of the KNOWN wrong temperature rise #s in articles and subsequently in a NYT editorial...

ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM GETS RESULTS! Not long after the American Prospect conceded that it had exaggerated its online traffic by almost 300 percent, the New York Times admits its Tim Egan Alaska story - hyped in editorials and by Bob "Suffer The Children" Herbert - contained a big fib. Here's the correction printed yesterday:
A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska's Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees.
Notice how long it took before this front-page fib was corrected - weeks. Notice also no admission that the Alaska Climate Research Center puts the rise as far less than that. I'm traveling and haven't had time to dig into the Alaska University citation. If anyone out there could subject it to scrutiny, I'd be grateful. Like the American Prospect's revised numbers, I still don't buy it, and would like to see the basis of that 5.4 degree claim. But it's gratifying to see that even the New York Times has to concede a whopper when it's pointed out in daylight. Score one for the blogosphere. Here in cyber-space, we also correct our errors promptly.

-p