Roman Around

I would like to take an enormous “attaboy” out of petty cash and present it to Stephen Sackur of the BBC.

Yes, the BBC.

I know this little morsel is currently making its way across the blogosphere, but it was only brought to my attention earlier today, thanks to Dennis Prager’s radio program. (Isn’t it annoying how work can keep one from updating one’s blog?)

A little over a month ago, the activist organization Greenpeace – led by Gerd Leipold – put out a press release saying that the humanity-induced catastrophe of global warming is advancing with such ferocity that in another twenty-one years, Arctic ice will be nothing but a memory.

And since Leipold is the top dog at Greenpeace, it is not unreasonable to presume that he would probably have final approval of (or at the very least be aware of) any official statements put out by the organization – including that one.

Among the other declarations, predictions and recitations of impending doom in the July 15th press release was this one:

As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.

Thanks to a brief but voracious outbreak of genuine journalism at the BBC, Stephen Sackur of HARDtalk was able to get Leipold to not only admit that the absurd claim of disappearing Arctic ice was probably not true, but that emotionalizing an issue (or “scare tactics,” as Mr. Sackur suggests) is employed by Greenpeace as a means to an end.

Here was a portion of the exchange:

SACKUR: But when you, in one of your press releases that I read, on July 15th say this – and this Greenpeace’s own press release – “As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030,” I mean that is just plain misleading, isn’t it?

LEIPOLD: I don’t think that it’s plain misleading. I know that there’s uncertainties. I’m a climate scientist myself.

SACKUR: But the Arctic includes the Greenland ice sheet. I mean, the Greenland ice sheet is in the Arctic. That’s not going to melt by 2030. That’s preposterous.

LEIPOLD: The Greenland ice sheet is already retreating, and the people there can tell it.

SACKUR: Forgive me, the Greenland ice sheet, from where I have just come, is 1.6 square kilometers. It is three kilometers thick in the middle. It’s been there for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s survived previous warming periods much warmer than we see today or will see tomorrow. There is no way that ice sheet is going to disappear.

LEIPOLD: What we have said, by and large, over the last twenty years, I think, was wise and was rational and reasonable to it. And we were confronted with a world, unfortunately, (that) only recently has woken up to it. And we – as a pressure group – have to emotionalize issues. We are not ashamed of emotionalizing issues. I think it’s a fact.

SACKUR: You call it emotionalizing. Others would call it “scare tactics.” Will you sit here now and tell me, in all honesty, that you do not that the Greenland ice sheet is going to melt by 2030?

LEIPOLD: I don’t know. I don’t think it will be melting by 2030.

SACKUR: So, in fact, would you say that it was a mistake for your organization to put that out?

LEIPOLD: It may have been a mistake. I don’t know this specific press release. I do not check every press release.”

Apparently, the head of Greenpeace has more important matters to tend to than being cognizant of what the organization he runs is saying publicly in press releases. He’d probably say he’s not a micromanager. He delegates.

To be fair, he may have been preoccupied with moving his personal effects from his basement to his attic in preparation of the raging flood waters that are on the way thanks to the melting Artic ice.

Frankly, Mr. Leipold looked like a deer in headlights, frightfully unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with a professional – much like the current New York Mets lineup.

Here is a video of the exchange:

In a related story, according to the Copenhagen Post, dated 19 August:

“The Foreign Ministry has cancelled 20,000 overnight hotel reservations meant for people attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December. The move is expected to cost the hotel industry about 40 million kroner in lost revenue. The ministry described the cancellations as a natural ‘adjustment’. But Thomas Færgeman, the director of environmental think tank Concito, was concerned the government had lost confidence that it could broker a ground-breaking climate and had therefore lowered expectations as to how many participants were expected.”

It probably had nothing to do with the fact that more and more people are coming to the realization that global warming, i.e. climate change, is (thus far) the 21st Century’s biggest farce – next to Al Sharpton and MSNBC.

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