific event, all flags go immediately up, ‘Oh, let’s explain this by global warming.’ I cannot support that,” he said.
Chink!! Funding gone, pay your own air fare, man’s an idiot 😉 but honest. Now there’s novel for a climate scientist.
Now this has got to be pure coincidence surely or do you think that perhaps the move company The Aslyum have paid some marketing company to promote Assoc. Prof. Andrew Muenchow recent work?
I’ve just been watching cable TV and was a bit gobsmacked to find this move being shown on the the SyFy channel this morning.
http://www.cinematical.com/2010/07/28/titanic-ii-trailer-hits-threatens-to-sink-a-ship-and-hearts/
Yes, Titanic II is a disaster movie (due to be released on DVD in the US next week)which takes place in April 2012, 100 years since the sinking of the RMS Titanic. A new luxury cruise liner, the Titanic II, has been christened, and is soon to embark on her maiden voyage, on the same route the Titanic took 100 years before.
During the voyage, the effects of global warming cause a section of a carving glacier the size of Rhode island in Greenland to break off and to produce an enormous tsunami that sends an iceberg crashing into the Titanic II, leaving it to the same fate of her predecessor.
Here is the official trailer (QT required) and photos on the ‘The Asylum’ web site
http://www.theasylum.cc/product.php?id=174
and here it is on YouTube
Colorado Bob: August 14, 2010 at 12:59 am
And the whopper here about the Peterman calving a 230 sq. mile ice berg in 1962 when it didn’t.
He got it right the first time, though.
“The last time such a massive ice island formed was in 1962 when Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved a 230 square-mile island, smaller pieces of which became lodged between real islands inside Nares Strait. Petermann Glacier spawned smaller ice islands in 2001 (34 square miles) and 2008 (10 square miles). In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf disintegrated and became an ice island (34 square miles) about 60 miles to the west of Petermann Fjord.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/06/oh-no-greenland-glacier-calves-island-4-times-the-size-of-manhattan/#more-23078
So this gaffe falls under the category of a “CRS Moment” rather than “deliberate whopper” — as one who also suffers from this debilitating (and the research to find a cure is sadly underfunded at the federal level — reflexively, I blame Bush) malady, I recognize the
*peers at watch*
It’s Saturday, why?
Ummmmmmm — could you repeat the question, please?
The photo makes me think of the alarmist penguins and their Lapp dogs huddling together on the last remnant of the continent of lies they constructed.
More on Peterman reality:
Re disinformation by RACook the route the ice island has to travel to reach the Nares strait is wide and straight not “narrow and twisting”, if anything delays its travels it will likely be inadequate depth.
Colorado Bob,
Is there some part of this statement which is confusing to you?
Ref – Marc Hendrickx says:
August 13, 2010 at 9:27 pm
“A great old map….”
________________________
Outstanding! GREAT is not true enough. This link may work better –
http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm1658
Colorado Bob,
Are you a “can’t see the forest because of one tree” kind of person?
tallbloke says:
August 14, 2010 at 1:02 am
If the sea levels are indeed dropping, the Panama & Suez Canals are in shallow trouble.
Colorado Bob: August 13, 2010 at 10:39 pm
This would make this whole post a work of fiction.
Using that line of logic, if you have a single hair on your body, then you are a sasquatch.
Colorado Bob: August 13, 2010 at 10:39 pm
This would make this whole post a work of fiction.
If one error makes a document a “work of fiction” then the IPCC report is completely negated dozens of times over.
“Box and two British researchers traveled to the glacier last year with Greenpeace activists who offered space aboard their ship, the Arctic Sunrise, to scientists studying climate change.
They were hoping to capture the event with cameras rolling, which would have been a powerful image just months before the Copenhagen climate talks that failed to produce a binding treaty to reduce heat-trapping gas emissions.
“It would have been nice if it had broken off last year,” said Melanie Duchin, who led that Greenpeace expedition. “I mean ice melting, it doesn’t get any simpler than that.”
Still, she finds it ironic that the Petermann breakup coincides with another catastrophe linked to fossil fuels. The Arctic Sunrise is now in the Gulf of Mexico, surveying the massive oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon blowout.” (? ironic… how?)
A bunch of purportedly non-biased “climatologists” team up with green piece radicals to produce a little climate theatre in order to influence global politics. They seek to portray a normal event as some kind of proof of an impending klimate katastrophe, but mother nature didn’t cooperate in the con game.
