hmmmm... okay, somewhere between Texas and Alaska there would be an area of 20,000 square kilometres!

The figure in red is the increase in area, over 1990? It certainly looks like there's a positive change from the graph.
If so than not only is she geographically challenged but numerically also.

Jeez...Vancouver Island is 32,000KM2!
She's talking about an area less than 60% of that.
And it's an increase not a decrease.

Sorry, but Jane Ferrigno is entirely factually correct: while it's true that both Alaska and Texas are 35 or 40 times larger than the 20,000 square kilometers of ice that was lost, she didn't actually *say* that the area of lost ice was comparable to Texas or Alaska. What she said was that the ice that has been lost is "comparable to an area somewhere in between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska."

She was *obviously* referring to an unspecified 20,000 square kilometer area somewhere in between Texas and Alaska - perhaps in Colorado, or Oregon, or BC. She certainly didn't specify where the 20,000 kilometer area in question is, she said that the 20,000 kilometers of ice that were lost were comparable to "an area somewhere in between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska."

Talk about twisting someone's words. You "conservatives," or whatever you call yourselves, have clearly lost your minds.

Yeah well...Napolitano said the system worked when the "panty bomber" was apprehended.....
Growing glaciers are melting/retreating....
They just keep on making stuff up.....
Does this mean they are creative?

She should shovel my driveway. It's about the size of Rhode Island.

Shhh, don't make Jane Ferrigno angry... you won't like her when she's angry.

Didn't know they did kilometers in the US.

good one sasquatch ...you see how dr .libby responds these libs have to constantly split hairs for there case ....i guarentee what she said is not at all how she meant it she wanted to use texas and alaska becasue they are huge in mass and people will relate to that fear mongering tactic ...oh no 20,000 square kilometers ..and then the visualisation of texas or alaska on a map and that helps people get scared becasue it cross refrences 20,000 kms squared with texas and alaska so in peoples minds they visualise a piece of ice that is 20,000 witch is hard to compare to anything for people who don't know off the top of there head the square kms of any state or province such as myself and she throws in the texas alaska visualisation so people can tie it in together on there own in there heads that 20,000 kms squared is = to texas or alaska ....pretty big wow we better by a prius honey ...and recycle our children ....and i willl get a vasectomy ,and you can be castrated ...and we will give all of our money to AL GORLIONY and his crime family. See how that works DR LIBBY VON DUCHEBAG.

paul in calgary.

Wasn't Josef Goebbels a Doctor as well?

it's becoming non-stop comedy at a billion dollars a year.

we need some of Gore's millions of degrees of temperature inside the earth to leak out and fix this global cooling soon.

heh, nice try, Dr, Libby Raoul. I know you are joking. But the interpretation hinges on two words/phrases:

The first is 'between', and linked to the second phrase 'the state of Texas and the state of Alaska'.

One interpretation can indeed be as you outline, where the two states are set up as geographic spatial locations and the ice area is defined as existing anywhere, spatially, in between. This is a weak interpretation because it doesn't really need those two end points (Texas and Alaska), and, such an image doesn't help to understand the size of the ice mass lost.

So the second interpretation has nothing to do with the geographic location of the mass but with a visual image of its size. Informing the readers of the two largest US states, with regard to size, and telling the reader that these images canm be compared to the 'area' of the ice mass - that's deliberate misinformation.

Oh, and equally manipulative is the use of kilometres. The US mind won't visualize this properly and won't realize that it's actually rather small..never mind opening up the tundra to the generation of new plant and animal life in those areas.

One of the two doctors is having fun at our expense. The other one has a very green family.

On a related note,the largest iceberg recorded,years ago BTW,was approx. 11.000 sq, kilometers. So over a twenty year period,losing 20,000 sq Kms. of ice is not unusual at all.

Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!

I've lost my ice! Oh have you seen my ice? Oh my where did my ice go! We're all doomed if I can't find my missing ice! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Is_Falling_%28fable%29

: I think I’ll go back 20 years, and in the last 20 years, I would say at least 20,000 square kilometers of ice has been lost, and that’s comparable to an area somewhere between the state of Texas and the state of Alaska.

Is that the ice cube usage in Vegas?

Now that the earth has tilted from the Chilean earthquake, DR Raul, my prediction is that the ice bridges will be so large in two years that anyone standing on top of the new ice will be able to see not only Russia but Heaven as well.

