The original daily mail article is here and is pretty entertaining. It looks like they actually used ice thickness for contour lines in Greenland (and didn’t note it) but nowhere else (Antarctica, Iceland, Canada). Ms. Sheena Barclay finds herself in a hole and decides it’s the right time to demonstrate the use of a diesel powered excavator:
I spoke to Sheena Barclay, MD of Collins Bartholomew, the Atlas’s publisher.
She defended the map, saying that the 15% shrinkage in ice-cover is real and refers to a comparison between the map shown in the current edition and that in the last edition, published in 1999.
The first problem is those words ‘green’ and ‘ice free’. According to Ms Barclay, ‘ice free’ refers to ground covered with less than 500 metres thick.
So ‘green, ice-free land’ could refer to land covered with nearly third of a mile thickness of ice. I put it to Ms Barclay that this isn’t what most people would think of as ‘ice free’.
‘Yes, I can see why you would see that as misleading’ she admitted, after a very long pause.
And ‘green’? To me (and I would guess everyone else) I think of bleak Greenlandic hillsides covered with grass or at least moss, perhaps a few grazing sheep.
It turns out ‘green’ refers just to the printing colour chosen by the cartographers to indicate low-altitude land, and not its colour at all. Which is, er, white.
How did this happen? According to Ms Barclay at the scale of the Greenland map (1:12,500,000) only ice thicker than 500 metres is shown.
But this is patently not the case. On the same spread in the Atlas, at the same scale, small ice caps in both Iceland and British Columbia are also shown in white.
I asked the scientists at the SPRI to confirm that these ice caps were much thinner than 500 metres and they were able to do so.
It gets worse. The Greenlandic ice cap is marked with a series of contours at 500-metre intervals.
But nowhere on the map, or in the Key at the beginning of the Atlas, is it made clear what these contours refer to.
It cannot be altitude as many intersect with another set of contours which clearly DO show height above sea level.
These contours seem to be ice-thickness contours, produced from radar data.
Fair enough, but this needs to be explained, which it is not, and it also needs to be explained why other ice-covered areas (including Antarctica, Iceland, Canada etc) are marked with elevation-contours not ice-thickness contours.
Worst of all, according to the SPRI, the publishers did not, as they are claiming, use the same method in 1999 – when even quite small mountain glaciers in Greenland were shown, properly, as ‘ice covered’.
Well this proves that… that climate scientists are conspiring…, um, that corrupt politicians…
Sorry, what was your point? That a few people at Times Atlas are stupid?
No, the point is that people in the media are both stupid and eager to foist junk science on us. And note that Murdoch owns the publication.
The original daily mail article is here and is pretty entertaining. It looks like they actually used ice thickness for contour lines in Greenland (and didn’t note it) but nowhere else (Antarctica, Iceland, Canada). Ms. Sheena Barclay finds herself in a hole and decides it’s the right time to demonstrate the use of a diesel powered excavator:
I spoke to Sheena Barclay, MD of Collins Bartholomew, the Atlas’s publisher.
She defended the map, saying that the 15% shrinkage in ice-cover is real and refers to a comparison between the map shown in the current edition and that in the last edition, published in 1999.
The first problem is those words ‘green’ and ‘ice free’. According to Ms Barclay, ‘ice free’ refers to ground covered with less than 500 metres thick.
So ‘green, ice-free land’ could refer to land covered with nearly third of a mile thickness of ice. I put it to Ms Barclay that this isn’t what most people would think of as ‘ice free’.
‘Yes, I can see why you would see that as misleading’ she admitted, after a very long pause.
And ‘green’? To me (and I would guess everyone else) I think of bleak Greenlandic hillsides covered with grass or at least moss, perhaps a few grazing sheep.
It turns out ‘green’ refers just to the printing colour chosen by the cartographers to indicate low-altitude land, and not its colour at all. Which is, er, white.
How did this happen? According to Ms Barclay at the scale of the Greenland map (1:12,500,000) only ice thicker than 500 metres is shown.
But this is patently not the case. On the same spread in the Atlas, at the same scale, small ice caps in both Iceland and British Columbia are also shown in white.
I asked the scientists at the SPRI to confirm that these ice caps were much thinner than 500 metres and they were able to do so.
It gets worse. The Greenlandic ice cap is marked with a series of contours at 500-metre intervals.
But nowhere on the map, or in the Key at the beginning of the Atlas, is it made clear what these contours refer to.
It cannot be altitude as many intersect with another set of contours which clearly DO show height above sea level.
These contours seem to be ice-thickness contours, produced from radar data.
Fair enough, but this needs to be explained, which it is not, and it also needs to be explained why other ice-covered areas (including Antarctica, Iceland, Canada etc) are marked with elevation-contours not ice-thickness contours.
Worst of all, according to the SPRI, the publishers did not, as they are claiming, use the same method in 1999 – when even quite small mountain glaciers in Greenland were shown, properly, as ‘ice covered’.
Well this proves that… that climate scientists are conspiring…, um, that corrupt politicians…
Sorry, what was your point? That a few people at Times Atlas are stupid?
No, the point is that people in the media are both stupid and eager to foist junk science on us. And note that Murdoch owns the publication.