THE NEW YORK TIMES reported on Sunday that greenhouse warming was causing Alaska to “crack, burn and sag.’

Now Professor Gerd Wendler of the Alaska Climate Research Center (he’s a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, a lovely campus that I visited once) says that the Times’ claim of a seven-degree temperature rise is wildly exaggerated: here are the actual figures, which are much lower.

What could account for this discrepancy?