NYT and WaPo hype Greenland ice cap melt – based on incorrect data

By Thomas Lifson, AMERICAN THINKER

Americans who get their news from the mainstream media that take their directions from the New York Timesand Washington Post can be forgiven for suspecting the President Trump wants to buy Greenland because its ice cap is melting. Both newspapers reported that Greenland experienced temperature records in June this year.

The Times hyped scares of melting ice and rising sea levels:

With the hot air moving north this week, Greenland was experiencing its own version of a heat wave. On the southwestern coast, Nuuk, the capital, reported temperatures in the high 50s Fahrenheit, about 10 degrees higher than average for this time of year (55 Fahrenheit is the equivalent of roughly 13 Celsius).

The warmth increased the surface melting of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, which covers about 80 percent of the island. Analysis of satellite data by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., showed that melting on Wednesday extended across 380,000 square miles, or about 60 percent of the total ice area.

That is about four times the median extent for the end of July over the past four decades. But while the extent of melting has been higher than average this year — including a day in June that set an early-season record — it is less than the record 2012 melt season, when warm temperatures persisted for much of the summer and at one point nearly 100 percent of the ice sheet was melting.

Greenland’s ice sheet is nearly two miles thick in places, and if all of it were to melt, global sea levels would rise about 24 feet. Melting has increased in recent decades because of climate change and has been outstripping accumulation from snow, resulting in a net loss of ice. Estimates vary, but a 2018 study found that the ice sheet has been losing an average of nearly 300 billion tons of ice per year this decade, contributing a total of about one-quarter of an inch to global sea level rise over that time.

But Anthony Watts noticed something about the latest scare

Now from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), via the news website The Local, the cooler reality:

Danish climate body wrongly reported Greenland heat record

The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.  

But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.  

“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.” 

I have been unable to find corrections from either paper.

August 18, 2019 | 8 Comments »

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8 Comments / 8 Comments

  1. THE RESEARCHER OF KNOWLEDGE CANNOT TURN UP HIS NOSE AT KNOWLEDGE

    We have to clear up a few things:

    Ted writes

    “As you know, there are thre questions.
    1 . Is the climate changing? Of course.
    2. to what extent is the warming, man made? Opinions vary on this.
    3. Assuming that man is a major contributor to the warming, are the proposed changes in man’s behavior worth the cost. I think not even if we were certain that the problem is caused by man.
    The NYT article only deals with the first question.”

    Number 1 is a trick. It says nothing at all. It advances no knowledge. Everything is in change. Including the climate. You take this for granted. So that question was a waste of space.

    Number 2 To what extent is the Warming man made. Yes there are arguments. let me use Infowars for shorthand…Infowars denies that it is man made citing other periods when there were no humans and no capitalism. But the Hockey Stick will win the day conclusively in this “argument”.

    And number 3…Ted makes this very complicated, but suppose just suppose that down the line is a horror show in which 6 billion of a 7 billion human population will die, for the moment jsut suppose, then we have a minor difficulty!

    Now before going on to the body of my work on the Hockey Stick idea let me deal with the NYT article.

    The author is Henry Fountain. He is a typical liberal gentleman and probably sides with the Palestinian Arabs and so on.

    So I have nothing in common politically with Henry Fountain.

    All I am doing here is looking at his article. It is his article here which is under the microscope. Ben Johnson took drugs to help him go fast and felt it was a pretty good idea. But say Ben wrote an article on sprinting technique so would it be valid. i would say yes.

    Or…we are all biased against the NYT as the BBC. But do we discard everything. Of course not. They have great riches and time on their hands. Most of us have neither. So we weigh the evidence like that.

    In short Henry seems to be making a case out that there is melting in the Arctic. He focuses on Greenland.

    It is without any doubt whatsoever that the article by Fountain and the various scientists interviewed or quoted is writtn in a very conservative style. This quality runs through the whole article.

    “The early melt is in keeping with the overall trend in the Arctic, where the warming effects of climate change are amplified. Overall, the region is warming about twice as fast as the global average.

    But day-to-day conditions in the Arctic can vary, and by Saturday somewhat cooler air led to reduced melting of about 215,000 square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colo.”

