A greener Greenland? Times Atlas 'error' overstates global warming

By Tamara Cohen
Last updated at 11:06 AM on 20th September 2011
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The publishers of the world’s most prestigious atlas have been caught out by Cambridge scientists exaggerating the effects of climate change.

In its latest edition, the £150 Times Atlas of the World has changed a huge coastal area of Greenland from white to green, suggesting an alarming acceleration of the melting of the northern ice cap.

Accompanying publicity material declared the change reflected ‘concrete evidence’ that 15 per cent of the ice sheet around the island – an area the size of the United Kingdom – had melted since 1999.

But last night the atlas’s publishers admitted that the ‘ice-free’ areas could in fact still be covered by sheets of more than a quarter of a mile thick.


It came after a group of leading polar scientists from Cambridge University wrote to them saying their changes were ‘incorrect and misleading’ and that the true rate of melting has been far slower.

Experts from the University’s internationally-renowned Scott Polar Research Institute said the apparent disappearance of 115,830 sq miles of ice had no basis in science and was contradicted by recent satellite images.


Glaciologist Dr Poul Christoffersen of the Scott Institute says the figure is misleading

There are no official figures on how much ice has melted but one scientist put it at between 0.3 and 1.5 per cent of the ice sheet.

Publicity for the new atlas read: ‘For the first time the new edition has had to erase 15 per cent of Greenland’s once permanent ice cover – turning an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland “greenâ€