It Must Be Global Warming

No Ice At The North Pole screams another typical front page headline from the left-wing newspaper, The Independent this morning.

According to The Independent, the article is apparently ‘an exclusive’ – but truth be told, it is not. In fact the story came to light more than eight years ago in the United States and has cropped up in the global and national media more than a few times since.

Back in August of 2000, The New York Times printed a similar but equally erroneous report suggesting that ‘the North Pole is melting’. Yet, the Times were forced to issue a retraction after it was pointed out by other scientists that in the summertime open stretches of water in the Arctic were a normal occurrence.

Thus, the US-based Capitalist Magazine observed less than a year after the New York Times article:

Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that ‘The North Pole is melting’.

The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist – an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy – who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. ‘The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water’, the reporter declared, ‘was more than 50 million years ago’.

Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction.

However, the eco-left were not content to let the story lie forgotten and managed to revive it again in April this year with ABC News claiming that the ‘North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008’. Today, eight years after the original claim and two months after its latest appearance in ABC, The Independent has just caught up and republished the falsehood.

What’s more, the Independent article fails to even mention the volcanic eruptions that have very recently been discovered by scientists under the arctic icecap. But then why would The Independent worry about such trivial matters as truth, fact and good journalistic standards and practices? They are convinced that Global Warming is almost solely caused by the activities of humanity and will publish any evidence, whether true or not, to persuade others that they are correct.