Sen. Kerry Recycles Greenpeace's Lie About Arctic Ice

Radical environmentalists love recycling so much that they recycle lies — and the lies are even bolder when reincarnated. Sen. John Kerry proved it this week when he recycled Greenpeace’s lie about an ice-free Arctic and said it will become a reality even sooner, by 2013.

We exposed Greenpeace’s lie less than two weeks ago on our blog and on Big Hollywood, and forced the group to issue a rare “clarification.” Our piece and the companion video went viral. Even the pro-environment blog at the left-wing Guardian newspaper acknowledged that “Greenpeace will be bruised by this furor.”

But none of that exposure kept Kerry, D-Mass., from repeating and amplifying the lie in a predictably hysterical op-ed about “catastrophic climate change” for the liberal Huffington Post.

To justify his alarmism that global warming is a national security threat, Kerry parroted the tired and discredited claim about Arctic ice. “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013,” he wrote. “Not in 2050, but four years from now.”

Greenpeace wasn’t even willing to distort the truth that much when it mentioned melting Arctic ice in a July 15 article. The group pinpointed 2030 as doomsday, 17 years later than Kerry.

But even that claim was so bogus that Greenpeace’s own leader recanted when pressed by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur. “I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake,” Gerd Leipold said last month on “Hardtalk.”

When we publicized that admission, Greenpeace appended a note to its story online but also tried to manufacture a phony grassroots campaign to cover up the admission. That’s the kind of behavior that emboldens politicians like Kerry to make even more outrageous claims.

Kerry’s decision to regurgitate and exaggerate the lie about melting ice just goes to show that no fact is too sound for environmentalists to distort and that they have no qualms about using their scare tactics even after being caught in a lie.

Being an environmentalist means never having to say you’re sorry.