Greenland remains white

'Atlas-Gate' invades map publishing world

Some scientific resources have claimed Greenland is turning green...

... while in reality Greenland is still very much the misleadingly named arctic land mass it always has been.

After years of hearing Al Gore and other environmental activists talk about "global warming" like it was the apocalypse, scientists are starting to debunk and cool down the fears of climate change. In the latest chapter, publishers of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World apologized after a press release claimed "Greenland is turning green."

Scientists swiftly denied the claims that Greenland's shrinking ice surface has decreased by 15 per cent.

“It is regrettable that the claimed drastic reduction in the extent of ice in Greenland has created headline news around the world,” Poul Christoffersen, a glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, said in a Fox News online article. “There is to our knowledge no support for this claim in the published scientific literature."

Christoffersen believes the actual reduction to be around 0.1 per cent.

The publisher, Harper Collins, tried to defend their claims, which are also detailed in the atlas itself. They used information from the U.S. Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

Graham Cogley of Trent University said glaciologists like himself are "hypersensitive" to errors made like in the Times Atlas.