The United Kingdom’s House of Lords are an unlikely bunch to be bundled under the banner of “alarmist” or even “warmist”. Nevertheless their Select Committee on the Arctic has just published a report entitled “Responding to a Changing Arctic“, and in this video the chairman of that committee, Lord Teverson, briefly outlines their findings:
Note that he starts by saying that:
Absolutely the obvious thing first of all is that with the temperatures going up [in the Arctic] at twice the rate of the rest of the world the thing that everybody is seeing is reduction in sea ice which has reduced quite substantially over recent years, and of course a lot of the Arctic is land and we have the melting ice on Greenland particularly, which is causing sea level rises in the rest of the world.
In order to get that message across the committee has also produced the following infographic:
which shows how the temperature over land has been increasing whilst the sea ice extent in the Arctic has been declining. The committee have also made all the learned evidence they received whilst producing their report publicly available. Professor Andy Shepherd from the University of Leeds told the committee that:
The majority of sea ice changes witnessed in “the past 50 or 60 years” could be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on temperatures in the Arctic region.
and:
Suggested that the length of the solar melt season had increased by around five days per decade, causing additional melting and retreat of the ice.
How strange then, that David Rose made no mention of any of this when reporting Prof. Shepherd’s views in his “Myth of Arctic meltdown” article of August 31st 2014?
How strange also, that Christopher Booker maintained in his “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever” article of February 8th 2015 that:
The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.
Strange? Not at all. It is called: creative journalism and selective amnesia.
Using traditional Great British euphemisms we describe it as “telling porky pies” or “being economical with the truth”!