BBC comes over all alarmist

Pursuing its campaign of climate alarmism, the BBC World Service today headlines the news of a receding Arctic ice-cap.  They say that melting is “nearly as bad as last year” — which I take it means that there is less melting than last year.  In 2007 they trumpeted the record level of melting, but as Christopher Booker later pointed out in the Sunday Telegraph, the subsequent re-freezing took the ice-cap back to normal dimensions.  Indeed there were photographs of Newfoundland fishing boats exceptionally iced-in to their harbours and unable to leave, and stories of unusual number of polar bears making their way across extensive pack-ice to Iceland, and posing a threat to local residents.
 
As an aside, I recently heard a presentation in Chicago by Bjorn Lomborg, the “Skeptical Environmentalist”.  He cited studies showing that if all the planned measures were taken to mitigate climate change, it might eventually save the life of one polar bear a year.  But (he said) we currently shoot three or four hundred polar bears a year — for example to protect residents in Iceland.  Rather than spending trillions of dollars a year to save one bear in many years’ time, couldn’t we just shoot one less?
 
Now the data show that the world has been in a cooling phase for ten years, since 1998.  Of course it takes a while for the ocean temperatures to catch up, so we should not be surprised if the Arctic ice-cap is still responding to the warming that took place 1975/1998.
 
Funnily enough, the BBC made much less of the news of exceptional cold and snow which caused huge disruption of transport services in China last winter, nor of the exceptional cold weather events in the Southern Hemisphere winter in recent months.  But then if the facts don’t fit the narrative, it’s easiest to ignore the facts.

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