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Murdered by the Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday!
At the weekend my old mucker David Rose reported in the Mail On Sunday the shocking news that there is 60 per cent more sea ice at the Arctic than there was this time last year. So too did Hayley Dixon in the Telegraph. The implication of both pieces was that perhaps this global warming thing we've been hearing about ad nauseam this last couple of decades isn't quite the deadly threat the 'scientists' have been telling us it was; that indeed, maybe the more pressing worry ought to be global cooling.

Luckily the Guardian's token Big Oil employee and environmental expert Dana Nuccitelli has stepped in to explain what the problem is. It turns out that both the Mail on Sunday and the Telegraph are utterly rubbish publications, staffed by lying liars whose bottoms smell of ploppy poo, and who just can't be trusted to report on science accurately.
These two articles at the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph continue the unfortunate trend of shoddy climate reporting in the two periodicals, particularly from David Rose. They suffer from cherry picking short-term data while ignoring the long-term human-caused trends, misrepresenting climate research, repeating long-debunked myths, and inventing IPCC meetings despite being told by climate scientists that these claims are pure fiction.

Based on their history of shoddy reporting, the safest course of action when reading a climate article in the Mail on Sunday or Telegraph is to assume they're misrepresentations or falsehoods until you can verify the facts therein for yourself.
Lest there be any doubt that Nuccitelli is right, here are a few Guardian commenters, venting their righteous rage:
The Press Complaints Commission will, no doubt, back these journalists and their right to lie and peddle disinformation.

It's why my uncle Taffo had his legs blown off...to defend the right of Rose to mislead the general public
and (I thought Guardianistas preferred not to break Godwin's Law?).
Those of us who read the Mail as well know the formula by now. Roll out that well known "expert" David Rose at weekends, whose "expertise" ranges from the royal family to hydraulic fracturing but the jack of no trades spins a good yarn and tells a few "fisherman's tales" to captivate an audience dying to hear "proof" of what they already believe.

Weekends of course attract more readers and more clicks on an article bring in more advertising revenue. Advertising revenue is worth more than truth to a gullible readership.
Or as it says in Mein Kampf, keep the slogans simple so they appeal to the least intelligent.
and
The Mail and the Telegraph both encourage the prejudices of their readers.

That is why they are successful in selling papers.
and (this one really needs to be read out by Adam Buxton in one of his pretentious-tit voices)
Uhm, am I the only one here who prefers the perspective of trained professionals to that of a Layman?
So there you have it: all this wicked denialist nonsense about Arctic sea ice may be trivially true but if you take this "factoid" seriously then basically you're a lying greed-capitalist Nazi sympathiser who was tacitly responsible for a Guardian reader's uncle getting his legs blown off - and you're also a complete idiot because you're (probably) not a climate scientist and climate scientists are trained professionals (a bit like Bodie and Doyle, only with white lab coats and PhDs and bunsen burners instead of Walther P38s) whereas you're just a rubbish layman.

Oh dear. I think it's time I explained for the benefit of any Guardian readers present, and also for that of my menagerie of house trolls and failed UEA wind turbine salesmen, what this debate is really about.

One thing it's not about is "the science." As I explain very clearly in Watermelons, it never was about "the science." If it were - or ever had been - about "the science" the debate would be over by now. (For fuller explanation, read the book).

And it's precisely because it's not about "the science" that the very last people who should be arbitrating on this issue are "scientists." As we've seen in the Climategate emails, in Gleickgate, in Amazongate, in Glaciergate, in the machinations of the IPCC, in the data manipulations by NASA and CRU, in the public statements of activists like James Hansen and Sir Paul Nurse, the "scientists" can no longer be trusted to give it to us straight. It's why what they think, or don't think, about issues like arctic sea ice is of such marginal relevance to the main story.

The main story is this: for well over two decades now, the world of a terrible environmental threat variously called "global warming" or "climate change" dishonest, highly politicised scientific establishment, in bed with scaremongering green NGOs, shyster politicians, rent-seeking corporations and ignorant, irresponsible media outfits has been warning the world of a terrible environmental threat variously called "global warming" or "climate change" which only exists in the form of computer projections. As time has progressed, so the doomy prognostications of these computer models (GCMs) have begun looking less and less plausible, leaving that dwindling body of experts who still believe in their accuracy looking more and more foolish.

This is the context in which the Arctic ice stories above need to be judged. They tell us absolutely nothing about "global warming", for no single weather event can. But they speak volumes about the way, for years, the climate debate has been held hostage by green propagandists, aided and abetted by their shills in the mainstream media.

A classic example of this is the 2007 BBC report quoted in both articles:
Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.
Note that invocation right at the beginning of one of the BBC's favourite professions "scientists". ("Scientists", as the BBC would like us to think, channelling Homer Simpson. "Is there anything they don't know?"). There is, admittedly, a cautious "could" in the second paragraph. But this is more than offset by the headline "Arctic Summers ice-free 'by 2013'" and by the paragraphs further down where Professor Maslowski uses his experty expertise to assure us that, actually, his estimates are pretty conservative and that the chances are things could be a whole lot worse. And, of course, by the corroboration the scare story receives at the end by yet another experty expert, one Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University.

I would not be at all surprised if the BBC's claim wasn't repeated in many other publications at the time. Environment correspondents hunt in packs and get their stories from the same parti-pris sources, often taking them straight off the press release and rarely bothering to fact check them, for why would you need to when Gaia, the baby polar bears and the weeping glaciers are on your side? Senior editors - certainly until recently - have found the whole global warming issue far too boring and involved to have an opinion on it themselves, and have therefore tended to defer to the supposed expertise of their environment corrs and run whatever drivel they care to churn out.

It's a shame really, that the hacks and scientists responsible for fomenting this scaremongering tosh can't retrospectively have their salaries docked - by way of partial recompense for the gazillions they have cost us all as a result of the expensive policies brought in as a result of their nonsense.

Still, at least we have the consolation of mockery. This BBC story now deserves to rank alongside the Independent's unforgettable claim in 2000 that "Snowfall is now just a thing of the past". I'm sure as the weather closes in and we enter a new little ice age to rival the Maunder and Dalton Minima, we'll have plenty more time as we huddle over our flickering computer screens for warmth to find plenty more idiocies where those came from.