It is hard not to share Jennifer Marohasy’s frustration at at the mainstream media’s failure to report this:

‘a wide-ranging survey of glacier conditions across south eastern Greenland, indicates that glacier melt has slowed significantly and that it would be wrong to attribute the higher rates of melt prior to 2005 to global warming or to extrapolate the higher melt rates of a few years ago into the future.’

But unlike Jennifer, while disappointed, I’m not surprised.

This is an important story because the whole ‘Oh my God, the ice is melting, the seas are rising, please give us lots of money’ campaign is based on the alleged melting of Greenland’s glaciers and ice sheet. Ice in the Arctic is floating, so even if that melts in an unusual way it will have no effect on sea level. As I have noted before, a rise from -45 degrees to -40 degrees in Antarctica is not going to melt a lot of ice, and anyway, except for the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica is stable or even cooling. So the Greenland ice sheet melting story was vital to to the anthropogenic global warming scare campaign.

For the mainstream media to print such a story would be to acknowledge they had been wrong, and that there really was nothing to worry about. And they won’t do that. Alarming climate headlines will persist for a few more years.

Headlines like the one on this rankly dishonest story: Scientists Say Glaciers Melting Fast. This is based on studies by the grandly titled World Glacier Monitoring Service. They monitor 80 glaciers around the world. Cool. But there are about 160, 000 glaciers in the world, some two thirds of them in Antarctica. So this claim is based on a study over the last thirty years (nothing in geological time) of one half of one tenth of one percent of the world’s glaciers. And even then, the headline belies comments from one of the scientists involved that coastal glaciers in Norway thickened during the study, and that the overall rate of loss in studied glaciers had slowed from the previous year.

Eventually, when it is simply not possible to ignore the fact that the world is not getting any warmer, and that there never was any reason to believe the minor and perfectly normal variation in temperature over the last 100 years had any relation to human produced CO2, the mainstream media will find some new potential disaster, and begin demanding that politicians take immediate action to save us from it.