A change of mood today. Some slightly heavier relief from all the nonsense:
Out flew the web and floated wide
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
From “The Lady of Shalott”
Today we move on to the second sentence in David Rose’s article “this time last week”.
Them:
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
Us:
As you can see, the Mail article includes no references. Surely in this day and age an online article about such a controversial subject should at the very least include a few links? Hayley Dixon’s article for The Telegraph did at least manage to do that! I’ve asked David Rose via a number of different avenues where he got his information, and how he did his sums. I know he got at least one of the messages because he was browsing my profile on LinkedIn last week, but I have yet to receive any answer from him.
Groping in the dark I’ve tried to speculate about which BBC report in 2007 David is referring to. Perhaps it’s this one by Jonathan Amos entitled “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013′”. Please note the quotation marks around the date. According to this article:
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
[His] latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.
Instead of relying on what David Rose says Jonathan Amos says Wieslaw Maslowski said, why don’t we instead take a look at what Prof. Maslowski actually said. Here’s an extract from the slides he used when giving a presentation in Japan in the summer of 2008, when he’d had plenty of time to learn the lessons of the astonishing Arctic sea ice melt in the summer of 2007:
Note that he didn’t say words to the effect that “The Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2013” as claimed by David Rose. What he actually said, and converting the mathematical symbol into plain English, was:
IF this trend persists the Arctic Ocean will become ice-free by AROUND 2013!
which is a very different thing. For those of you that would prefer to actually hear Prof. Maslowski convey that message himself, here’s a podcast from December 2007:
The interview lasts for about half an hour, and a full transcript is also available courtesy of Beyond Zero Emissions. You will note that what Wieslaw actually said was:
If we project this trend ongoing for the last 10 – 15 years, we probably will reach zero in summer some time mid next decade.
Verdict:
The evidence suggests that David Rose doesn’t research his sources properly, doesn’t understand English and doesn’t understand common mathematical symbols. Alternatively he understands all of that perfectly well, but chooses to misrepresent all of that to his loyal readership instead of educating them about the facts of the matter.
Our title today is an allusion to Bill Bruford’s “Five Percent For Nothing”, from the 1971 album “Fragile” by Yes. Here’s what the cover looks like:
Them:
A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
Us:
According to the NSIDC once again the numbers look like this:
The sums are obviously rather tricky, so we’ve enlisted the aid of a spreadsheet. Here’s what it reveals to us:
| Metric | Date | 2012 | 2013 | Increase |
| NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) | Day 249 | 3.558 | 5.236 | 47.2% |
| NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) | Sep 8th | 3.523 | 5.179 | 47.0% |
| NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) | Aug 27th | 3.94 | 5.632 | 42.9% |
| NSIDC Daily Extent (million km²) | Aug 15th | 4.845 | 6.159 | 27.1% |
| NSIDC Monthly Extent (million km²) | August | 4.71 | 6.09 | 29.3% |
Verdict:
Whichever way you look at things, on a “same time last year” basis at least, the magic number of 60% seems to be out of reach. Whatever the arithmetic David Rose actually performed, whether mentally or on his pocket calculator, it would appear not to involve comparing like with like. We have asked David and the Mail on a number of occasions what numbers he started from and what calculations he performed. We have received no answers as yet.
Getting back to our title, when you start to look at Arctic sea ice volume instead of extent, 160% of almost nothing is still almost nothing:
Video courtesy of Andy Lee Robinson
Small print: We have yet to double check all the numbers in our simple spreadsheet. The NSIDC web site is still down today.
Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start!
Them:
A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
Us:
Verdict:
The Mail et. al. say “Nearly a million square miles”. When the floods in Boulder have receded the NSIDC will once again say “Just over half a million square miles”. Is that discrepancy sufficient to satisfy the Press Complaints Commission’s definition of “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”?
David Frost died last week . So it goes.
According to the BBC:
Politicians regularly complained to BBC management that they were being ridiculed by David Frost and his team. But the programme gained a massive following and soon achieved cult status.
We hope to achieve something similar!
By way of brief introduction, the name of our humble organ is an ironic play on the title of David Rose’s series of “Great Green Con” articles in The Mail on Sunday.