    It is not scare language at all. It is the opposite. Lifson does a terrible disservice to patriotic Americans and Jews here by his lies on this score alone.

    in passing note that one of the sources for the information of Fountain is the National Centre in Colorado. He never mentions the Danes.

    And so on and so on through the article. Full of interesting information. That is it. the article is informative.

    melting of the snow on top causes a change of colour. Then light snowfall means that that will happen sooner the next yearly cycle.

    it mentions a great warming in Siberia. Just mentions this.

    It mentions that the rate of heating in the Arctic is twice the rate of rest of the world.

    And so on.

    say a child was reading this. Imagine the follow on questions.

    From Lifson there is only a sullen destruction, a little like the annoying child at the back of the class whose parents have told him the teacher is an idiot. So nobody goes anywhere.

    Then Lifson thinks of Watt and Watt comes up with this Danish angle. It seems they made a mistake and their thermometer was faulty. Oh dear dear dear.

    And that is the whole centre of the article of Lifson.

    it is a shameful thing indeed and to think that Jews are actually following that website.

    And everybody in the game knows that Watt is a chancer. An ignoramus. He spent ten years in a university and could not get his degree.

    But Infowars and Breitbart will hire him…so desperate are they.

    By the way I think Trump is an ignoramus but a crafty ignoramus and he sprung this buying Greenland thing because the living reality of global warming is cornering him.

    We admired him because he took on the Democrats and the RINOs like the Bushes. But the world in HIS hands…disaster. He is a street fighter type. And may make America unliveable for Jews.
    and our world for everything.

  2. @ Ted Belman:
    This may be here https://wryheat.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/tuvalu-and-other-pacific-islands-resist-sea-level-rise-and-add-land-area/

    Earth, nature and matter is wonderful and will try its best. As seems to be happening in these studies

    But remember that Jamaican sprinter Ted. The modern scientists who see clearly reckon there will not be the time.

    I will come on to this when I deal with James Hansen hockey stick, hockey stick handle made lengthier.

    You leave out the Jamaican. Speed is the key.

  3. @ Ted Belman:

    As you know nothing that was forcast for the first 20 years happenned.
    THIS IS NOT TRUE. OVERALL EVERYTHING HAS COME TO PASS AS PREDICTED. THERE HAVE BEEN MISTAKES BUT SO WHAT. ABOVE ALL THE HOCKEY STICK OF HANSEN HAS BEEN TOTALLY PROVEN.

    So I remain skeptical. But I am will to listen and learn.
    GOOD ATTITUDE TED.

    I do admit that I have reluctance to accept conventional thinjking because there is so much fake news out there. The Left is driven by the agenda. That in itself makes me skeptical of everything they report.
    HERE YOU MAKE A CARDINAL ERROR. WHAT IS THE LEFT TODAY IS A BURNING QUESTION AND WHAT INFOWARS CALL THE LEFT I CALL POLICE AGENTS MORE LIKE.

    BUT ABOVE ALL YOU CONFUSE LEFTIST GROUPS ETC. WITH SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCE COMMUNITY. AND THE SHEER NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS THAT COME IN ON GLOBAL WARMING.

    Banks are still financing condos of the ocean. Big money isn’t worried about it either. How come?
    BLIND. DO NOT CARE. GET THEIR PENSIONS. MONEY WHICH IS FIAT IS AVAILABLE. THE OLD STORY BEHIND 2008.

    So let me put a few thoughts of my own forward.

    1. There is a collision between capitalist man, industrial man, man the farmer who is really a banker etcetera. and human beings and animals.

    see re pigs in Northern Ireland
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgXPcGEvFI

    see re pig farm in Ireland
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=235rTAZcEJg

    All recent videos

    There is now a major collision between man and nature. Man as you know Ted emerges from nature. And it to grasp the nature of this precise moment in the history of man that is SO important.

    There is a factor in the situation today that is very hard to grasp. There was one man, a genius of a genius of a genius. Spent many years in the British Library. He we now are beginning to know (he) predicted foretold out present extreme crisis, a crisis of man, that is capitalist man, abusing grievously our nature.

    The planet will survive. But there is no guarantee AT ALL that life on the planet will be there with that earth. No guarantee whatsoever.

    The next work I am going to do, and I will succeed, is to show that the work of James Hansen on the “hockey stick” was indeed correct, and this has been confirmed very, very much by new knowledge, which sometimes people call “studies” or “reports”, but it is really better described as knowledge.

