Lesson #457 in how to lie with scienceFile this lesson away in the Decline and Fall of Enlightenment Science.
Nature, formerly known as the esteemed science journal, is now achieving everything a captured tabloid industry sales mag could hope for. They've
squeezed a disaster out of a tiny change in a short record, and from a good news story. Let's not forget, for the last 100,000 years most humans would have been happy that a bit of Antarctica was greening.
"Lush"? The only people who call this lush are penguins:
© joannenova.com.au
To appreciate the Black Belt level of
naked exaggeration going on here, consider the opening hyperbole:
A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.
"It's the beginning of dramatic transformation," says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study1, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.
All this shock and drama arise from an area of "less than a square kilometer" expanding all the way up to "nearly 12 square kilometers". These numbers "shocked us" say the PR team, I mean, the scientists, who continue on in their best Agony-Aunt impression: "
It's simply that rate of change in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that causes the alarm." Sob sob, and Boo hoo too. It's a lonely peninsula. Can we find it a friend?
Everything about this shows the pathetic decay of Western Science. We're talking about 12 square kilometers of more habitable land on a continent with 14 million square kilometers of ice.
The horrible affliction of unexpected tundra now covers 0.00009% of Antarctica.
Comment: An earlier report from the area: Woman killed by leopard in Pune, India - 5th such incident for district in 5 months