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If you get a chance to answer this, can you clarify if the feature last night was the same issue as was briefly shown last week? I was not paying attention 100%, and initially I was under the impression it was a new event, but ended it certain that it had already been covered on a previous show. It seemed odd that a chunk of the news was given over to repeating something which, in my humble opinion, was not "great television", but a muddled and forced attempt at possibly the most issue in the world today.
Lazy attention seeking fluff like this is fodder for the "boy who cried wolf" anti-climate change lobby, and more of the Ten O'clock news drifting, along with ITV news, towards US style evening news where ratings are king, and resemble the feature pages of the Daily Mail, with health news, scare mongering crime stories and features taking up the bulletin.

"The fact that it's now floating free is taken as an indicator of the pace and extent of global warming"

What indication of the pace or extent of global warming does this give?

Does the fact that 99.999% of the world's ice shelves have remained firmly attached to landmasses also give "an indication of the pace and extent of global warming"? Why not send a team to one of these to give out the message that perhaps we don't have too much to worry about?

How do you know that the calving of ice shelves isn't just something that happens from time to time, and that the appearance of the Ayles Ice Island could be completely unrelated to global warming?

Do you feel the need to treat your audiences like schoolchildren because they are unable to take on board any message that isn't shown alongside something with dramatic pictorial impact? If so, you must also be aware that this same audience, like children, will believe without serious question the attachment of the picture to the message. I'd suggest it is irresponsible for serious reporters to attempt to persuade using pictorial images that only dubiously relate to the message being given.

Dear Mark,
Fifty years ago during in the last International scientific year, IGY, my father, Willie Knutsen, commanded another Manhatten-sized ice island, T-3, or, Fletcher's Ice Island. Twenty years earlier , my Brooklyn-born, Norway-raised father's arctic career had begun on the "Quest", then back in Norwegian hands, on a Norwegian-French expedition to Greenland, but Willie recieved his degrees in art and architecture from Newcastle University in 1935. The local paper in 1938 hailed him as a "local son". His arctic work continued till 1969, but the year(!)on T-3 was a special experience even for that "arctic rat", as he called himself. He told me his many and wonderful stories of his life, I turned them into a book, and in 2005 The Explorer's Club were kind enough to get it published: "Arctic Sun on My Path: the true story of America's last great polar explorer." There is a chapter on T-3 of course. Fun stuff. Thought this might interest you.
I have sent a similar message to David Shukman. It would have been great to have accompanied him to the new ice island.
Yours,
Will Knutsen

What do you mean landing a team on the island 'makes great television'! It's hackneyed and cliched, and was so even before ITV did a week-long special from the Antarctic some months ago. The spectacular bit was the sequence of satellite photos - a MUCH better use of money from increasingly reluctant licence payers.

No, it's an indicator that summer is just around the corner.

Erm?......

What *news* does it make?

So your team hitched-a-ride for free (?) - but that's not the 'Pareto' important bit!

The only 'Breaking (....excuse the pun?).... News' is that of another global indicator: No-one to interview; nothing to video (it's ice, isn't it?); tantamount to *hearing* paint dry!

Yes, it's an important indicator, but it is not newsworthy in the frontline sense! The 'story' could be efficiently related in the Science columns - from quotations sourced and ratified by the scientific community out there. It's a big lump of ice! It wasn't loose until recently! Are we going to hear about every linkage with global warming?

Not everything factual is newsworthy, is it?

Mark,

I like your justification for the story - it was obvious David was hitching a ride and not taking them along; I hope no idiots complained about this!

Could an entry be made in the science news section were the public can track it slowly...?

Cheers
Oli

PeeVeeAh

I'm sorry if science stories bore you - but if the melting of the Arctic ice pack is not newsworthy I'm not sure what is...

Maybe another overpaid presenter standing in front of a villa in Portugal saying there are no new developments in the hunt for a missing little girl?

Or a few Livepool fans not being able to get into a football stadium?

Well of course the climate is changing. Throughout millions of years it has always done so. Nothing to get excited about.

The only thing we can do, which is what man and beast have always done to survive, is adapt.

One inconvenient truth for the eco-zealots: climate change is a natural phenomenon.

I challenge anyone to disprove that.

Exactly how much of a carbon footprint is it costing nature for you to make this report?.

I read with amazement from a FOI release that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ who keep banging on and on about 'man made global warning' made zero carbon offsets last year!.

To my ind the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is a typical green hypocrite. tell us what we should do but never practise what they preach and preach and preach.

The only 'idiots' are the naive bunch of lemmings who think that if the ´óÏó´«Ã½ say something is true it must be.

As ´óÏó´«Ã½ often comments on the USA contribution to global CO2 I wonder why your team of reporters has failed to report on the fact that US CO2 production fell 1.3% during 2006. I realise you like to emphasise the poor behavour of the US on the environment. At least they are doing a more effective job than the uber-Greens of UK and Europe who talk a good fight.

