Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration

BBC Interviewer calls claim that Arctic ice would disappear by 2030 “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism”

Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold has been forced to admit that his organization issued misleading and exaggerated information when it claimed that Arctic ice would disappear completely by 2030, in a crushing blow for the man-made global warming movement.

In an interview with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Leipold initially attempted to evade the question but was ultimately forced to admit that Greenpeace had made a “mistake” when it said Arctic ice would disappear completely in 20 years.

The claim stems from a July 15 Greenpeace press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” in which it is stated that global warming will lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2030.

Sackur accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing “misleading information” based on “exaggeration and alarmism,” pointing out that it was “preposterous” to claim that the Greenland ice sheet, a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle that has survived much warmer periods in history, would completely melt when it had stood firm for hundreds of thousands of years.

“There is no way that ice sheet is going to disappear,” said Sackur.

“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake,” Leipold was eventually forced to admit.

However, Leipold made no apologies for Greenpeace’s tactic of “emotionalizing issues” as a means of trying to get the public to accept its stance on global warming.

He also argued that economic growth in the United States and around the world should be suppressed and that overpopulation and high standards of living should be combated because of the perceived damage they were doing to the environment.

“Leipold’s admission that Greenpeace issued misleading information is a major embarrassment to the organization, which often has been accused of alarmism but has always insisted that it applies full scientific rigor in its global-warming pronouncements.”

Similar claims that the north pole will be “ice free” crop up almost every summer yet are routinely disproved.

Indeed, it was discovered that during August 2007 to August 2008, Arctic ice had in fact grown by around 30 per cent, an area equivalent to the size of Germany.

A new peer reviewed study has also discovered, “Total annual precipitation in Greenland ice sheet for 1958-2007 to be up to 24% and surface mass balance up to 63% higher than previously thought.”

Climate scientists allied with the UN IPCC were also caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, in another shocking example of mass public deception.

In November 2008, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, announced that the previous month had been the hottest October on record. It later emerged that the data produced by NASA to make the claim, and in particular temperature records covering large areas of Russia, was merely carried over from the previous month. NASA had used temperature records from the naturally hotter month of September and claimed they represented temperature figures in October.

Watch a clip from the Sackur- Leipold interview below.