Tag Archives: David Rose

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 Mail Makes Modest Amends

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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.
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
The Mail’s modifed message about Arctic sea ice

Along with this “explanation” in a sidebar:

2013-09-28_2341_Mail_NSIDCFor 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?

An Unbroken Ice Sheet?

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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:

https://www.facebook.com/GreatWhiteCon

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
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
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”.

Shock News! Why Isn’t the Arctic Ice Free?

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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:

Wieslaw Maslowski says "if" and "about" in 2008
Wieslaw Maslowski says “if” and “around” in 2008

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.

60 Per Cent of Nothing?

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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.

Us:

According to the NSIDC once again the numbers look like this:

NSIDC daily Arctic sea ice extent chart, highlighting September 7th 2013
NSIDC daily Arctic sea ice extent chart, highlighting September 7th 2013

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.

Hello, Good Evening and Welcome!

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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.