Daily Telegraph’s track record on glacier headlines
Following “Glaciergate”, the climate sceptic term for a mistake made in the IPCC’s 2007 report, there’s been a noticeable theme in the Telegraph’s coverage of glaciers: headlines that don’t agree with the stories they’re headlining.
For example, an article in December had the headline:
Cancun climate change summit: glaciers increasing despite climate change
The article began:
“Glaciers in many parts of the world are increasing, according to a new United Nations report, despite climate change.
Glaciers have grown in western Norway, New Zealand’s South Island, parts of Asia and the Tierra del Fuego in South America.”
The story accompanied the release of a UNEP report into the impact of climate change on high mountain glaciers.
Did the report back up the article’s headline and intro? The summary of the report starts
“Climate change is causing significant mass loss of glaciers in high mountains worldwide. Although glacier systems show a great amount of inherent complexity and variation, there are clear overall trends indicating global glacier recession, which is likely to accelerate in coming decade”. [our emphasis]
So the top line of the report was that, despite some areas of glacier growth, overall glaciers were ‘in recession’ – directly contradicting the headline.
The Telegraph article conceded:
“However, overall ice and snow on mountains has been retreating since the industrial age, according to scientists from around the world.
In some regions, it is very likely that glaciers will largely disappear by the end of this century, whereas in others ice cover will persist but in a reduced form for many centuries to come.”
Which makes the headline all the more mystifying.
On 27th January, the Telegraph was talking about glaciers again, this time in the Himalayas:
“Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds
Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.”
The article referred to a new paper published on January 23rd in Nature Geoscience, which looked at how glacier melt is affected by the presence of rubble or debris on the glaciers. The researchers studied 286 mountain glaciers in the greater Himalaya between 2000 and 2008.
To support their headline, the Telegraph focused on the study’s finding that 58% of the glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are “stable or advancing” – partially as a result of the presence of debris on the glaciers.
However, taken as a whole the paper told a different story. In contrast to the Karakoram region, the researchers observed the highest concentration of retreating glaciers (79-86%) in the Western Himalaya, northern central Himalaya, and the West Kunlun Shan, where the proportion of debris-covered glaciers is relatively low.
In the southern central Himalaya and Hindu Kush, where debris cover is common and high, 65% and 73% of the studied glaciers were found to have been retreating, but at slower rates.
The conclusion of the paper is that the presence of debris on the side of Himalayan glaciers is a complicating factor in understanding glacier melt and that unique climatic factors may be influencing the Karakoram specifically.
This sounds like potentially good news for those who rely on the glaciers as a watersource – and certainly important for researchers studying the impacts of climate change on glacier melt – but it hardly justifies the headline that “Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change”, particularly as the study concluded:
“More than 65% of the monsoon-influenced glaciers that we observed are retreatingâ?¦”
In the Telegraph article itself, the proportion of glaciers that are advancing or stable is put into context, but again, the headline doesn’t reflect this.
The Telegraph’s core value (trumpeted in this Sunday’s 50th anniversary edition of the Sunday Telegraph), is
“a commitment to telling the truth clearly and honestly to our readers”