The news reports on the breaking off of a portion of floating ice in Antarctica have received wide distribution (i.e. do a google search under news for Antarctic sea ice and hundreds of reports appear on this event). These news reports claim that this breaking is due to global warming. As just one example of the statements in the news, The Guardian wrote
”The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted.
“The ice shelf is hanging by a thread,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). “We’ll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be.”
The Wilkins shelf covers an area of 5,600 square miles (14,500 sq km). It is now protected by just a thin thread of ice between two islands.
Vaughan was a member of the team that predicted in 1993 that global warming could cause the Wilkins shelf to collapse within 30 years.”
This media reporting has become typical of the bias that many journalists have. Not reported in the media (but well reported on ICECAP by Joe D’Aleo) the media has ignored in their reporting the increase in Antarctic sea ice cover in recent years, with, at present, a coverage that is well over 1 million square kilometers above average (see)!
In fact, over the globe, since the Arctic sea ice cover is not far below its average and the Antarctic sea ice coverage is well above average for this time of the year, the global coverage of sea ice is actually above average after being below last year (see). There is no way to know if this is just a short term perturbation, but at the very least the news media should have been honest and balanced in their coverage.
Unfortunately, it appears that most journalists just parrot the perspective of the first news release on these climate issues, without doing any further investigation. If this is inadvertent, they need to be educated in climate science. If deliberate bias, they are clearly advocates and the reporters should be clearly and publically identified as having such a bias. In either case, the public is being misinformed!