In case today’s headline metaphor doesn’t readily translate into other cultures, it refers to the popular fairground sideshow in which a couple of puppets dance on the end of some strings, accompanied from time to time by a baby, some sausages, a crocodile and a police officer.
Us:
The Great White Con was recently mentioned on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog, where the discussion turned to news of a recently published academic journal article by Marcia Glaze Wyatt and Judith A. Curry entitled “Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century”.
In one response it was suggested that:
I always think it’s terribly sad when a study is immediately condemned on the basis of not whether it has been peer reviewed, or methodology, or objectiveness, but on the basis of who wrote it. It’s the classic open goal displayed by supporters of the consensus (which includes myself) to anything which may challenge entrenched beliefs.
Them:
In partial answer to that point, here’s a screenshot from an article entitled “Arctic sea ice minimum?” on Judith Curry’s personal blog this morning:
An extract from Judith Curry’s blog article “Arctic sea ice minimum?” on October 13th 2013
Us:
From the other side of the fence here’s a couple of screenshots from the September 4th edition of the NSIDC’s Arctic Sea Ice News entitled “A Real Hole Near the North Pole“:
NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice News report for August 2012
The NSIDC discuss “Water Near the Pole” on September 4th 2013
Would anyone care to play “Spot the difference” with me? If the differences between the official National Snow and Ice Data Center version of recent events in the Arctic and David and Judy’s version aren’t immediately obvious to you there are plenty of clues sprinkled throughout the rest of this web site to help. Does any of that help to explain my comment on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog to the effect that:
If [Judith Curry] can’t even get the basics right I fail to see why anyone (apart from David Rose of course) should place any credence whatsoever in her “Stadium Waves”, although I must admit I haven’t read the paper yet. I fear it will be a while before it rises to the top of my “to do” list.
It has just been brought to my attention that the topic of Arctic sea ice was raised by Angela Rippon on the edition of “Broadcasting House” that aired on BBC Radio 4 on the morning of Sunday September 29th. In her review of that Sunday’s papers Angela had the following to say:
Them:
Tucked away at the bottom of a page in the Mail on Sunday is a piece saying that “The Arctic ice experts have made a million kilometer blunder“, and this is again using computers, and apparently the official source of information on polar ice caps have got it’s figures for the recovery of the Arctic cap wrong by a million square miles, and they say that this was actually a typo, it was a typographical error, and there are no plans to make a statement on the change because it was just an error in the data. So what data CAN we believe?
Us:
Obviously that’s my own transcript rather than an official one from the BBC. By all means listen to the programme yourself, and let me know if I’ve inadvertently got something wrong. According to the BBC’s “BH” page it will be available for download there for another 25 days.
Now obviously as soon as I’ve finished writing this article I’m going to amble over to the BBC web site to lodge a formal complaint, in which I shall suggest that Angela and the BBC’s “BH” team read this website from cover to cover, starting with this very article.
As a preliminary answer to Angela’s final question I would like to suggest:
Certainly not the Mail on Sunday’s, and not the British Broadcasting Corporation’s either, unless they correct this particular blunder quicker than you can say “Global COOLING!” whilst simultaneously sipping a piña colada by the side of Santa’s super new low albedo summer swimming pool!
I just received an emailed letter from the Telegraph’s Head of News, part of which reads as follows:
The Telegraph has looked into the matters you raise. As far as the points concerning ice extent are concerned, the incorrect information was derived from data published by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The mistaken information was due to a typographical error, which the NSIDC only corrected after the article that incorporated it was published. We have since updated the online versions of the article and explained why this was necessary.
There is no mention in the letter of any “updates” or “corrections” being put into print. The Telegraph are thus telling much the same story as the Mail, which is of course wholly unsatisfactory when it comes to correcting the long list of “inaccuracies and misrepresentations” they have recently published regarding the sorry state of sea ice in the Arctic. This is how they’ve done it:
There has been a 29 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of 533,000 square miles.
In a rebound from 2012’s record low, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific had remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.
One ship has now managed to pass through, completing its journey on September 27.
with the following additional “explanation” at the end:
Update: As at the date the article was first posted it relied on information about ice extent from the Nasa-funded National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC). This information contained a typographical error which the NSIDC subsequently corrected. The article has been amended in line with the correct information.
In addition, we have amended our reference to the Northwest Passage following the successful traverse, completed on September 27 after our article was published, of the Danish bulk carrier Nordic Orion.
Us:
Should The Telegraph’s Head of News be interested in some slightly stale Northwest Passage news, here’s a picture published on econnexus.org on September 4th in an article linked to below, which takes a close look at the “pack ice” supposedly “blocking the North West Passage” on that date:
Sea ice concentration in the Northwest Passage on September 4th 2013, according to AMSR2
Update: After this article was published, a bulk carrier – the MV Nordic Orion – was able to pass through the Northwest Passage on its way from Vancouver to Finland.
c) “That has been enough to make a mockery of a much-publicised prediction, six years ago, by Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, that the Arctic would be entirely ice-free by 2013”
Here’s the text of a comment I just left on The Telegraph web site underneath an article written by Christopher Booker entitled “The ice is not melting, yet still the scaremongers blunder on”:
In case anyone in here is vaguely interested, I just received an email from the Managing Editor of the Mail on Sunday, part of which reads as follows:
“You are correct in pointing out that the main figure in that article was wrong. The increase was 533,000 square miles and 29 per cent, as you say.
We are reporting this in the paper tonight and will correct the online article also.”
