As the climate science continues to strengthen, and as the observational data around the world continue to accumulate, those who deny the reality or severity of human-induced climate change are getting increasingly desperate. As evidence piles up and as our weather worsens, their positions get weaker and weaker and their claims that the climate isn’t changing, or isn’t changing because of human actions get harder to support, their voices get more strident, and their language and vitriol get uglier.

Climate deniers cannot make a case against human-caused climate change without desperately manipulating, misrepresenting, or simply misunderstanding the science. While there are examples of their bad science (BS) every day, a particularly egregious case has played out in New Mexico in the past week.

In 2009, Harrison Schmitt, a former senator, astronaut, and self-described climate “denier” (and potentially the Energy Secretary to the new New Mexican governor), sent a paper to NASA riddled with long-debunked errors of science.* Others have written about this paper, taking it apart error by error. But one particular mistake lies at the heart of this week’s dust-up in New Mexico. In that paper Schmitt said:

“How long this cooling trend will persist remains to be seen; however, Greenland glaciers have been advancing since 2006, Artic [sic] sea ice has returned to 1989 levels of coverage, and snowy, cold winters and cool summers have dominated northern North America and Europe.”

All four of these statements are wrong:

(1) The Earth is not in a cooling trend, but a warming trend,

(2) Greenland is losing ice, not gaining it (more evidence of warming),

(3) Arctic (the correct spelling) sea ice in 2009 had not “returned to 1989 levels of coverage,” and

(4) Snowy, cold winters and cool summers do not dominate North America or Europe, nor would they refute the fact that the planet as a whole is warming.

In The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper on January 24, Dr. Mark Boslough (an adjunct professor of Earth and Planetary Science at UNM, with a doctorate from CalTech) noted the errors in Schmitt’s statement and wrote how he tried to privately point them out to Schmitt, but that Schmitt never corrected them. The error that has stirred up the new debate in New Mexico is the third one “Artic [sic] sea ice has returned to 1989 levels of coverage.” [John Cook has also tackled this here in an excellent Skeptical Science post.]

Arctic Sea Ice: Specific, Verifiable Data First and most simply, Boslough is right and Schmitt is wrong. No matter how you measure it, there was less Arctic sea ice in 2009 than in 1989: • The average area of Arctic ice was less in 2009. • The average extent of Arctic ice was less in 2009. • The volume of Arctic ice was less in 2009. • The maximum amount of ice (in winter) was less in 2009. • The minimum amount of ice (in summer) was less in 2009.