"Fiasco" was the word chosen by one scientist in an email to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., alerting his colleagues to erroneous claims made by the publishers of the atlas about the speed at which Greenland's glaciers are melting.
He also feared a map in the atlas, along with news accounts repeating an error in the news release, could pull climate scientists into another vortex of damaging controversy.
The release claimed that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover from 1999 to 2011. That translates to 125,000 cubic miles, which is enough melted ice to raise sea levels 3 to 5 feet, according to Etienne Berthier, a glaciologist at the University of Toulouse. The corresponding map in the atlas itself indicated that significant portions of Greenland's coastline had become ice-free.
Glaciologists, previously bruised by an exaggerated claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers in a 2007 U.N. report that became fodder for global-warming skeptics, mobilized as a truth squad.
On blogs and radio programs and in newspaper columns, they stated emphatically that Greenland has not lost 15 percent of its ice cover in recent years. The retreat, they said, is more like one-tenth of 1 percent.
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