Do these wacko's have an off switch????

ET:

C'mon baby - "Dr Libby" was clearly tongue in cheek. A little humour is never a bad thing, is it?

Speedy:

Nice one!

I'll bet this is just one of those metric to imperial conversion mistakes. Didn't we have an airliner come down in Manitoba one year because of this damn metric thing?

Is that like Algore and the earth core being "several million degrees?"

Everyone knows that the accepted unit of measure for ice "loss" is football fields. I still doubt that if you added all the football fields in Alaska and Texas, that you would get 20,000 of them.

Well I believe that 20,000 square kilometers is comparable to Alaska or Texas. After all I sometimes see the comparison between Earth and Sun, or the Solar System and the Milky Way, or the Milky Way and the rest of the visible universe as seen through the Hubble telescope.

That's the size of 2453313 Canadian football fields!

Ok, I see now what shes done. Let's pretend your thumbnail represents 20,000 sq k. If you move it over the map (at a distance of 8 or 9 inches), it does cover Alaska or most of Texas.

You need a map and a thumb to perform this scientific experiment. It also helps to close one eye when you do the lining up.

If the good doctor says that a 20,000 square kilometer ice berg is somewhere in size between Texas and Alaska, then it's not up to us untrained, uncredentialed and unpublished-in-the-peer-reviewed-literature laypersons to say otherwise.

In other news, 2+2=5

Maybe she's looking for a job with The Lancet?

Not her fault, for years she has been told that 6 inches is 9 inches so she is measurement challenged.

Wasn't Josef Goebbels a Doctor as well?

And Dr Amy Fisher, too. (And don't you forget it or she'll attack you using a child's chair in a chain restaurant.)

Every day the AGW alarmists are apologising for honest "mistakes" like this.
It's strange that I've yet to hear one mistake that doesn't buttress their failed arguement. The law of averages would dictate that if these were truly mistakes, close to half would contradict their position.
Mistakes my butt. Lies and propaganda.

The size of the hole in Dr. Ferrigno's argument, for the existence of AGW, lies somewhere between the size of the states of Texas and Alaska.

I think what this shows is the truly inferior mental
equipment of many "climate" "scientists". I do know
a couple of oceanographers who are genuinely bright
if not brilliant. But most of the "climate" people
are fourth-rate scientists, who apparently see
"climate" as a huge teat on which to fasten. Rent-
gatherers the every one of them.

"The Climate Industry Wall of Money

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the “deniers”, the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed. Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.

The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it’s chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.
Follow the money

Money for Sceptics: Greenpeace has searched for funding for sceptics and found $23 million dollars paid by Exxon over ten years (which has stopped). Perhaps Greenpeace missed funding from other fossil fuel companies, but you can be sure that they searched. I wrote the Climate Money paper in July last year, and since then no one has claimed a larger figure. Big-Oil may well prefer it if emissions are not traded, but it’s not make-or-break for them. If all fossil fuels are in effect “taxed”, consumers will pay the tax anyhow, and past price rises in crude oil suggest consumers will not consume much less fuel, so profits won’t actually fall that much.

But in the end, everyone spends more on carbon friendly initiatives than on sceptics– even Exxon: (how about $100 million for Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research). Some will complain that Exxon is massive and their green commitment was a tiny part of their profits, but the point is, what they spent on skeptics was even less."

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/the-climate-industry-wall-of-money/

@andyc

Not to say there's a world of difference between the two, but I think you mean Amy Bishop.
Amy Fisher was the 3,629 km2 "Long Island Lolita".

"the fact that the ice shelves are changing on the peninsula is a significant signal that global change, climate warming, is"

Now I'm as confused as Ms.Ferrigno, I thought it was "Climate Change-Global Warming", and now she's gone and changed it to Global change,Climate warming"!

Take those four words and combine them in different ways and the possibilities are INFINITE!

The polar ice sheet at the South Pole moves roughly 10 meters per year. If everything stays the same, the ice where the geographic pole is today, will end up in the ocean in approximately 140,000 years.

