By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Back on July 10, this site noted that The New York Times ran both a story, and editorial and a Bob Herbert column claiming that temperatures in Alaska had increased by 7 degrees Fahrenheit in only 30 years. That claim was completely bogus and on July 11, the New York Times issued a correction,

A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska's Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees.

Nice of them to run a correction, except that these numbers also appear to be bogus. According to the Alaska Climate Research Center,

In their 11 July, 2002 Edition, the New York Times ran a correction of the value of 7°F as used in the 16 June article, 24 June op/ed, and mentioned in an 8 July op/ed as well. The corrected value is now 5.4°F over a 30 year period. We still find the value of 5.4°F too great by a factor of 2 for the 1971 to 2000 period, the last 30 years. However, the possibility exists that the value of 5.4°F is in reference to a temperature change in some other earlier 30-year period.

Maybe on their next round of corrections, the New York Times will get closer to the actual temperature change -- apparently it corrects errors in the newspaper on an iterative basis, getting closer and closer to the truth with each successive version.

Sources:

Corrections. The New York Times, July 11, 2001.

In response to the New York Times Article of 16 June 2002 and Op/Ed of 24 June 2002 - Update. Alaska Climate Research Center, July 12, 2002.

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