AP Celebrates Earth Day by Lying

What did you do last Saturday to celebrate Earth Day? Me? Oh, I drove my powerful V8 fast to the office, where I worked on getting a big (and environmentally sensitive) development project approved.

Others marked the day differently ... like Associated Press which spent it lying about global warming. Its article focused on glaciers on the Antarctic peninsula, and said:

"Fifty years ago, most of the glaciers we look at were slowly growing in length but since then this pattern has reversed. In the last five years the majority were actually shrinking rapidly," said the study's leader, Alison Cook of the British Antarctic Survey.

Antarctic Peninsula. (Photo by Greg Mortimer)

It also helpfully pointed out:

The Antarctic peninsula is a small segment of the Antarctic continent (actually, it's about 2% of it), located at the South Pole, and the behavior of the ice on the peninsula is not necessarily a reflection of what's going on elsewhere in Antarctica, said another investigator, David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey.

What Associated Press failed to tell readers (who must have upped the global temperature a degree or two with all their hand-wringing) is that temperatures over most of the remaining 98% of Antarctica are dropping and that ocean ice everywhere around Antarctica except the seas off the Antarctic peninsula is increasing.

Patrick Michaels at Tech Central Station devastates the AP story in delightful detail with, as Arlo Guthrie once said, "circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back." After establishing that the scientific literature clearly shows the continent is cooling, Michaels does his bit to warm up the global warming debate:

The general cooling of Antarctica is highly scientifically significant because climate models run under increasing levels of greenhouse gases predict that the Antarctic continent as a whole, not just the Peninsula, should be rapidly warming. This is clearly a model failure and no amount of going on and on about the impact of warming in the Peninsula, is going to change that fact.

h/t Greenie Watch