http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/assets/downloads/Ice_Report_14_4_09.pdf

“The Catlin Arctic Survey’s route was specifically designed so that the team would begin the expedition on multi‐year ice, transit briefly through a region primarily covered with first‐year ice, then enter a region in which second‐year ice now prevails………

…….The fact that initial ice thickness results indicate that they have been travelling over first year ice, almost right from the start, indicates that the extent of the multi‐year ice is much reduced and is now confined to a narrow swath east of 130W along the northwest Canadian Arctic Archipelago / Greenland coasts.”

Should’nt they have known this before hand? Can’t they see the same satelite imagery that I can? How much worse could their planning have been.

That’s an astonishing thing to say! Are you really saying that the neighbour’s (and your) opinions carry more weight in the matter than the mother’s?

It’s one thing to offer advice, entirely another to obstruct people exercising their own freedom of choice! Thank God we don’t (yet) live in a society that forces people to have children in hospital, or anywhere they feel happier. The risk of infection in hospitals is often greater than at home where, if you recall, the midwife was happy to perform. As so often in medicine, the risk/benefit analysis is far from clear.

Much as I am enjoying the general schadenfreude over the Catlin expedition, I admire their fortitude and, however misguided, their spirit of endeavour. Do we really want to discourage that?

Sweet Grace could easily have been brain damaged, all it takes is a small complication and some bad luck — this happens to thousands of children every year, and it’s a terrible waste that can be avoided if there is the equipment ready to deal with the emergency. Your neighbor did the right thing to try and prevent your daughter from harming her baby, and you’re a fool to hate him for it.

The Caitlin team, just like your daughter, are entitled to kill themselves if they want to, but when they put others deliberately at risk with their carelessness, they should be stopped.

I’m no fan of plastic in the wrong place either, but I think the problem is one of attitude to disposability rather than the material itself. We are constantly exhorted not to put our shopping in thin plastic bags, yet the amount of plastic involved is vastly less than the packaging used to contain the items we have just bought! As a method of transporting stuff, they are very efficient, and if they end up in the oceans, that is unlikely to be the fault of most users. Education, a better attitude towards disposal (of all rubbish) and some effort to simplify over-packaging would largely solve the problem, IMHO. I realise, of course, that that’s easier said than done…

The plastic in the oceans is causing real environmental problems right now. How many resources are being diverted from actual problems like this by the anti-CO2 movement?

I too pick up plastic off the beach, but sometimes there’s just too much!

I used the laptop analogy as what I hoped would be a recognisable illustration. You may ascribe the heat in your Thinkpad’s battery pack to the rest of it, but some will be self-generated, I assure you – the reason is sticks out the back is to help this dissipate, which appears to work.

The plastic water bottle epitomises everything about this throwaway, disposable society,” said de Rothschild

He should tell that to the billions of people over the last century who have finally had regular clean drinking water, juice and pasteurised milk added to their daily diet because of plastic bottles. Most of our ancestors had neither – a fact that escapes environmentalists.

from the link:

“The plastic water bottle epitomises everything about this throwaway, disposable society,” said de Rothschild, who trained to be a showjumper in England and who has trekked to both the north and south poles. However, he added that he was not aiming to demonise plastic, but was trying to highlight its alternative uses, as well as focusing global attention on the dangers posed to the ecology in regions such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

I would agree with this. AND it is not about CO2 :).

Recycling is what people did while I was growing up, nothing was thrown away that might be used again somehow.

We do not live a million years to see the plastic evaporate.

Though I agree that plastic is immensely useful, I also do not enjoy swimming in plastic sand, which is what happens when all these start breaking down into smaller parts. A line is left of colorful little bits at the tide line, and is picked up again to float with you if the sea is calm. Yack.

I spend half my week by the seaside, and on the walks I take I pick up plastic litter ( metal and paper I ignore) and throw it into the bins provided every 500 meters or so. This litter come sin from the open sea from plastics that have been thrown all over the place, from stream beds to boats cruising.

Sometimes I feel like a bag lady, but my part of the beach, about 2 kilometers, stays tidy, and hopefully without this ubiquitous plastic sand.

Whcih points to the problem : people should be educated about the disposal of plastic. That is a worthy goal, and the recycling business does a bit of that.

James P (08:25:21) :
…
One of my hobbies is flying electric model aircraft, where the wattages are rather higher and battery cooling is a major consideration!

You’re talking discharge of a high-capacity, high-energy density power source in only 10 to 15 minutes of flying; I’ve had plastic battery holders with NiCad (low capacity) cells melted/destoyed when the ‘pack’ terminals came across the same radio’s antenna in my briefcase; ruined both the pack holder and the antenna due to the heat produced in that short-circuit condition!

but a laptop battery delivering 20-30W will get quite warm, as you will discover if you take it out immediately after use.

Every morning I haul my T60p from our hour-long morning meeting conference room back to desk or lab; no unusual warmth is felt from the rather large protusion that is the battery pack on the back of that T60p laptop …
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Besides, the Lenovo/IBM T60p thinkpad I have doesn’t ‘warm the battery’ due to dischrge as much as it does by being in contact with the chassis … and this model is equipped with a fan! Running MS Office suite plus LabVIEW development suite and our co’s security software I can assure you the little beast breathes fire out the air/fan exhaust port.

