As the east coast of the United States hunkers down for Irma (and maybe Katia and Jose), the Gulf continues Harvey clean up, LA puts out the largest fire in the city’s history helped by a record-breaking heatwave in California, and ash from a dozen wildfires falls like snow in Seattle, it’s easy to forget things are happening around the rest of the world.
But since Labor Day marks the end of summer, we thought we’d prepare you for the annual tradition of denier drivel claiming the Arctic isn’t melting.
As Bob Ward at the London School of Economics reminded us, last week marked the third anniversary of a story by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday claiming that Arctic ice melt was slowing or leveling off. Of course, melting has continued, and Rose’s use of the extreme melt in 2007 as a starting point is easily debunked by Skeptical Science’s Arctic Sea Ice escalator. More simply: you can draw short trend lines all sorts of ways to mislead your audience, but the longer trend is what matters, and it clearly shows melting.
On the same day as Ward’s post, Richard Black (formerly BBC, now ECIU) started teasing a few of Britain's fake news stalwarts on Twitter, sarcastically pitching that they write on the “recovery” of arctic ice. (Like any good flack, he made sure to follow up, because the melting continues and winter isn’t quite here.)
But continued teasing on non-melting stories did nothing to deter blogger Paul Homewood from posting exactly the misleading meme Ward and Black call out, literally the very next day. Unsurprisingly, a link to Homewood’s post topped the Climate Depot site yesterday, blaring, “Analysis: Arctic Sea Ice Stable Since 2007.”
This post is telling, in that Homewood makes no attempt to hide the long-term trend line showing continued melting in the graph that he says shows a slowdown of melting since 2007. Then a second graph shows that ice extent in this year, and recent ones, remains over two standard deviations below the 1981-200 average. Yet somehow, apparently because all the ice isn’t already melted, this debunks the notion of an Arctic death spiral. He, and those who parrot the argument, are so frozen in their denial they look at what is obviously a downward trend, well outside the norm for even the warmed late 20th century, and see only the reassuringly straight line their denial requires.
If only deniers’ minds could be changed as easily as the climate.
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