I suppose they haven’t learned anything from the last beat down skeptics gave them on their Statue of Liberty Fiasco
Bjørn Lomborg writes:
National Geographic is at it again. They present the world “if all the ice melted” — and they have the temerity to suggest it will happen with more global warming.
“If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58.”
This, of course, is only the outcome of continuing ever larger carbon emissions for many hundreds of years, something that no one is realistically expecting.
Could we please have a sensible, non-scare conversation back at the venerable National Geographic?
National Geographic’s last scare: http://on.fb.me/1iJR5t6
And here is their new one: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/rising-seas/if-ice-melted-map
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[Anthony] Meanwhile both Arctic and Antarctic ice are within normal parameters of standard deviation:
Arctic is about 1 standard deviation below the average line:
![N_stddev_timeseries[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/n_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
The Antarctic is above two standard deviations:
![S_stddev_timeseries[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/s_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
Globally, sea ice is at normal:
![global.daily.ice.area.withtrend[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/global-daily-ice-area-withtrend1.jpg?quality=83)
Related articles
- The ice is not melting, yet still the scaremongers blunder on (junkscience.com)
- National Geographic rising sea level prophecy – cause for concern or absurd fairytale? (wattsupwiththat.com)
Just Boycott the magazine. easy.
It’s their reputation they’re trashing. They’re making themselves look incredibly silly, and such weapons-grade stupidity will be wheeled out to remind everyone of their detachment from reality for years to come.
Let them get on with it.
Wild and desperate stuff. Oh, I haven’t read that magazine in decades.
We should stop using ‘skeptic’ and replace it with ‘thinkers’ because it’s only by not thinking at all that anybody could fall for National Scaremongering magazine.
As Sagan would have said, if the supermarket cashier says the rest has been stolen by a supersonic invisible pixie, any thinking person would not believe a word of that…
I dumped it years ago. I just couldn’t take their ignorance!
5000 Years? Which scientist does not get the interglacial part?
Another question to ask – is the period 1980 – 2010 even “normal”. While we can probably discount the period of 10k years ago (as one we would not want to be “normal”), how do we know the ice levels of the past 30 years are even remotely normal? It could be that 2013 is “normal”, and the period of 1980-2010 was abnormally high.
That is the problem with too little data to develop a baseline.
Next month:
“IF ALL THE VOLCANOES ERUPTED”
Cancelled my subscription 20 years ago. My father had all issues back into the late 40’s. By the time I got interested circa 1960, I enjoyed four decades of NG. By the 90s they started editorializing, and I stopped reading it.
What you lot don’t realise is that if the sea level rises by 432 feet it will be twice as bad and worse than we thought.
This is the kind of stuff why I canceled NG & pretty much all other “science” journals. What do these type of articles suggest they think about their readership : that we are all left wing politicos who will mindlessly soak this drivel up? that we have no scientific training to be able to think critically about a presentation like this (bad assumption for a science based journal) ? that we are all so weak minded we will just simply convert to their worldview ?
No good scenarios there – boycott this journal
If alcohol loving aliens arrived and took all our ice to mix their drinks, at least we would not have to worry about all that flooding.
“If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58.”
Uh, and at what level of atmospheric CO2 do they predict this will happen?
“…if the sea level rises 216 feet…”
Oh, no.
I just invested in waterfront property in the Maldives.
🙂
JimS says:
November 5, 2013 at 7:43 am
If alcohol loving aliens arrived and took all our ice to mix their drinks, at least we would not have to worry about all that flooding.
Why, I believe I wouldn’t mind a close encounter with one of those aliens.
🙂
George, you need to realize that if my grandmother were a bus, she’d have wheels.
I’ve been a subscriber for years, tolerating the bad editorial policy because of their coverage of non-controversial subjects (e.g. wildlife, archeology, geography). This past year their bias has become too much for me, and I’ve let my subscription lapse.
Let’s be honest… reading these types of scare scenarios are entertaining. In a ‘What would the world look like if…’ kind of way. The problem is when the ignorant start to believe.
And here we are.
What most of you, including NG, are missing is that if all the ice melts, that Blob they froze up in the Arctic will wake up! And Steve McQueen isn’t around to save us this time!
National Inquirer printed with fancy colour on thick glossy paper. What a joke!
This is no different, really, than when the great pregressive intellegentsia of the early 20th century were obsessed with eugenics and raical purity.
It only took forced steriliaztion, the emergence of Planned Parenthood and an angry Austrian WWI veteran to get people to reconsider the wisdom of that particular progressive obsession. I wonder what it will take for the pregressive intellegentsia of today to reconsider their CO2 obsession?
What if, what if…………
I know, what if NG stopped printing rubbish onto our valuable resources – they might annually save half a dozen or so trees from pointless destruction?
Better still, what if NG actually looked objectively at science AND its reporting, instead of with simple advocacy in mind?
Does National Geographic depend on federal government grants to stay afloat?
For most of my rather long life, I found National Geographic to be highly addictive. Those wonderful photos! Those wonderful photo journeys! No one makes maps as beautiful as NG.
But I simply cannot read it any longer. I cannot bring myself to visit their website. The reason is that both magazine and website are crammed with images that mislead and claims that are false. It is as if the magazine’s editors were suffering from a communal auto-immune disease. They are destroying what made the magazine great, the photos and the photo journeys. Far too many images now serve only the purpose of propaganda. Seeing those images distorted to the purposes of propaganda causes me to suffer a painful cringe.
History has taught us that images can be poisoned by the people who use them and the purposes to which they are put. Monumental architecture suffered an incredible setback at the hands of the people who erected monumental buildings in Italy and Germany during the Thirties. The editors of NG seem determined to do the same to their once glorious magazine.
[NG]“If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58.”
[Bjorn]”This, of course, is only the outcome of continuing ever larger carbon emissions for many hundreds of years, something that no one is realistically expecting.”
Sorry, Bjorn, but with the logarithmic impacts of ever increasing CO2 essentially falling to zero, and with climate sensitivity to CO2 being well below what the IPCC has claimed (and very close to what the skeptics always said it was), the NG scenario is ridiculous no matter what our emissions are over the next ‘hundreds of years’.
While Mr. Lomborg has been a champion of rationality in environmental issues, he readily admited that he doesn’t know that much about climate and accepted the IPCC projections at face value. This makes him a dangerous ally in the fight for truth about climate change.
I’ve canceled my subscription because of their lunatic stance on AGW. I don’t want this trash in my house.