I noticed that all of the news stories about antarctic ice melting seem to be in november/december/january and all the stories about arctic ice melting/breaking off seem to be in may/june/july. I was trying to work out if this was a coincidence or whether there was some scientific reason for this.

John (comment 5) - this is because it's summer in the southern hemisphere when it's winter here.

What the ´óÏó´«Ã½ have not told us is that it'll make virtually no difference to sea levels if all the artic ice on the planet melted tomorrow (although polar bears would be homeless). That's because the ice is floating and when it melts it shrinks. The bigger problem would be if the antarctic ice melted as this is situated on land, so every melted bit would raise sea levels.

when will the ´óÏó´«Ã½ start reporting climate change in a fair and unbias way?
there are as many arms of the scientific community that do not hink man is responsible for global warming, as there is for those that do. yet the ´óÏó´«Ã½ still only plugs that its all or fault.
hey, its summer so thinga are getting warmer, ice melts in the heat. etc etc etc.
why don;t you give equal time to those that show just as good evidence that climate change is down to the sun.
in fact last week i went to Aberdulias falls int he vale of neath. a plague there says that 5000 years ago the falls were covered by a glacier. today there's no ice anywhere near the UK so the ice has receded back 1000s of miles long before man started pumpoing out pollution.
so come on ´óÏó´«Ã½ be fair and stop jumping on the global warming bandwagon, invented for thatcher to sell nuiclear to us - and start reporting more fairly.

i recommend people look for a documentry that was aired on channel 4 a while back, its called the greatglobal warming hoax and has some very respectfull scientist's talking and gives great evidence as to why the ice is melting, not man made but more the sun and that "global warming" is a regular occurence and a natural cycle of the earth.

If you think about it rationally, one reason the goverment would push the man made global warming farce, is so that they could build nuclear. Think about it, were running out of oil quickly, and so other then finding alternative fuels, you know get the goverment spending its money wisely for a change, other then to get its greedy hands on some oil, to promote wind farms and fuel cells etc Water as a fuel is no futuristic dream, its been around for some time just no one has pushed it. Type in water fuel in any search engine and see for yourself, i recommend everyone watch this video -

what this man has done is amazing, he can use water as a fuel which can burn, please watch it carefully, and then ask yourself, why doesnt the ´óÏó´«Ã½ report on such amazing inventions, this is revolutionary yet no one knows about it

Europe, Britain, and ´óÏó´«Ã½ have reached a point of hysteria over climate change. Laughably, they try to bludgeon the US into submission to their preposterous schemes to slow it down if it can no longer be reversed. You have no case ´óÏó´«Ã½, go talk to the Chinese, the Indians, Brazil, Indonesia, and then talk to your fellow EU hypocrites. When they are all convinced and actually begin to do something, then come back and talk to the US about it and we'll see if there is any interest in it here yet. In the meantime, I'd look for a nice air conditioned office to camp out in for the next few months, it's going to be a long hot summer.

There aren't in fact as many arms of the scientific community that do not think man is responsible for global warming as there are that do. The vast majority of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that at this stage in the planet's history it is man-made. One indicator of this is the growing consensus among the hundreds of scientists from around the world who contribute to the International Panel on Climate Change. They have produced four reports so far, and every time they have upped the likelihood that humans are behind this climate change. In their most recent report, these hundreds of scientists agreed that the current warming was 90–99% likely to have been caused by humans. If you've ever paid any attention to how international documents and treaties get written, and how many compromises get inserted to satisfy each participant's political ends, you'll realize what this consensus on 90–99% likelihood means.

It's not the scientists who differ in their opinions on the causes of the present warming. It's the media that, in efforts to portray the issue in a "fair and balanced" way, have insisted on portraying "both sides" without acknowledging that the weight of scientific opinion is so very heavily on only one of them. This media-created dualism has led the public to believe, wrongly, that there is a wide difference of opinion on the causes of climate change. The current US administration, for one, has consistently tried to convey exactly this impression, for example by watering down assessments from its own scientists to sound more vague and uncertain than the scientists who wrote them intended.

None of this is to say that the climate has not changed in the past, as one of the commenters pointed out. It is merely to point out that the climate is changing now because of our human actions. It is also changing faster than ever before, and while it's easy to say "adapt" in an online comment, I suspect it would be harder to say it to someone who is stateless because his country has been swallowed up by rising sea levels (as is happening now in the Pacific) or someone whose town has had to be relocated entirely because the permafrost under it has melted (as is happening now in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic). Increasing numbers of climate refugees and conflicts and humanitarian emergencies related to climate change are part of the price we will inevitably have to pay for not stepping up and doing something about it now.

I, unlike other commenters, have been very glad to see the media finally reporting the scientific consensus rather than continuing to mislead the public into thinking there is none.

This global warming issue is nothing more than a scam by the Worlds so called elite. Wars do not work as well nowadays for them.

If we were really destroying the Earth, they would stop using the black god, known as oil. Why? because if the Earth is destroyed, they would be destroyed along with it.

The Earth has climate changes every few millenia quite naturally.
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