On Sunday, CBS claimed that Antarctica is melting. In fact, once small portion of the Antarctic peninsula is warming and may be losing snow, while the rest of Antarctica has not been warming and in fact has been gaining ice cover. The show visits an island off the Antarctic Peninsula which has about as much weather relevance and predictive power to the rest of Antarctica as Key West has to the rest of the United States. Absolutely absurd.
Unfortunately, I have a real job and I don’t have time to restate all the rebuttals to the CBS show. However, I took on the Antarctic issue in depth here, and this post at NC Media Watch has more.
We had the same crap journalism in Canada about two weeks ago – big story, big headline saying “Antarctic Melting” followed by a whole series of paragraphs about melting ice etc.
In the LAST line of the story there is a mention about two parts and one part isn’t melting.
No mention of the fact that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is 9x larger in volume than the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Honest journalism eh ??
I was napping when 60 Minutes came on, and I had to wake up and turn it off. I could have watched it for laughs except it’s not funny to see such blatant misrepresentation of the facts and with such dire potential consequences.
It’s like what James Lileks said today about our economic woes:
“I’m not worried about the economy at this point; I’m worried what people will do save it.”
http://lileks.com/bleats/archive/08/0108/012208.html
Leave it alone, Oh Wise Politicians. Don’t dip your oar in where you’re neither needed or wanted.
CBS doesn’t run stories which say, “Murders are on the rise in America” when the murder rate only increases in Washington, DC, for example. The reason is that everyone knows that Washington, DC is makes up a small part of America. Sadly many journalists don’t know that the Antarctic Penninsula is a small part of Antarctica.
As you pointed out in your earlier post about Antarctica, the current amount of sea ice is still far above normal: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg.
I wonder how many of the world’s poor have died of the cold in recent weeks (see link below) because their leaders no longer see any reason to prepare for cold weather “on account of global warming.”
Will media outfits like CBS take some of the blame for this?
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UB52R81&show_article=1