When megawarmist Richard Black of the BBC pans it, you know it’s a problem.
WUWT covered this story earlier, now the crescendo is building on this fancifully exaggerated claim about Greenland melting.
The Times Atlas says:
“for the first time, the new edition of the (atlas) has had to erase 15% of Greenland’s once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland ‘green’ and ice-free.”
…
“This is concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever – and doing so at an alarming and accelerating rate.”
The Scott Polar Institute has now weighed in.
The Scott Polar group, which includes director Julian Dowdeswell, says the claim of a 15% loss in just 12 years is wrong.
“Recent satellite images of Greenland make it clear that there are in fact still numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the new Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of new lands,” they say in a letter that has been sent to the Times.
“We do not know why this error has occurred, but it is regrettable that the claimed drastic reduction in the extent of ice in Greenland has created headline news around the world.
“There is to our knowledge no support for this claim in the published scientific literature.”
Read the entire article here
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So, will the BBC/Times Atlas print a retraction?
@Anthony
I remember a blogpost from you in summer 2010
wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/12/greenland-hype-meltdown/ (leading http:// removed)
There’s a link to Godthab Nuuk GISS temperature station.
data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=431042500000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1 (leading http:// removed)
Somehow this graph looks very strange and unreal to me.
I mean, this really, really looks like a manipulation!
What has happened with that station?
Some other stations in Greenland show a similar (lesser) spike, many do not.
There must be something odd here.
I suggest this to be probed at surfacestations.org, if there’s a possibility to do.
Thanks!
(https removed due to filtering here)
In this case, I suspect the reason has more to do with proper editorship than anything else. The word “wrong” is being quoted, and as such has quotation marks. In the article itself, the words “comprehensive” and “most authoritative” (in connection to the Atlas) are also in quotes, because they are being quoted.
It’s much the same as when a headline says, “Marathon runner says he’s ‘tired’ after 300 km run.” They’re not questioning that he’s tired, they’re just pointing out that it’s the marathoner’s determination of his state, not theirs.
Of course, in a situation like this, it can serve a dual function.
Note that Richard Black’s article referred to in this thread does NOT allow comments. Richard Black regularly allows comments on all the articles on his blog but if you comment about the Atlas is “wrong” article he submitted on the main page then the BBC will simply delete your comment as “off-topic”.
In this disingenuous way, the BBC is able to control comments and avoid discussion of volatile subjects that might detract from their propaganda messages. If you look back at RIchard’s reporting history, there are a number of examples where he has done this. To prove a point, the latest article (running concurrently) on Richard Black’s Blog at the BBC re-iterates his usual alarmist claims, it states: “Now, there are voices, some of them at the top of politics, who will tell you that climate change is the biggest threat facing the human race.”
Do you see the magic trick? The smoke and mirrors of deception?
Here in Richard’s left hand is the “wrong” claim that Greenland Ice is collapsing catastrophically. However, watch Richards as he wave a wand, and suddenly in Richard’s right hand we have “climate change is the biggest threat facing the human race.”
The words Huckster, Scam Artist, and Fraudster come to mind. Especially considering his salary is paid for by the taxpayer!!!!
@londo
“Don’t these guys do basic order of magnitude checks.”
Good grief, they are science journalists. They wouldn’t recognise an order of magnitude it it smacked them in the eye, let alone have conception of any distance greater than Epping to London.
All this angst and anguish from the posters here doesn’t alter the fact that the apparently inaccurate story about the loss of ice cover in Greenland has hit the MSM whereas the comments from the Scott Institute will not reach anywhere near the same number of people. In reality the warmists are winning
Richard Black is a relentless AGW parrot who primarily acts as a Greenpeace and UN stenographer. He hasn’t had an original thought or written a properly researched blog in the four years or so I have been reading them.
Presumably he will now use this obvious error as an example of how he presents both sides, even though he doesn’t.
On the bright side, this is yet another attempted lie exposed and one more nail in the AGW coffin in terms of public opinion.
Really. Why would or should anyone believe anything that comes out of that fudge factory anymore?
“Ric Werme says:
September 19, 2011 at 11:05 am
David Schofield says:
September 19, 2011 at 10:42 am
> I think we would have noticed a 1 metre sea level rise by now?
You’re assuming constant ice depth across Greenland. If that were the case there would be some really impressive cliffs at the edge of the ice.”
Ta but I was being sarcastic. I know Joe Public will think losing 15% of the ice is a hell of a lot. When they hear ‘sheet’ it does give the impression of a uniform thickness.
NewScientist is jumping down their throats, too. See http://tiny.cc/qrovk, entitled, “Times Atlas grossly exaggerates Greenland ice loss” ( 21:25 19 September 2011 by Catherine Brahic).
I liked this quote in particular:
I usually don’t jump on the professionalism of the people on the other side of the aisle, but this one is such a doozy, wow, a total screw up.