I trust I will receive a similar response to my recent email to the Managing Editor of the Telegraph about the same issue. Then perhaps we can start discussing all the other inaccuracies concerning sea ice in the Arctic that both papers have published recently?
Here’s a screenshot of my comment:
Christopher Booker learns that in fact the Arctic sea ice IS still melting.
Here’s what the revised version of David Rose’s article of September 8th now looks like:
The Mail’s modifed message about Arctic sea ice
Along with this “explanation” in a sidebar:
For Bob Ward’s version of events please see our recent article entitled “Humiliating Mistakes by David Rose“. As I put it in that article:
So… David Rose and the thousands who have republished his assertions across the planet never cottoned on to the physical implausibilty of their headline “statistic”, and never bothered to contact the NSIDC to check?
What do you suppose is the probability that the rest of “the climate science” in Rose’s recent articles is similarly flawed?
Today’s headline paraphrases slightly the title of a recent blog post by Bob Ward, who is Policy and Communications Director of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the Grantham Research Institute. In that article Bob finally provides an answer to the question that’s been troubling us about how David Rose arrived at his preposterous “Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year” bullet point in his article published two weeks ago in the Mail on Sunday.
Mr. Rose never responded to any of my communications, but according to Bob:
Rose told me by e-mail that the source of his claim that the ice extent was 60 per cent higher this year was an announcement posted on the website of the United States National Snow and Ice Data Center on 4 September: “August 2013 ice extent was 2.38 million square kilometers (919,000 square miles) above the record low August extent in 2012.
The NSIDC confirmed to me yesterday that the main figure used by Rose for his article was mistyped and that the mistake was corrected on 10 September, showing that Arctic sea extent in August 2013 was only 29 per cent higher than was recorded for the same month last year.
In an email to me yesterday, Natasha Vizcarra, the media liaison for NSIDC, stated:
“When we published the report, it contained a typographical error in the difference between the August 2013 monthly ice extent and the record low August extent in 2012 (and the corresponding square mile conversions). If you subtract the August 2012 extent of 4.72 million square kilometres from the August 2013 extent of 6.09 million square kilometers, you get 1.38 million square kilometers, not 2.38 million square kilometers. Our readers noticed the error and we corrected the typographical error on September 10. There are no plans to make a statement on the change because it was not an error in the data.”
So it seems the raw data was correct, the graph displayed to the left of the “typographical error” on the NSIDC web site was correct, and yet the Mail’s “Arctic expert” David Rose and the thousands who have republished his assertions across the planet never cottoned on to the physical implausibilty of their headline “statistic”, and never bothered to contact the NSIDC to check?
What do you suppose is the probability that the rest of “the climate science” in Rose’s recent articles is similarly flawed? Here’s another bit of simple arithmetic he evidently managed to get wrong:
David Rose has now had another article published in the Mail on Sunday. The new one refers back to his previous words of wisdom about the Arctic, imparting this piece of information:
The Mail on Sunday’s report last week that Arctic ice has had a massive rebound this year from its 2012 record low was followed up around the world – and recorded 174,200 Facebook ‘shares’, by some distance a record for an article on the MailOnline website.
That’s a lot of people repeating a load of old nonsense! Here at GreatWhiteCon.info we also have a Facebook presence, so if you would like to share our alternative interpretation of what’s really going on in the Arctic please take a good look at:
and share that information with your friends, as long as it makes more sense to you than David Rose’s record breaking article. Meanwhile here in at Great Ivory Towers we’ve still only progressed as far as the third sentence in David’s article the weekend before last, which reads as follows:
Them:
Days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
As you’ll discover below we’ve been experimenting with YouTube recently, where we stumbled upon a NASA video which led us to a page on NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center web site where you can download a high resolution version of the same video. We did that, and then much like the Mail, we took a screenshot from the video to reveal an image remarkably like the one they published just over a week ago. Here it is:
NASA visualization of the Arctic on August 15th 2013
Us:
We also found that NASA’s Scientific Visualization Center had another similar video available for download, covering the period from August 1st to September 13th 2012. Here’s a screenshot we took from that video, for August 15th 2012:
NASA visualization of the Arctic on August 15th 2012
For some reason a similar image cannot however be found in David Rose’s Mail on Sunday article of September 8th 2013. Instead that contains an image labelled “August 27th 2012”. Whilst you ponder why the Mail was avoiding comparing like with like visually 9 days ago, here’s a little animation we’ve put together using alternative visualizations of Arctic sea ice, this time of ice concentration and generated by the University of Bremen. It shows how the sea ice cover has been changing from August 15th through to September 13th 2013, which may ultimately prove to be day of the minimum extent in 2013, using the NSIDC’s methodology at least. Note that it lingers for a while on August 27th, and we hope you like the sound track!
Verdict:
For reasons known only to themselves the Mail certainly weren’t comparing like with like visually on September 8th 2013. They evidently weren’t comparing like with like numerically either, since however hard we try comparing numbers from “the same time last year” we can’t come up with the Mail’s magic “60% increase”. Comparing NSIDC extent for August 15th 2013 with August 27th 2012 did however lead us to perform this bit of elementary arithmetic:
6.16 / 3.94 = 1.56 – A 56% increase.
However hard we try we still can’t get close to the Mail’s “nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent”. We also challenge all and sundry to watch our video and then loudly proclaim, with a straight face, that “an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores”.
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:
Fragile cover art, by Roger Dean (image Wikipedia)
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.
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:
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.
The Mailet. 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”?
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
