Tag Archives: Economist

The Strange Tale of The Mail and The Snow Dragon

Politics, , , ,

This article is reposted from econnexus.org.uk, originally published on March 18th 2013, as historical background to a new article on the so called Polar Silk Road.

As I’ve recently been reporting over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, I inadvertently found myself having lunch with the Chinese delegation to the Economist’s Arctic Summit in Norway last week. Amongst other things I learned about the voyage of the Chinese research vessel Xue Long (Snow Dragon in English) right across the Arctic Basin last summer:

The summer 2012 voyage of The Snow Dragon, courtesy of the Arctic Portal
The summer 2012 voyage of The Snow Dragon, courtesy of the Arctic Portal

Then over the weekend The Daily Mail published (again?!) an article by David Rose under the strident headline:

The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along!

Needless to say the following article shows nothing of the sort. Fondly imagining that David and his loyal readership would be interested in learning about some of things I discovered on my recent trip to Oslo I posted a comment on David’s article, which included this link to the following image (courtesy of The Arctic Portal once again):

Cross-Arctic Sea Routes. Past, present and future.
Cross-Arctic Sea Routes. Past, present and future.

After a couple of hours I noticed that my learned comments seemed to have fallen foul of the Mail’s moderator(s). So too had the most popular comment on the whole story from Mark in Warwickshire, who was complaining by then that:

Mark's message is missing!
Mark’s message is missing!

My message was missing too, so I carefully read the Mail Online’s “House Rules“, which state (amongst other things) that:

We welcome your opinions. We want our readers to see and understand different points of view. Try to contribute to the thread, rather than just stating if you agree or disagree.

I figured that was exactly what I was endeavouring to do, so still somewhat baffled I read on:

You must not insert links to websites (URLs) or submit content which would be an infringement of copyright.

Figuring that I must have crossed on to the wrong side of this particular line I tried again, using the following carefully crafted form of words:

My previous comment seems to have fallen foul of the “house rules” so I’ll try again. To discover what I was on about try Googling my username along with “Arctic Summit”.

I attended the aforementioned event in Norway last week. If there was a Daily Mail reporter there they kept very quiet about it! Amongst the other matters under discussion the Russians and Chinese were obviously extremely keen on the idea of saving many billions (and hence making many billions!) of dollars by shipping many billions of tonnes of stuff across the Arctic Ocean in the very near future.

[link omitted to avoid offending the house rules]

Whatever the likes of Myles Allen and David Bellamy may have said in various locations at various times the message from the real world in Oslo last week is abundantly clear. Statements such as “No, the world ISN’T getting warmer” are extremely “economical with the truth”.

That was over 24 hours ago, but still my wisdom from the East has failed to materialise at its intended destination. Perhaps someone from the Mail Online would be good enough to explain to me where I’m going wrong? Hopefully Mark is now a happy bunny at least, because today his missing message has been miraculously restored to the top spot amongst the currently 709 comments on the Mail’s Message:

Mark's missing message is miraculously restored
Mark’s missing message is miraculously restored!

Do you suppose one or both of my messages will benefit from a similar miracle in the near future, and who is “conning” who here?

Some Statistics for the 2015 Economist Arctic Summit

Politics, , , , ,

Professor Jason Box was good enough to add some expert commentary to our recent story about a large calving of the Jakobshavn Glacier last month. Consequently we have just watched his presentation to the 2015 Economist Arctic Summit at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo with much interest. Here are our edited highlights from the conference’s Twitter feed:

 

 

 

 


 

Here are some relevant Arctic sea ice metrics. We will continue to update them as the latest figures arrive throughout the rest of today:

IJIS/JAXA daily extent: 13,648,280 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 2003

vishop_sic_20150311
 

DMI “30%” daily extent: 10,676,900 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 2005

DMI-30-icecover_20150312
 

NSIDC daily extent: 14,330,000 km² – Lowest ever level for the date
NSIDC 5 day average extent: 14,280,000 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 1979
Charctic-201503011Crop
 

Cryosphere Today daily area: 12,984,410 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 1979
CTArea-2015-Day69

Is The Economist Being “Economical with the Truth” About Arctic Sea Ice?

