Greenpeace leader admits exaggerating Arctic ice claims

Though, as Andrew Bolt below suggests, was this a mistake or a deliberate lie that they just happened to be finally caught out on by the media actually asking difficult questions for a change?

And the BBC to boot!!!

It is similar to their 20,000 species going extinct every year lie. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, other than a very suspect mathematical model, to support this claim.

Is "mistake" another word for a warming lie? 

Andrew Bolt

Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 05:07am

Just an honest mistake, which purely coincidentally scared people into thinking we really are heating the world to hell:

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.”

Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming. Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.

“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake,” he said.

Mistake? Leipold tries another form of weasel words:

We as a pressure group have to emotionalise issues.

I think the BBC reporter (and what a turnaround this is) is right:

Sackur said the claim was inaccurate on two fronts, pointing out that the Arctic ice is a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle, and that it had survived much warmer periods in history than the present. [Clarification: Sackur was referring to the Greenland ice cap, within the Arctic ice area.] The BBC reporter accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism.”

Standard operating procedure for warming alarmists actually, as Professor Steven Schneider once cheerfully conceded.

Amazing how green lies collapse once reporters actually do their job and subject them to scrutiny. But what hope that the ABC will do as the BBC at last has, given that its chief science broadcaster is Robyn “100 Metres” Williams?

But if Greenpeace now admits it was a “mistake” to claim the Artic would be ice-free in 30 years, what would you call a scare-claim at wild as this one:

Tim Flannery also warned ”this may be the Arctic’s first ice-free year”

And this, from Al Gore:

… the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years...

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