CBS Evening News Carries Propaganda

I was watching CBS Evening News and they interviewed a guy, James Martin, who takes pictures of glaciers. He is moaning about the loss of glaciers. (Gee... I bet James Martin is really torn up because the two mile thick glaciers of the last Ice Age are gone. Oh, if only we could bring back the "good old days" of the last Ice Age!)

What really bothered me is that James Martin outright lied and nobody at CBS pointed this out or felt that viewers needed to be exposed to the truth. James Martin was right when he said there were missing "millions" of ice in the Arctic but he got his units wrong, he said "million square miles" but it is "million square kilometers". This error means he is off by a factor of 9/25, i.e. 64% less than what he stated. Consequently his claims were all wrong. He said the "missing" ice was the size of Alaska, Texas, and California combined:

• Alaska 591,004 sq mi 1,530,699 sq km


• Texas 266,807 sq mi 691,030 sq km


• California 155,959 sq mi 403,934 sq km

As you can see, the actual loss of a million sq km of ice is 2/3 the size of Alaska, not the "million square miles" which is the combined area of the three states. You can confirm this fact by looking at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign' Cryosphere Today web site, in particular at the "anomaly" graph showing how this year differs from the the 1979-2000 baseline:
He also said "another million square miles of ice in the Arctic will be gone within two decades". Below is the "trend" over the last 30 years, there is a slight dip, and nothing here justifies his outlandish claim. The area of ice show 2007 as a modern low point, but arctic ice is slowly rebounding, so it isn't obvious that "another million" is about to disappear. There really is no "pattern" to the ice loss. The "global warming" crowd wants to blame humans for "catastrophic loss of arctic ice" but I don't see it and it isn't clear that the losses (and rebounds) in the record aren't just natural processes...
Nobody at CBS caught the error.

As well, James Martin talked about "huge chunks" of Antactica breaking off and melting. That's true, but that is simply the annual melt! Nothing unusual about that. In fact, the media has been caught using the very same photo in different years to "prove" that great chunks of ice are collapsing and disappearing... the very same photo. Nobody in the media bothers to check the truth of these tales they retail to a gullible public. You can see the details of this hoax on a posting on the Watt's Up With That web site.

Here is Antarctica. Do you see a "loss of ice" here? I sure don't!
There is no obvious trend at this pole. And the current year anomaly shows no great loss of ice:
The only "facts" that James Martin got right were that glaciers are melting. But he implied it was "global warming" and that isn't necessarily so. It is mostly just the rebound from that last "little Ice Age". He also claims this was the result of human-caused global warming, but if it is just the natural process of rebounding from the last ice age, then it isn't humans.

The fact that a major news media like CBS airs falsehoods (while it restricts coverage to the Hadley CRU e-mails to a brief mention despite the fact that this is a clear scientific fraud perpetrated by those who have a political "global warming" agenda) means that the public is mis-informed. It is disgraceful that the media caters to these noisy special interest groups who are propagandizing an essentially political point of view, and a misinformed political point of view!

I don't mind CBS reporting "news" about the message of a political group but the obligation of the media is to put this group's "message" into context and, in this case, show that the claims are false! CBS has utterly failed in its responsibilities.