Greenpeace's sea ice 'mistake' delights climate change sceptics

Who would think that the omission of the word "sea" in one sentence of a Greenpeace online news story would kick off such an almighty ruckus?
Who would think that the omission of the word "sea" in one sentence of a Greenpeace news story would kick off such an almighty ruckus? Anyone who follows the climate change debate, that's who.
The climate change sceptics - and the blogs on which they mass - have been cock-a-hoop with unbridled joy in the past few days with the belief that they have snared the Big One. During a BBC Hardtalk interview with Stephen Sackur, the executive director of Greenpeace, Gerd Leipold, admitted that a July news story which said that "we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030" was a "mistake".
Leipold then went on to say: "As a pressure group, we have to emotionalise issues and we're not ashamed of emotionalising issues."
This is the offending text of the original Greenpeace news story (Sackur mistakenly refers to it as a "press release"), written to highlight the work of the crew of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise which was, at the time, in Greenland:
Ice free ArcticBad news is coming from other sources as well. A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it's getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030. They say you can't be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn't apply to the Arctic sea ice. Polar bears are the first to suffer from it, but many other species could be affected as well.
Yes, it certainly should have been phrased more carefully and accurately, but it should be obvious to most readers that the story is referring to sea-ice free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030, as opposed to the whole ice cap melting by this date, as Sackur kept on pressing in his questioning.
But a mistake it was, and it has given Greenpeace's critics enough rope to let them believe they can hang their arch-nemesis.
Yesterday, Greenpeace issued a spirited defence of Leipold's response to Sackur's questioning:
Sackur claimed that we were predicting that all the ice in the Arctic - including the massive Greenland ice sheet, which is on land, would be gone by 2030. That's NOT what we said. When we talk about "ice-free summers" in the Arctic, we're using the term the same way that NASA and climate scientists the world over use the term: to describe an Arctic free of sea-ice. And Sackur, or his researcher, would have known that if they read the entire article, including the next sentence: "They say you can't be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn't apply to the Arctic sea ice."…As a climate scientist himself, (Dr.) Gerd Leipold rightly knows that no scenario currently predicts the collapse of the entire land-based ice sheet as early as 2030, nor have we ever made that claim. Now, it's fair to say we could have been more precise. We could have inserted three letters into the offending sentence: S-E-A, to make it crystal clear to the casual reader. But the term "ice-free" to refer to an absence of ice on the ocean came straight from the NASA report we were citing, and is the common description you'll find in scientific publications as well as among journalists. If you Google "ice free summers" and "arctic" you get about 230,000 hits. Oh, and gosh, look what the first article is: a story from the BBC itself talking about the retreat of SEA ice, but what's the headline? "Arctic summers ice-free by 2013"Is the BBC scaremongering and suggesting the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet? Or are they reporting the facts?Now HardTalk is all about difficult questions. We have no problem with difficult questions or a fair fight. Because in a fair fight, our arguments generally win. Gerd handled the rest of the interview with his customary flare. But this wasn't a fair fight. This was Gerd being asked to defend a distortion of what our web story said. Bottom line: there's nothing to repudiate -- just something to clarify. The climate skeptics are trying to turn this into a victory, undercut our reputation for accuracy, and further their 'flat earth' position of climate denial.
I am broadly sympathetic with Greenpeace on this one, but it has learned a hard lesson about the need to be super accurate when entering the climate change cage fight. Perhaps the greater "crime" was Leipold's admission that "we're not ashamed of emotionalising issues". The avalanche of evidence that now underpins climate change predictions should stir any right-minded person to take them seriously. Admitting that you don't mind emotionalising issues immediately gives ammunition to your critics that they will then use to say you are prone to exaggerating the facts.
Some senior climatologists have rightly come out and urged their colleagues, as well as the media and environmentalists, not to use exaggeration as a tool to win over the doubters. In February, Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said:
Overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening. Both undermine the basic facts that the implications of climate change are profound and will be severe if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut drastically and swiftly over the coming decades.
Professor Mike Hulme, formerly a director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, has repeatedly called for over-emotive terms such as "catastrophic" and "terrifying" to be avoided. "Campaigners, media and some scientists seem to be appealing to fear in order to generate a sense of urgency," he said in 2007. "If they want to engage the public in responding to climate change, this is unreliable at best and counterproductive at worst."
This is all sensible advice, especially given there's simply no need to exaggerate. The facts are scary enough, without having to resort to artificially magnifying them. Greenpeace will be bruised by this furore, but it should also see it as an instructive exercise in how best to engage with its critics.