'Unprecedented' Greenland Surface Melt - Every 150 Years? - NYTimes.com

The flow of news releases and background science content from NASA is generally excellent, but the space agency badly blew it earlier this week with this headline, which has now reverberated around the Web: “Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt.”

Unprecedented means “never done or known before.” Yet the news release beneath the headline directly undercuts that description of this melting event, saying that it is rare — the last wide surface melt was in 1889, recorded in separate ice cores at the Greenland ice-sheet summit and in the northwestern part of the vast frozen expanse — and has happened roughly every 150 years over a long stretch of centuries, as recorded deeper in the ice. (Here’s a figure from a 1994 Science paper pointing to a series of such melt layers, reflecting summer warmth. Please see the postscript below for the key reference, provided by Lora Koenig of NASA.)

The inaccurate headline and burst of hyperventilating coverage and commentary (with some exceptions, like this new post by Climate Central) have already provided fodder for those whose passion or job is largely aimed at spreading doubt about science pointing to consequential greenhouse-driven warming.

'Dry Spell Blues' - YouTube

A musical portrait of the dry conditions that occasionally beset farmers in America's heartland. The classic Son House blues tune is combined with footage from the film "The Plow that Broke the Plains."

THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: Alberta's oil sands will be developed, no matter what U.S. greens say

President Obama may not want to exploit the energy buried in Canada's Alberta oil sands, but China sure does. Think of Monday's $15.1 billion offer by China's state-owned Cnooc to buy Canadian energy giant Nexen as a post-Keystone XL Pipeline bid to replace the U.S. as Canada's biggest energy investor and market.