They measure the location of the pole every year. The forth picture shows the movement of the ice, and hence the pole. The poles were orignally the same length, the older ones have been buried in the snow.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/explore/ice/activities/ice_action/flubber/South_Pole_Station_Images.pdf
http://www.eoearth.org/article/South_Pole

"“It is almost impossible to know who is the government and who the lobbyists. They have merged into one single animal with different faces.” – Dr. Gabriel Calzada, Spanish economics professor and researcher"

"But no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end."
(Animal Farm)

...-

"Obama Admin. Caught Red-Handed Working with Big Wind Energy Lobbyists, Misleading America People"

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/20637

It appears that some of these people believe their own lies.

Of course, these are not "mistakes", but deliberate attempts to continue to perpetuate the fraud. No doubt she is well aware that the actual amount (i.e., 20,000 km) will be forgotten or glossed over and people (and especially the so-called "mainstream" media) will connect to the fraudulent part of the message (i.e., "the size of Texas"). So in short order, the lie will become "ice the size of Texas...bla bla).

It's Propaganda 101 and will likely end up in some IPCC document somewhere.

The state of Alaska is: 1,717,854 km2, so what's 20,000 km2 in comparison? How about 1.1% So, compared to say the areal extent of Anchorage Alaska: 4,395.8 km2 = >5 times the space occupied by Anchorage Alaska.

like an earlier poster: the annual ice cube use in Vegas.

I'm sure Anchoage "ploughs" more than 5 times that in snow removal, annually.

From Jane …
I want to apologize to NPR and the listening audience for my misstatement last Sunday, February 28. During the last 20 years, an area more than 20,000 sq. km. (comparable to the size of New Jersey) has broken off the ice shelves of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the Antarctic Peninsula, the source of the ice loss, that I meant to say was larger than the state of Texas but smaller than the state of Alaska.

Thank you,

As regards the Antarctic ice, contrary to miodel predictions of an increase in mass--

// Scientists were able to conduct the first-ever gravity survey of the entire Antarctic ice sheet using data from the joint NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). This comprehensive study found the ice sheet's mass has decreased significantly from 2002 to 2005.
Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr, both from the University of Colorado, Boulder, conducted the study. They demonstrated for the first time that Antarctica's ice sheet lost a significant amount of mass since the launch of GRACE in 2002. The estimated mass loss was enough to raise global sea level about 1.2 millimeters (0.05 inches) during the survey period; about 13 percent of the overall observed sea level rise for the same period. The researchers found Antarctica's ice sheet decreased by 152 (plus or minus 80) cubic kilometers of ice annually between April 2002 and August 2005.

That is about how much water the United States consumes in three months (a cubic kilometer is one trillion liters; approximately 264 billion gallons of water). This represents a change of about 0.4 millimeters (.016 inches) per year to global sea level rise. Most of the mass loss came from the West Antarctic ice sheet. //
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/mar/HQ_06085_arctic_ice.html

"the accepted unit of measure for ice "loss" is football fields"

I want to know how many swimming pools would be filled if that ice melted or how many jumbo jets it weighs if it doesn't.

Posted by: Dr. Libby Raoul at March 4, 2010 3:11 AM
and
Posted by: ∞² at March 4, 2010 11:04 AM

Gold!

I'm a little surprised that the climate geniuses haven't taken note that if a 1,000 sq.km. iceberg fragments off over a 3 day period that they can truthfully say that over a year period we can possibly lose about 260,000 sq. km. of ice. An accompanying photo of a polar bear crying over a pitcher of iceless rum and coke may tip the scales back in their favour.

Not to say there's a world of difference between the two, but I think you mean Amy Bishop. Amy Fisher was the 3,629 km2 "Long Island Lolita".

It was an honest mistake, wingwalker. 8^)

Kathryn- I see you've got it real bad!
I think you should cut down on The Discovery Channel's 'Mega Structures' viewing for your own well-being ;-)

Fercryinoutloud..... Winnipeg ploughs more than 11 Kmsqd od public streets every every time it snows.

Over 20 years ..... that'd be one hell of a lot more than 20,000 ....

Who ARE these fools?

He wouldn't have been correct even if he had said square miles.

That area is smaller than New Jersey.

Forget it. I'm going to paint my roof white. I hear they'll be able to see it from space.

Didn't know they did kilometers in the US.
.
Posted by: Liz J at March 4, 2010 7:36 AM

Crazy isn't it?   But that's the way them there 'Scientists' talk, down here in the lower 57.
.