Greenland Melting 3….Funny Stuff (Rev. Dec.18)
Here are three brief extracts from the following NASA release:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/greenland_recordhigh.html
1) “…In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year [2007] over Greenland could cover the surface size of the U.S. more than twice…” [Repeat; in FACT….cover the U.S. more than twice]
2) “…Marco Tedesco, a research scientist at the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, cooperatively managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, used satellite data to…”
3)“…His [Tedesco’s] expertise in documenting melting trends produced other recent studies on increased snow melting over Greenland and the Antarctic…”
In the NASA link above, (Last Updated: November 30, 2007, Editor: Jason Townsend, NASA Official: Brian Dunbar), there is a truly ASTONISHING graph showing the Greenland Ice Sheet melting not in terms of millions of square kilometres, or giga-tonnes, or such familiar SCIENTIFIC units, but in the much more emotive units of “maps of the USA”! (mainland). For 2007 the melt index is given as about 2.3 USA’s, whereas for 1998 and 2002 it is about 3 (three) USA’s, and in 2005 about 2.9 USA’s (And BTW, in other references, in 1987, twenty years ago, it was on a close par with the recent alarming record melt of 2002)
However, Greenland is actually a lot smaller than the USA, so this dramatization is at best mistaken. (The CIA Worldfact Book gives it at ~3 times the size of Texas) According to the data out there, the Greenland melting has reduced since 2002, which was typical of 1987, yet the hype is that recent melting is ever accelerating and scary.
The alarmist talk out there also fails to mention that instrumental records show that Greenland was warmer back in the early 1900’s. (And, BTW, 1934 was the hottest year in the USA, not 1998, etc)
Why are we being misled?
Tags: Climate change: Global warming: Environment: Science +
December 19th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Black Wallaby asks “why are we being misled?”
It is apparent that the multibillion dollar “disastrous anthropogenic global warming” industry needs continuously appearing new disaster reports and predictions to stay alive.
These are not only being spread by politicians, such as Al Gore and the UN Secretary General, but also by quasi-scientific reports such as those cited by NASA.
The wording in these reports must be clever, in order to convey an alarming trend when the data do not really support the alarm.
Using bogus science to try to fool the general public in order to gain support for a political program is bad enough, but politicians have been doing this for ages to justify all sorts of personal political agendas.
What is even worse is to feed these scare stories to school children. Ask an average 10-year old what his/her greatest fear is, and he or she are very likely to reply “being swallowed up by waves caused by global warming”.
To spread fear into the minds of children is criminal, no matter how supposedly “noble” the cause.
Max
December 24th, 2007 at 4:59 am
Hello Black Wallaby,
How can these scientists make a silly mistake like thinking that greenland could be over three times bigger than the USA? It makes me wonder if they made some other silly mistakes too. I don’t think so though. They are trying to scare us right?