MORE GREENIE LIES: FAKE STORY ABOUT SHRINKING ANTARCTIC GLACIERS

This story was uncritically reported in ALL the mainstream newspapers that I know of. Below is a demolition of it. See the original report here for the graphics mentioned

Last week on Earth Day, AP newswire led with a real scare story: "Study Shows Antarctic Glaciers Shrinking." In doing so, the press, yet again, predictably distorted a global warming story.

By "Antarctica" they actually meant the Antarctic Peninsula, which comprises about 2% of the continent. It's warming there and has been for decades. But every scientist (or for that matter, everyone who has read Michael Crichton's "State of Fear") knows that the temperature averaged over the entire continent has been declining for decades.

The underlying science behind the AP story was published in the April 22, 2005 issue of Science magazine, under the more appropriate (and accurate) title, "Retreating Glacier Fronts on the Antarctic Peninsula over the Past Half-Century." A research team led by Alison Cook of the British Antarctic Survey carefully measured the historical position of 244 glaciers as determined from a 60-year collection of images including aerial photographs and satellite pictures. By comparing the position of glacier termini over time, the researchers were able to determine the timing and speed of glacial changes.

The results presented in Science weren't even based on the entire Peninsula, but rather the northern portion. While a more comprehensive continent-wide investigation of coastal glacier changes is underway, only the results from the Peninsula were written up.

Figure 1 shows the temperature trends from 1966-2000 over Antarctica as reported in a study by Peter Doran and colleagues and published in Nature magazine in 2002. The region that encompasses all 244 of the glaciers in the Science study is highlighted. While it is clear the there has been warming in the localized region around where the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers are located, it is also clear that the majority of the rest of the continent has been cooling. Just how much has been cooling was also calculated by Doran (Figure 2), and shows that about 2/3rds of the continent outside of the Peninsula has been cooling over the past 35 years or so.

Furthermore, studies have been made investigating the overall status of sea ice around Antarctica. NASA announced the results of their study in 2002 with a press release headlined "Satellites Show Overall Increases in Antarctic Sea Ice Cover." While there are regional variations from this trend, including a decline in sea ice around the Antarctic Peninsula, the area of sea ice around much of the remainder of the continental margin has been increasing, at least over the past 25 years. Obviously, a story proclaiming "Antarctic Sea Ice Rapidly Diminishing" and focusing on the Peninsula region would paint an incomplete and unfair picture of the actual circumstances there.

The fact that a report that glaciers are melting over one extremely small portion of Antarctica that is showing warming, while the rest of the continent is cooling, grabs not only newspaper headlines but finds its way without a regional perspective into a prestigious publication like Science is troubling. If objectivity, rather than scariness were the purpose, Cook et al. would certainly have referenced Doran's work for background. Or perhaps the editors at Science could have asked for it?

The general cooling of Antarctica is highly scientifically significant because climate models run under increasing levels of greenhouse gases predict that the Antarctic continent as a whole, not just the Peninsula, should be rapidly warming. This is clearly a model failure and no amount of going on and on about the impact of warming in the Peninsula, is going to change that fact.

There's a 2004 book that details the repetitive nature of global warming exaggeration, called Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media. If it were still being written, the sad story of Earth Day, 2005, would have surely merited a chapter.





Even simpler: If the facts don't fit, make them up

"An email from Donna Martinez alerted me to a press release sent out yesterday by a group called The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, calling on people to show up and protest George Bush's Earth Day visit to the Smoky Mountain National Park.

In the release the SACE stated that “last year, ozone levels in the Smokies rivaled those in major cities such as Atlanta and Los Angeles.” I immediately asked one of our trusted interns to call the contact number on the release to ask where the data for this claim came from. After apparently being hung up on the first time he called back and politely noted that he somehow got disconnected. He then asked his question once again and once again was hung up on.

So I decided to do a little fact checking myself. In 2004 for 9 ozone monitors in the North Carolina Mountains there was an average of .22 high ozone days per monitor. This covers everything from Boon to Cherokee, including the city of Asheville. The average number of high ozone days per monitor in the LA SMSA was 15 and for the Atlanta SMSA it was 3. This means that Atlanta area ozone was 13 times greater than the NC mountains and LA area ozone was 68 times the NC mountains.

Yep, ozone in the Smokies rivaled LA and Atlanta last year".

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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