The question for the warmists is, would it have been justified to use explosives to help mother nature along a little bit? Afterall timing is everything. You have to break some eggs in order to ‘save the pwanet’.
Walter Cronkite lives on in journalism. Someone wrote when he said, at the end of his broadcast, thats the way it is it was what he wanted it to be. Hopefully that attitude is not bleeding over into science.
stevengoddard says:
August 14, 2010 at 6:53 am
Colorado Bob: August 13, 2010 at 10:39 pm
This would make this whole post a work of fiction.
If one error makes a document a “work of fiction” then the IPCC report is completely negated dozens of times over.
GeoFlynx – I had been trying to point out earlier that the Ward Hill Ice shelf in Canada and The Petermann Glacier in Greenland were not the same. However, I do support Steve Goddard that this fact has not been made very clear in the recent press. Serious climate scientists have not made much of a fuss over the Petermann calving in the sense that a single solitary event, taken out of context, does not in itself form a “proof”. I’m afraid that the world press has over reacted on this one.
Readers will surely recall when WUWT was the first climate news outlet to publish this story:
Why do you lie?
[Reply: With a comment like that you need to provide a verifiable citation. ~dbs, mod.]
Phil. says:
August 14, 2010 at 5:15 am
Re disinformation by RACook the route the ice island has to travel to reach the Nares strait is wide and straight not “narrow and twisting”, if anything delays its travels it will likely be inadequate depth.
—…—…—
But you claim it’s a “straight path” to the sea?
Look at the satellite photos. The ice island is a long block, approximately 2.5 times longer than it is wide. It is in a fjord averaging only 15% wider than the ice island’s width, so unless the ice island moves directly and perfectly (only +/- 7.5 percent rotation allowed while randomly drifting in the current out of the fjord) in the centerline of the fjord north for 3x its length, it will jam in the Peterman Glacier outlet while it continues to melt. Then, all the sea ice chucks and glaciers between end of the fjord and the sea has to move out of the way, or it will jam between the walls of the Nara Strait and the jammed in sea ice – which will also block movement of the ice island.
Then the ice island must rotate 75 degrees clockwise, then stop rotating or it will jam again against the wall of the Strait. Then it must move 5x its length to reach the packed-in sea ice to the northeast that could be considered “open water” – if it weren’t covered by glaciers. There, however, movement will not be realistically restricted, and the wild press release comments (2-3 years from now?) begin to be relevant
However, even in the somewhat wider Nara Strait, the ice island must either be smaller (melting away) or not rotating at all, or it will still jam into the walls of the strait.
RACookPE1978,
May I make a prediction? Thank you:
I predict Phil. will not say, “I was wrong,” but will either jabber away trying to hide that fact, or will simply disappear for a while.
dbs, here’s the citation, a day ahead of WUWT, and unless someone is checking on UD Scientist on a hourly basis – which I doubt -, I wouldn’t be surprised if the person who tipped off Anthony got it there first.
Günther Kirschbaum says:
“Why do you lie?”
So you managed to find a source called “the chatter box” that reported the same thing within 24 hours.
Explain how you know that makes the author a “liar.”
Make it good, troll.
1. Can anyone tell me the best source of current satellite photographs of this area?
2. Can we have a thread on the NW and NE passages? The NW looks very nearly open now, and the NE just has a blockage between the Kara and Laptev seas (at least I think that’s the correct geography). What ships are attempting which Northern Passages?
Rich.
Re #1 I think I can answer my own question:
http://exploreourpla.net/explorer/?map=Arc&sat=ter&lvl=8&lat=81.677236&lon=-64.021071&yir=2010&dag=225
Rich.
Northwest Passage
See – owe to Rich said:
August 14, 2010 at 10:16 am
“2. Can we have a thread on the NW and NE passages?”
The NW passage northern route is looking more open than it has done in many a year
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/Ice_Can/CMMBCTCA.gif
Andy
RACookPE1978, you said
“By the way, the “ice island” in question is INSIDE a narrow, twisting fjord”
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/48690000/jpg/_48690867_glacier_image_compound_2.jpg
That’s the whole point about fjords, they are ice carved so are u shaped valleys that are not twisty at all. So why did you make that up, did feel you had to go the extra mile? The extra twisty mile of course 😉
Andy