Daily Mirror’s Pack Of Lies About Greenland Meltdown

By Paul Homewood

The Daily Mirror is probably the worst newspaper in Britain, an achievement given the competition!

Today it features a climate breakdown spread across the opening pages, led by this three page fake news story about Greenland. (The following two pages are devoted to the wildfires in Brazil).

A heatwave is gripping The Arctic, melting away Greenland’s ice sheet on an unprecedented scale and threatening a global rise in sea levels – an urgent reminder of the climate crisis we are now all facing.

Kids splashing each other in the sea and locals wearing t-shirts were unheard of here in August 10 years ago.

But now, alongside teenage girls wearing skirts to school and increasing mosquitoes, it is a common occurrence for the residents of Qaanaaq, in north-west Greenland, one of the world’s most northerly cities situated 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Greenland, the world’s largest island at almost three times the size of France, is now living with extreme environmental changes which could see the Arctic Sea free of ice by 2030 if no action is taken.

I travelled to Greenland, home to just 56,000 people, last week to see first hand the drastic changes to conditions and to understand why it matters to us all.

Away from headlines about melting ice caps and pictures of underfed polar bears unable to stalk seals on flimsy ice forced to invade towns for food, I found a community battling to adjust.

Living alongside a backdrop of eerily beautiful icebergs and utterly terrifying melting sea ice and retreating glaciers is having a devastating impact on species, habitats and human life.

This is the frontline of climate change…..

The country is also experiencing record-breaking temperatures. In mid-June, along the eastern coast it was 9C warmer than the 1981-2010 average.

Just as western Europe has baked in a heatwave with record temperatures at the end of July, the hot air moved as far north as Greenland with the gauge hitting 22C on August 1. The average high is around 7C….

Fourth fifths of Greenland is buried under an ice sheet two miles thick, much of it three million years old.

But in the blink of an eye in geological terms it has begun melting – and much faster than climate change models predicted.

Around 60% is affected, including higher elevations that only rarely see temperatures climb above freezing.

In July alone 200 billion tonnes of meltwater poured into the Atlantic – enough to raise sea levels by 0.5mm.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/kids-play-arctic-seas-22c-19016180

It is a story we have seen and debunked many times before, but still dishonest journalists peddle it.

Let’s start with this supposed heatwave last week at Qaanaaq, which the reporter said she visited last week.

According to Weather Underground, the temperatures at Qaanaaq, aka Thule, peaked at only 63F this month, on the 1st. Temperatures last week never made it above 47F. even though the average daily maximum for August is 44F:

https://www.wunderground.com/history/monthly/gl/BGTL/date/2019-8

The reporter, Environmental Editor Nada Farhoud apparently can’t distinguish between sunshine and heatwaves.

Temperatures at Thule regularly get close to 20C, and show little long term trends since 1950:

time series

http://climexp.knmi.nl/gdcntmax.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&WMO=GLW00017605&STATION=THULE_OP_SITE&extraargs=

And at the closest long running station of Upernavik, annual temperatures were just as high in the 1930s and 40s:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/04/24/greenland-temperature-data-for-2018/

And according to DMI, nearly all of Greenland was much colder than normal during the last five days:

http://polarportal.dk/en/weather/nbsp/current-weather/

But what about that 200 billion tonnes that has supposedly melted from the ice sheet? That must sound a scary number to Mirror readers!

Well, the Greenland ice sheet typically loses that much every summer, but also puts it all back again every winter when it snows.

http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

It is true that mass gain has been less than normal this year, mainly due to dry conditions in winter. However in 2017 and 2018, the ice sheet added much more ice than usual, more than offsetting this year’s shortfall. (As usual, for a full explanation of the surface mass balance, see here, as it explains the role of calving which is not included ).