A screenshot of the top of a global warming story in The Mail yesterday. The headline and bullet points above accompanied a story over the weekend by David Rose in the U.K. newspaper the Mail. It now seems to be gaining traction elsewhere in the media, including in a story in the Telegraph (which seems to be largely copied from the Mail), and this item on MSN Now. Let us count the ways that the headline and story violate the principles of journalism I will be discussing with 130 eager young undergraduates this afternoon in a class I teach at the University of Colorado. Literally. That's the purpose of this piece. Rose writes the following at the top of his story:
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. 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. Instead, 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.
Rose uses the recovery in Arctic sea ice since last year's record low extent as evidence to bolster the main points of his piece: that global warming has stopped, and that we appear to be entering into a long-term cooling trend. Let's put aside Rose's apparent ignorance of the difference between Arctic sea ice and an "ice sheet" (the latter, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, being glacial land ice extending more than 20,000 square miles). He is correct that the geographic extent of this year's Arctic sea ice is greater than last year's. But he cherry picks information to support his claim rather than provide readers with a full picture. Here's what the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported five days ago about Arctic sea ice extent for August 2013 — namely that it is:
...1.03 million square kilometers (398,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average for August, but well above the level recorded last year, which was the lowest September extent in the satellite record. Ice extent this August was similar to the years 2008 to 2010. These contrasts in ice extent from one year to the next highlight the year-to-year variability attending the overall, long-term decline in sea ice extent.