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

I was idly scrolling through my Twitter feed this morning when I couldn’t help but notice that Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was calling for volunteers to research possible trends in The Economist’s attitude to “climate change” over recent decades:


 

Unable to resist temptation I immediately popped on over to The Economist online and searched for the term “Arctic”, as is my wont. Lo and behold I discovered much to my amazement that they had published an article on that very topic earlier on this very day. However after reading it I have to say I was less than impressed, and reported my findings back to @ClimateOfGavin. I also called The Economist’s “Editorial” number, and spoke to a nice lady with an American accent who told me that she was an “answering service” and assured me that she would pass on my message to an Economist editor, but they almost certainly wouldn’t look at it until Monday. Here’s how the conversation is going:

Them:

The Northern Sea Route is not living up to the hype, either. In 2013 71 ships traversed Russia’s Arctic, according to the Northern Sea Route Information Office: a large increase since 2010, when the number was just four. But 16,000 ships passed through the Suez Canal in 2013, so the northern route is not starting to compete. In 2014 traffic fell to 53 ships, only four of which sailed from Asia and docked in Europe (the rest went from one Russian port to another). The route does not yet link Europe and East Asia.

The decline in 2014 was partly caused by the weather: less sea ice melted last summer than in 2013, so the route was more dangerous.

 

Now I distinctly recall posting this image:

2014-08-23_NSR-Ice on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum on August 23rd last year. Over and above that, here’s a couple of freshly minted videos to illustrate the point more vividly. The AMSR2 Arctic sea ice concentration data displayed is courtesy of the University of Hamburg:

[Edit 02/02/15] The Economist’s “man in Tromso” asked to see 2012 as well, so here it is. AMSR2 data wasn’t available in 2012, so this one uses the SSMIS passive microwave radiometer instead:

Set the top two running in sync and then if the difference between 2013 and 2014 isn’t as plain as day to you, my name is Snow White!

[Edit 05/02/15]

In an endeavour to quantify the reduction in ice coverage in 2014 compared to 2013 that’s evident in the animations we’ve combined the regional extents for the Chukchi, East Siberian, Laptev and Kara Seas to produce this chart:

NSR-Extent-2013-14
[/Edit]
 
Hence:

Us:

Please forgive my rather brusque manner, but I arrive fresh from hauling the Mail on Sunday in front of IPSO.

Can The Economist provide some evidence for their rather vague assertion that “less [Arctic] sea ice melted last summer than in 2013”. Can you for example provide a link to an authoritative source?

 
The latest print edition of The Economist landed on my doormat this morning. I eagerly turned to the “Letters” section, but was disappointed to discover that my virtual “Letter to the editor” sent on Thursday morning must have missed their deadline. Here it is:

CC: Your “Tromso correspondent”

Sir(s),

I read with much interest the “Not so cool” article in your January 31st edition, which suggested “The hype over the Arctic recedes, along with the summer ice”.

I take the point your Tromso correspondent makes that “The Northern Sea Route is not living up to the hype, either”, but I must take issue with the hype that currently reads, in both your print and online editions:

“The decline in 2014 was partly caused by the weather: less sea ice melted last summer than in 2013, so the route was more dangerous.”

All the evidence I have seen (collected together for your edification, including maps, graphs and animations, at https://greatWhiteCon.info/2015/01/is-the-economist-being-economical-with-the-truth-about-arctic-sea-ice/) refutes that statement. The minimum Arctic sea ice area and extent in summer 2014 were both below 2013. According to assorted satellites there was significantly less sea ice bobbing about along the Northern Sea Route in 2014 than in 2013. The official August 2014 forecast published by the Northern Sea Route Information Office maintained that ice conditions would be “Easy” over the entire NSR.

I look forward to seeing this particular piece of “hype” receding in both physical and virtual print in the very near future.

Yours,

Jim Hunt

 
Them:

We’ll keep you posted!

 

Russia’s Northern Shores

Concentration, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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: