6. ARCTIC ICE REDUX
By Christopher Booker, 04/02/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=PNAFS25HB5MC5QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0
?xml=/news/2008/02/03/nbook103.xml
Last autumn the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic ice was
melting so fast there would soon be none left.
Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen
on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work of the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking
from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost
back to 13 million sq km.
[http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg]
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpg
A second graph, "Global Ice Area", shows a similar pattern repeated every year since satellite records
began in 1979; while a third, "Southern Hemisphere Ice", shows that sea ice has actually expanded in
recent years, well above its 30-year mean.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
Still more inconvenient was the truth about an image that has been relentlessly exploited to promote this
panic over the "vanishing" Arctic ice. It is the photograph of two polar bears standing forlornly on the fastmelting
remains of an iceberg which has been reproduced thousands of times to show that there will soon
be no bears left (ignoring evidence that their numbers have risen recently).
Now, thanks to a Canadian journalist, Carole Williams (on NewsWithViews.com), we can read the story
behind this picture, which was taken in 2004 just off Alaska by a marine biologist, Amanda Byrd. As Ms
Byrd is happy to point out, the bears were in no danger so close to the coast (they can swim 100 miles). She
wanted a photograph more of the "wind-sculpted ice" than of the bears.
The image was copied by another member of the crew and passed on to Environment Canada. Then it was
was eagerly adopted by the warmist propaganda machine - above all by Al Gore, who used it to powerful effect
as an emotive backdrop to his highly lucrative lectures.
"Their habitat is melting," he likes to declaim, "beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet."
As the old joke has it, it seems those famous bears were not drowning after all, they were just waving. But
the BBC is no more likely to tell us that than it was to lead the news with last week's snow in Jerusalem.
eagerly adopted by the warmist propaganda machine - above all by Al Gore, who used it to powerful effect
as an emotive backdrop to his highly lucrative lectures.
"Their habitat is melting," he likes to declaim, "beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet."
As the old joke has it, it seems those famous bears were not drowning after all, they were just waving. But
the BBC is no more likely to tell us that than it was to lead the news with last week's snow in Jerusalem.
|