    You will publish this in the spirit of what you have said above.

  4. “A 2019 paper provided an analysis of 709 islands from across the globe and revealed that no island larger than 25 acres, which includes the ‘vulnerable’ Maldives, Tuvalu, Fiji, etc.—has decreased in size since the 1980s. In fact, 89% of islands assessed are stable or growing. ”

    Who can explain that?

  5. @ Adam Dalgliesh:

    Adam writes:

    “What has all this got to do with Israel? I would much prefer it if if Israpundit published articles only about Israel and its interactions with known enemies, friends, alleged “friends,” etc. I have never been able to discern a connection between the global warming controversy and Israel. It is essentially an American, and to a lesser extent European, domestic issue.”

    No connection??? Och you poor wee fellow you!

    And you claim to be Jewish too!!! And you went to Trinity! Och dear me they were always a dull lot at Trinity!

    Where sits with you Adam that Jews are to be a guide to mankind?

    Fxxk mankind seems to be your little croak out of you!

  6. What has all this got to do with Israel? I would much prefer it if if Israpundit published articles only about Israel and its interactions with known enemies, friends, alleged “friends,” etc. I have never been able to discern a connection between the global warming controversy and Israel. It is essentially an American, and to a lesser extent European, domestic issue.

    To the extent that Israel does have some interest in the global warming controversy, it is exclusively on the side of the global-warming affirmers. Israeli firms have been developing numerous new technologies that dramatically reduce carbon emissions, or utilize non-carbon-based alternative energy sources such as solar, wind, hydrogen, etc. Israeli firms have developed, and are marketing, cars, aircraft, power plants, etc. Using these new techological innovations. They have used the global-warming hypothesis as an effective talking point to sell these technologies. Why keep publishing articles that interfere with these profitable Israeli sales? IN any case, even if the global warming warnings don’t materialize, these Israeli technologies are immensely useful for innumerable other reasons.

  7. @ Felix Quigley:
    As you know, there are thre questions.
    1 . Is the climate changing? Of course.
    2. to what extent is the warming, man made? Opinions vary on this.
    3. Assuming that man is a major contributor to the warming, are the proposed changes in man’s behavior worth the cost. I think not even if we were certain that the problem is caused by man.
    The NYT article only deals with the first question.

    I have read many articles debunking the consensus and even the concensus itself. As you know nothing that was forcast for the first 20 years happenned. So I remain skeptical. But I am will to listen and learn.

    I do admit that I have reluctance to accept conventional thinjking because there is so much fake news out there. The Left is driven by the agenda. That in itself makes me skeptical of everything they report.

    Banks are still financing condos of the ocean. Big money isn’t worried about it either. How come?

  8. Ted Belman and his site need to clear up a number of things here.

    First of all what is the relevance to high temperatures right across the Arctic, including Siberia, in this year, to the central item of this article as presented by Ted Belman, something called the Danish Meteorological Institute and it seems a simple mistake they made, and quickly corrected THEMSELVES..

    Who are they? Why so important? They are not mentioned once in the NYT article. I may be wrong on that so please correct me if I am wrong.

    So it seems that this Danish group is brought in for a purpose. And what is it all about? They made a mistake.

    But the writers of the NYT article was not relying on the Danish Group at all.

    See this:

    “There is no way of knowing if such a pattern will occur this year, but the early extensive thaw “is setting the island up for more melting as we go on into the summer,” said Ted Scambos, a senior researcher at the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/climate/greenland-ice-sheet-melting.html

    See…different outfit. There must be many people measuring as we write.

    And as you read through the NYT article if anything they are most cautious in their claims.

    These are lies being told here.

    These lies depend and will only work on (gullible) people not bothering to look up the NYT article which is not a scare article at all, and if anything errs on the side of caution.

    Where does this leave Ted Belman and his site Israpundit…note the Isra…this becomes serious if associated with Israeli science?

    Is Greenland warming? Is Canada warming? Is the Arctic warming and is the Arctic melting?

    Then there seems to be a denial of these concepts which are based on scientific measurement and to argue against Ted Belman brings into play a known fraud called Anthony Watts

    see https://www.desmogblog.com/anthony-watts

    The result no answer to the questions above. Just fraud.