I was out and about last night, and ended up catching a breathless NBC News report about how the world's glaciers are getting ready to disappear within the next 30 years, and that we should all panic (by instituting draconian socialist global policies, but of course).
The report, to nobody's surprise, turns out to be a complete pile of bullcrap, since the frighteningly-close year we were told we had until was actually based entirely on a ridiculously stupid typo:
[Where] did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from?
According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!
2035, 2350. It's all just numbers, maaan.
The science is still settled.
Which means it's probably too much to expect all of these illustrious fact-checking professional news organizations to be providing any retractions or corrections to their mindless hype anytime soon.
(h/t I Hate The Media)