If you dig deeper into the exploding battery problem, you find a couple things: Cheap battery knock-offs problematic ‘supervision’ circuitry in that ‘battery’ with a few bonafide quality problems from legitimate manufacturers.

James P (03:05:44) :

It’s not the battery that gets warm, it’s the micro-processor (CPU)

The CPU has a cooling fan, the battery doesn’t, so sometimes this happens:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/07/28/another_dell_laptop_burns/

I realise that’s not meant to be normal behaviour, but all batteries have internal resistance, which results in heat when current flows in either direction, so they get warm when charging too. If you don’t believe me, take one out during charging or after a period of active use (e.g. not just on standby)…

In the cases where I’ve drained the battery making long QSOs (talking) on one of those portable radios, it wasn’t the cell-pack that got hot, it was the area where the RF PA (Radio Frequency Power Amplifier) was mounted!

Reference section:

o Knock-off batts cited by laptop vendors as issue: http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/3267

o List of CPU power dissipation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation
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Something pertinent from a few years ago. From the comments section, not a news or opinion article

The Chasm Between Grand and Great
By Shawn Macomber

[quote LA Times]
I visited the Grand Canyon for the first time on my recent honeymoon. I didn’t feel particularly small, or smaller than usual anyway. I had no sudden epiphanies. There was no reinterpreting my life’s joys and sorrows as mere specks of dust in a vast universe. I also failed to come face to face with God, a feat many of my fellow travelers on the discount bus tour assured me they had easily accomplished. I suppose I must have wandered to the wrong viewing station, which is just my luck. A few weeks ago I spent five solid days at the Democratic convention and never once caught sight of Ben Affleck.

Is the Grand Canyon impressive? Well, yeah. Biggest hole I ever saw. But let’s be reasonable here: It’s nature’s job to be impressive, isn’t it? The Colorado River (conspiring with wind, rain and gravity) has been working on that hole for more than 5 million years. It’s all hypothetical, of course, but give me 5 million years and a garden trough and I’ll carve you a Grand Canyon in New England. I’ll make Vermont an island with relief sculptures of Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders looking out into the world and a drawbridge that goes up when those evil fast-food company execs come knocking.

Later, listening to the endless New Age meditations and ecstatic gushing of the bus driver and other tourists as we hurtled through hours of desert wasteland, I couldn’t help but see myself as a bit of a killjoy. “When we’re dead and gone, that canyon will still be there,” one woman across the aisle said reverentially. I resisted the urge to add, “Yeah, and so will your Gatorade bottle, but I’m not going to start worshiping that.” My disconnect from the others was as complete as if I had just shown up at the Indy 500 in a Prince T-shirt.

My mental self-mortification over my confessed bad attitude began to dissipate, however, as we pulled up to Hoover Dam for a quick “photo op,” a stop that lasted a total of five minutes. Most people stayed on the bus, presumably to continue watching the Sandra Bullock witch flick, “Practical Magic,” on the overhead television.

So I stood looking out at this massive feat of human ingenuity and wondered exactly how our priorities got so screwed up. I was facing more than 6 million tons of concrete restraining the Colorado River (something the Grand Canyon clearly cannot do) Score humans, eh? and creating Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. The Hoover Dam project was one of the only projects undertaken by the federal government to ever come in under budget and ahead of schedule. In addition to supplying water to cities up to 300 miles away, 17 4-million-pound generators in the dam capture 2.8 million kilowatts of electricity and send it along 2,700 miles of transmission lines to Los Angeles and other distant locales. The Hoover Dam project was a truly American effort: Every state provided supplies to the project. Ninety-six of the more than 15,000 workers involved lost their lives during the construction.

Yet all it takes is Sandra Bullock casting a computer animated spell to reduce the attention to zero.

Perhaps in 5 million years, when whatever life forms destined to follow us are studying the ruins of our culture, they will find value in Hoover Dam that many of us fail to ascribe to it today. When it comes down to it, the construction in the 1930s of a dam that continues to benefit millions of people to this day is without a doubt more impressive than a river wearing a channel in rock over millions of years. Hoover Dam makes a measurable, positive impact on the people in the Southwest. The Grand Canyon sells T-shirts and postcards and gives mules something to climb in and out of. I’m sure the mules would like to see us get our priorities straight as well.

Look, God isn’t in the Grand Canyon — a river is. If people are searching for God or for an escape from their problems, I’d wager it’s more likely to be found in the complexities and possibilities of the human mind than inside a geological structure. Now if the Grand Canyon had been a public works project, that might be another story.[/quote]

http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/latestfromtheice

It shows a temperature of -25C and states “sunny” “showers” . How can it rain at -25? Maybe they are in England after all.

Stephen Sakkur: He was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire and studied at Cambridge University and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

Bios from Wiki and BBC do not say if he graduated nor in what subjects. I think this is a general problem with the MSM.