I had the "Today Show" on Friday morning while I was waiting to do a radio interview with WOOD-AM about my winter forecast and I heard Matt Lauer say, "Next we'll take a trip to the Arctic, where the ice is melting fast". What followed some commercials was a story that said: "...the Arctic, where the climate is changing rapidly and not for the better." The trouble with the above statements is that they're not true. You can check the extent of Arctic ice at the University of Illinois Cryosphere website: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ You'll find that the Arctic icecap reached a record (and we only have a 29-year record) low in 2007. The icecap has been growing at a fairly rapid rate since, gaining 7% in just the last year to bring it back to 2002 levels. Alaska is having one of their coldest years ever, and the ice is not "melting fast" it's actually growing fast. Also, the Antarctic icecap reached a record maximum in 2007. The TV story also showed a graph of the loss of Arctic ice from 2005 to 2007. Obviously, the story they wanted to tell was that the ice is "melting rapidly" If they had included 2008, or done a graph from 2002 to 2008, or from 1989 to 2008, it would not have had the same dramatic effect as the graph that was shown. (picture courtesy of the University of Illinois Cryosphere Today)
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