ABC News recycles the same idiotic global warming claim that the New York Times retracted in 2000

ABC News: North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008

1. The erroneous August 20, 2000 New York Times/AP story is here.

2. John Daly debunked the story the next day here; scroll down to see the text of the retraction.

3. From a related 2001 story here:

Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that "The North Pole is melting." The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist -- an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy -- who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. "The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water," the reporter declared, "was more than 50 million years ago."

Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction.

4. From another related post here:

One example of the shoddy support for the IPCC report: an observation by Harvard University oceanographer James J. McCarthy, a prominent member of the IPCC panel, was reported by the New York Times. Dr. McCarthy said “that for the first time in 50 million years the ice pack at the North Pole had melted”. It seems Dr. McCarthy had observed open water at the North Pole while on an educational cruise and he promptly reported this as evidence of the effects of human-induced climate change. This is the caliber of the ‘science’ supporting the idea of man-made global warming.

After printing Dr. McCarthy’s ‘observation’, the New York Times was contacted by scientists more familiar with the Arctic's climate history and geological record who pointed out that, during the summer, more than 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is free of ice and it is not rare that the North Pole is part of that 10 percent. Ten days later the New York Times printed a retraction which was not challenged by Dr. McCarthy.