Tag Archives: AMSR2

Russia’s Northern Shores

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Regular readers will have realised by now that we’ve been pestering the Mail and The Telegraph with telephone calls and emails for weeks now. That’s because, as The Economist put it last weekend:

There are climate facts—and facts are stubborn things.

Both The Mail and The Telegraph have now corrected a couple of the gross inaccuracies they printed (virtually and/or physically) on September 8th, but many more remain. One of those is the identical phrase in both articles saying:

An unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

The fact of the matter is that this statement is untrue. I’ve recently received a couple of letters about this from “The Daily Telegraph” signed by “Robert Winnett, Head of News”. Here’s an extract from the first one:

Them:

Reputable evidence exists to show an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shore.  This can be seen on the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website [in the article] “A Real Hole Near the North Pole“.  The site states that the average ice extent for August 2013 was 6.09 million square kilometres, which is more than half the size of Europe.

Us:

Have I got news for you Robert!  If you’d read any of the articles on here, or watched any of the videos I linked to in my emails, that wasn’t the “fact” I was quibbling about. The fact is that the Arctic “ice sheet” was not “unbroken” and did not “stretch… to Russia’s northern shore” on September 8th 2013 and for considerable periods of time both before and after that date. Here’s an extract from The Telegraph’s second letter:

Them:

In reply to your enquiry, the Telegraph’s policy is to correct clear inaccuracies once we are alerted to them – and in appropriate cases update articles on our website.

Us:

I thought I’d already made this perfectly plain, but evidently not, so here’s yet another alert about clear inaccuracies in the “reporting” of climate science in The Telegraph:

Santa’s Secret Summer Swim

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This weekend the Mail on Sunday admitted that the headline numbers in David Rose’s  “And now it’s global COOLING!” article published on September 8th were inflated by a factor of approximately two. This is how they explained that discrepancy to their faithful readers:

Scan of the bottom of page 31 in the September 29th 2013 edition of the Mail on Sunday
The bottom of page 31 in the September 29th 2013 edition of the Mail on Sunday

Can you spot the MILLION square km blunder by the Mail on Sunday? For the benefit of the scientifically illiterate amongst you I’ll explain, as I did yesterday in an email to the Mail on Sunday’s Managing Editor:

It appears that whoever writes your headlines is unaware of the difference between “A MILLION km” and “a million square km”. The former is a distance, and hence has no area. The latter IS an area.

Them:

As you can clearly see, the Mail reported yesterday that:

On September 4, NSIDC, based at the University of Colorado, stated on its website that in August 2013 the Arctic ice cover recovered by a record 2.38 million sq km – 919,000 sq miles – from its 2012 low.

News of this figure was widely reported – including by MailOnline – on September 8.

Us:

The headline of the report published on the NSIDC website on September 4th reads as follows:

A real hole near the pole

The related text reads as follows:

A large hole (roughly 150 square kilometers or 58 square miles) of near-zero ice concentration appears to have opened up at about 87 degrees North latitude. Small areas of open water are common within the ice pack, even at the North Pole, as the ice pack shifts in response to winds and currents, resulting in cracks (called leads) in the ice. The current opening seen in our satellite imagery is much larger.

and the relevant area of the accompanying satellite imagery looks like this:

University of Bremen colour visualisation of Arctic sea ice concentration for September 2nd 2013
University of Bremen AMSR2 colour visualisation of Arctic sea ice concentration for September 2nd 2013

Them:

Since the Mail’s intrepid reporter evidently read those words and looked at that picture, why on Earth do you suppose that the Mail on Sunday printed these words four days later?

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.

Even more to the point, why on Earth do you suppose that the Mail on Sunday left those words unaltered following their September 28th edit of the online version of that article?

Us:

Here’s our latest video update on the 2013 Arctic sea ice refreeze. The “Polar Polynya” is prominent by its presence, as is the broad band of open water between the “broken ice sheet” and “Russia’s northern shores”:

The “Polar Polynya” Reappears!

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Whatever David Rose may say in the Mail on Sunday, satellite images from high above the Arctic make it abundantly clear that there is in fact no “unbroken ice sheet [that] already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.”

Should further confirmation of that fact be needed, here’s our latest video analysis of the Arctic “refreeze” thus far:

The Great White Con – Update 1 from Jim L. Hunt on Vimeo.

As our video update points out, if you look carefully at the Arctic sea ice concentration maps derived from AMSR2 data, the large “Polar Polynya” visible is the region of the North Pole earlier this month seemed to be shrinking to nothing following the (provisional) NSIDC 2013 extent minimum on September 13th. However it now seems to have been given a new lease of life, as has the nearby “Barents Bite” of open water north of 85 degrees latitude.

That area of the Arctic is currently obscured by cloud, but here’s an image captured by the Aqua satellite earlier today of the “broken ice sheet” off “Russia’s northern shores”:

The Arctic sea ice edge off "Russia’s northern shores" from the Aqua satellite
The Arctic sea ice edge off “Russia’s northern shores” (Click for larger version)

Image courtesy of NASA Worldview from from the Aqua satellite.

Can you by any chance spot any cracks and/or holes in the supposedly “unbroken ice sheet”? Can you spot “Russia’s northern shores” for that matter?

In conclusion, for the moment at least, please note that we are now collecting all these periodical updates together in one handy location.