One question might be:
<.b?"When he published his Hockey Stick paper, why didn't all these people come out, hollering about Michael Mann disappearing the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period?"
This thing isn’t as egregious as that was.
But it is such a lovely screw up, all by its little ol’ lonesome, so let’s enjoy it!
Damage limitation?
First you re-write history…then you re-draw the maps. The Green Guard are getting us ready for their ‘Great Leap Backwards’.
I have repeatedly read the comment about the Greenland ice sitting in a bowl (300 m deep) and that if the ice melted, most of the water would stay in the bowl.
Respectfully, this is incorrect. As the glacier(s) melted there would be massive amounts of melt water runoff, etc. At the same time isostatic rebound would be initiated and the 300 m bowl would disappear. The same argument could have been made for the main North America or European -Asian continental glaciations…… there aren’t any vast 300 m deep intercontinental seas.
In 2004, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA)
“Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
ACIA, Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. Cambridge
University Press, 2004, http://www.acia.uaf.edu ”
showed two pictures of the ice shield from 1992 and 2002, that should shock
the public and consolidate the climate warming hype.
1992: http://www.klimanotizen.de/assets/images/autogen/a_2004.11.jpg
2002: http://www.klimanotizen.de/assets/images/autogen/a_2004.11_1.jpg
Back to reality…
However, what they deliberately concealed and what Greenland GISP2 ice core
data affirms, the ice shield has been decreased several times in history.
Here are the ten warmest decades since 900 years:
1220-1223:
http://www.klimanotizen.de/assets/images/autogen/a_2004.11_3.jpg
1556:
http://www.klimanotizen.de/assets/images/autogen/a_2004.11_4.jpg
1932-1938
http://www.klimanotizen.de/assets/images/autogen/a_2004.11_2.jpg
(GISP2 source data is available from http://www.bgr.de
(Federal Institute for Geosciences and Resources))
Decade Variation C (mean +/- 5 years)
1932 0,83
1937 0,81
1221 0,81
1220 0,80
1222 0,79
1938 0,76
1556 0,76
1936 0,76
1223 0,74
1933 0,73
In case of AGW, again, it is obvious fact that “useful” information is emphasized and,
– for the same purpose, useless informations were deliberately omitted.
CRS REPLY: Thanks for the correction, I wasn’t aware of the Danish perfidy! From what I’ve read, Greenland is becoming quite the vacation spot, with some comparing it to how the US state of Alaska was, many years ago.
Philip Finck says:
September 19, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I have repeatedly read the comment about the Greenland ice sitting in a bowl (300 m deep) and that if the ice melted, most of the water would stay in the bowl.
Respectfully, this is incorrect. As the glacier(s) melted there would be massive amounts of melt water runoff, etc. At the same time isostatic rebound would be initiated and the 300 m bowl would disappear. The same argument could have been made for the main North America or European -Asian continental glaciations…… there aren’t any vast 300 m deep intercontinental seas.
—
Forgetting about the Great Lakes now, are we?
Ian says (September 19, 2011 at 2:09 pm): In reality the warmists are winning.
Yep. For all the clarity here on WUWT that the global warming is a modern myth and has been comprehensively debunked, the Global Warming Industry still thrives. A horde of bent scientists, activists, windmill scammers and politicians are still on the gravy train whilst soaring energy bills hit the poorest disproportionately. The warmists’ propaganda machine is a riproaring success. Let’s hope for a couple more severe winters: they may bring us to a “tipping point”.
I am surprised that Mr Black has come out on the side of truth and has panned the Times Atlas, quite rightly.
Will he now reply to my email complaining about his treatment of Dr. Spencer.
I got a reply to my complaint to the BBC from Richard Black (RB). He defended his position by further attacking Spencer not for what he says in the paper but for his religious associations. In essence, RB said that he is justified in pointing out Spencer’s religious convictions because these convictions mean that Spencer simply does NOT believe in climate catastrophe.
RB explained that, in a nutshell, Spencer’s religious affiliations share a belief in a God (shock, horror) and that belief includes the confidence that God would not have created an Earth whereby minor amounts of CO2 from human activity could cause a catastrophe. In essence, for non-believers (like me), you could translate Spencer’s beliefs into ‘the Earth environment and ecosystems are generally stable and self correcting and without tendencies towards runaway catastrophe”. A belief which I suspect most rational scientists will share (even if they do not accept that there is any evidence for a God) because of the overwhelming evidence of the stability of the atmosphere throughout geologic time.
RB was definitely trying to discredit Spencer, felt justified in doing so, and confirmed this in writing to me.
The BBC has chosen to do nothing about it (despite a complaint)
Philip Finck says:
September 19, 2011 at 2:38 pm
… there aren’t any vast 300 m deep intercontinental seas.
————–
Hudson Bay, Arctic Archipelago, Baltic Sea, North Sea, Barents Sea, Kara Sea, – all the result of repeated glaciations suppressing the land mass.
Hudson Bay has risen 200 metres and is still an average 100 metres deep.