For BarryW: in truth, the Greenland sea shows zero anomaly compared to the 1979-2000 mean, so the choice of starting from the Svalbard islands never made any sense.

ice concentration

Same story also in Aftenposten today

Mot Nordpolen i Kajakk
(“Towards the North Pole in kayak”)
http://www.aftenposten.no/klima/article2639305.ece

- I fjor på denne breddegraden så jeg tre meter tykk is. Nå kan jeg bare se en meter tykk is. I 2007 spådde jeg at Arktis ville være mer eller mindre uten is på sjøen om sommeren innen ti år. Alt jeg har sett på ekspedisjonen min, bekrefter den spådommen, sa han fredag.

(“- Last year at this latitude I saw 3 meter thick ice. Now I can only see 1 meter thick ice. In 2007 I predicted that the Arctic would be more or less without ice at sea during the summer within ten years. Everything I have seen on this ekspedition of mine, confirms that prediction, he sais Friday”)

There is just no limit to how this stunt is exploited, completely disregarding all facts.

- Nordpolisen har smeltet to tredeler på ett år
(“- North Pole ice has melted to thirds in a year”)
http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2008/09/07/546022.html

- I fjor på denne breddegraden så jeg tre meter tjukk is. Nå kan jeg bare se en meter tjukk is.
(“- Last year at this latitude I saw 3 meter thick ice. Now I can only see 1 meter thick ice”)

The coverage of this story is very untruthful and irresponsible, IMHO.

To: The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming

Note – Your comment posting software and my editor may make this difficult to
read, a Web version of this is at http://wermenh.com/climate/index.html

I understand that you will soon hear from a British explorer, Lewis Gordon
Pugh, in a self-appointed role as ambassador for the Arctic. Apparently he
has been invited due to his recent attempt at paddling a kayak from
Spitzbergen to the North Pole. He was forced to abandon the attempt 1000 Km
from the North Pole

The impetus for the attempt was a forecast from Canadian and US researchers of
a 50-50 chance that ice would melt at the Pole, a forecast that failed
miserably – Pugh completed only 10% of the trip he originally planned.

Our accurate record of Arctic ice cover only dates back to the development of
satellites that record images of the planet, approximately 1979. That was
also about the time a circulation pattern called the Pacific Decadal
Oscillation flipped from a cool phase to a warm phase, it has only recently
flipped back to a cool phase. In other warm periods people have reported that
the Arctic Ice Cap was melting. In 1969 the New York Times quoted Col. Bernt
Bachen claiming “the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the
North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.” Only a few years
later the frigid winters of the late 1970s brought concerns about a coming
Ice Age.

The cool PDO will bring us a golden opportunity to determine just what effect
CO2 has on climate. Solar activity has also declined and we are in a broad
solar minimum that some people thought would end in 2006. This will be a
wonderful time for real science, and we will learn more in the next decade
than we have in the last five.

In Pugh’s writings, I’ve found him to be so convinced that the Arctic is
melting and will soon be open that I don’t think he realizes there is a good
possibility that it won’t happen. The ice cover this summer tracked well
ahead of last year’s for most of the summer and may well not exceed it. Some
scientists expected that the thin, new ice that formed last year would melt
quickly and that melting would be much greater this year.

Is this a sign that we are entering a cool period or is it just an example of
weather’s wide variability that makes teasing out climate signals so
difficult. I suspect the former and I hope that the committee listen to Pugh
with interest, but remember that the science is nowhere near settled and if
anything is becoming less settled.

The expedition could have travelled at least 300 miles farther north 29 years ago.

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=05&fy=1979&sm=09&sd=05&sy=2008

I agree 100%. But here’s a question: Who is more likely to get rock-star treatment? Lewis Pugh or Anthony Watts? The fact is that being a Pugh-like shameless self promoter, engaged in a hypocritical and dishonest pursuit of empty symbolism really can pay off.

There are probably 1000 girls willing to have Pugh’s baby now.

Here’s another comment from his blog, from “Michelle”

“The simple fact – Lewis and his team are passionately and physically communicating that they care and are doing all they can to reach world leaders. Isn’t that enough!? Most of us sit on our bottoms and do nothing. Listen to him at congress and you will change your mind. Did you know he is trying to legally protect the arctic, for all of us?”

See, it doesn’t matter how wrong-headed Pugh’s ideas are. He just needs to make a big show of altruism/caring and his status is raised substantially.

“Lewis Gordon has paddled further north than anyone has paddled before” …

How hard/easy would it be to find contrary evidence on this? I’m sure you guys must have some good links. It certainly looks to me as if he didn’t get very far at all.

I think this guy is just trying to set himself up like his hero Al Gore, and make
millions while being a hypocrite.