I should add that when I pointed out the press release to the BBC, they claimed that they weren’t aware of it and they say that they have no intention to give it a high profile at this stage.

I spotted this comment from the UK Met Office (who are usually first in line when banging the drum for AGW):

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091015b.html

Seems they are now backtracking furiously and have little faith in the Pen Hadow “research”.

The posting is here. Anthony, you might want to drop by and comment if you think its important. Its unusual that this reporter is responding to blog comments.

http://blogs.tampabay.com/energy/2009/10/arctic-to-be-largely-icefree-in-summer-months-within-a-decade-says-new-study.html#comments

From the National Geographic (March 1991)
‘The hard way to the North Pole’
“We were crossing ocean covered by a crust of moving ice that cracked and buckled constantly, leaving leads of open water, some so wide we could not see the other side. These we had to ski along until we found a narrow neck to cross…
Past expeditions would wait for days for water to freeze over, but we didn’t let smaller leads stop us. We had designed our sledges extra wide and high to act as boats.”

I have NGs going back to the 1960s. There have been numerous articles on the Arctic, and I remember always about the unpredictably of the ice and how expeditions have a short time before the spring breakup.

Just shows how useless their forecasts are.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/10/climate_issue.html#comments

Post #280

A number of comments here have raised issues connected with our reporting of Arctic stories in general, and in particular of the Catlin Arctic survey. As Catlin was David Shukman’s story, and as David has covered the Arctic regularly over the years, I asked him if he’d like to respond to some of the points you raised – here’s his reply:

Hi,

The messages cover a range of questions so I hope the following provides answers:

The Catlin Arctic Survey: We never shrank from covering the failures and mishaps of the expedition, reporting on the breakdown of the Sprite portable radar and the telemetry system among others. We explained how a combination of equipment failures and bad weather forced the team to abandon the original objective of the North Pole. The delay in resupply flights and the resulting shortage of food were also part of our coverage. It’s hard to see how that constitutes granting the expedition unwarranted publicity.

However, the fact remains that the expedition did then adapt and managed to gather ice measurements by hand-drilling, albeit over a shorter distance than planned. Several readers question the validity of the data, with one quoting Dr Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado as saying that he did not “anticipate using the Catlin data”. However, that phrase was extracted from a blog in which Dr Meier goes on to say that the Catlin survey could provide “ground truth” to corrobate other sources.

This is where the Catlin expedition can be particularly valuable. To have a group out on the ice taking direct measurements of thickness across a relatively large region (compared to most field expeditions) of the Arctic is something that has only rarely, if ever, been done before. It is unfortunate that the radar may not have worked as well as hoped, but that is the nature of field work, especially in harsh polar environments – things almost never go according to plan. The radar would essentially provide a continuous transect of thickness estimates over several hundred kilometers. However, the drill hole measurements taken regularly over the route will still likely be valuable.

The data has since been passed via Professor Wadhams to a network of Arctic researchers including the NSIDC and the European Damocles project.

Readers further question how the terrible weather which the survey encountered can be squared with the notion of warming. The expedition took place in the tail-end of winter. That was always the plan both because it’s the state of the winter ice that scientists find most useful (before the summer melt) and because any expedition needs to be completed before the ice breaks up.

Professor Peter Wadhams: Like any academic he inevitably needs funding – there’s nothing unusual in that – but his credentials as a polar specialist are surely hard to deny. A veteran of submarine missions under the ice with the Royal Navy and numerous expeditions on the ice itself over the past 40 years, he has never been someone content only with computer modelling. And he is not alone in bringing forward the forecasts for the timing of Arctic melt. Since the record melt of September 2007, a growing number in this field have radically revised their forecasts too. Muyin Wang and James Overland, two noted US specialists, suggested a similar timeframe – 30 years – for seeing a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean, in a paper published last year in Geophysical Research Letters.

Apparent contradictions: several readers have complained that the findings of the Catlin Arctic Survey, and associated comments from Professor Wadhams, are contradicted by the results of an airborne survey, known as PAM-ARCMIP, carried out by an international consortium of researchers including the Alfred Wegener Institute of Germany. It reported finding ice which was thicker than expected. As I understand, the airborne survey did not follow the route taken on the Catlin expedition but instead focused on areas further east and north.

The fact that the aerial measurements found thicker ice along the northern coasts of Ellesmere Island and Greenland is explained by Professor Wadhams. He and others have for some years forecast that warming would have the effect of dislodging older, multi-year ice allowing the ocean currents to drive it into that very area, on its approach to the Fram Strait and out of the Arctic Ocean. It does not mean that the Arctic ice is “getting thicker”, as some have written; instead, it means that the thickest ice appears to be breaking up and then accumulating, as predicted, in one particular region.

Patterns of melting: more than one reader has suggested that we are ignorant of the fact that much of the Arctic sea ice melts in the summer and re-freezes in the winter, and that we are also somehow ignoring evidence that the ice is regrowing. This follows the confirmation that the peak melt this year did not set a new record. My colleague Richard Black has addressed this in this blog post. But to restate this: the data show that this year’s melt was the third in a row to be well below the average since the satellite record began in 1979. The past five years have seen the five lowest ice extents since that record started and, according to the NSIDC, the rate of decline is currently running at 11.2% per decade. It’s worth noting that in September 2007, the sea-ice shrank to the extent originally forecast for 2055.

David Shukman

eye8eon Says:
16/10/2009 at 20:29

“But I will say this…I totally believe what I write, give or take a few omissions or errors, after all, I’m self educated. I left school with no GCSE’s and was in prison whilst my school friends were learning how to be adults, etc. I was fighting for my sanity and health in a young offenders jail. Thats my own fault. Whilst there, i met an anarchist named john, from brum. He told me a few things, and it all clicked with the stuff I heard as I was growing up around rebels and political activists. The government lies and kills, capitalism is bad, etc, etc.
So my views will never be changed, ever…certainly not by someones comments, even well formed arguments, because this guys not for turning…….”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,566601,00.html

“LONDON — Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said much of the melting will take place within a decade…

…Wadhams, one of the world’s leading experts on sea ice cover in the North Pole region, compared ice thickness measurements taken by a Royal Navy submarine in 2007 with evidence gathered by the British explorer Pen Hadow earlier this year.

…Hadow and his team on the Catlin Arctic Survey drilled 1,500 holes to gather evidence during a 280 mile walk across the Arctic. They found the average thickness of ice-floes was 1.8 metres, a depth considered too thin to survive the summer’s ice melt….”

The usual catastrophic predictions follow…

Sigh.

But thanks to another BBC team, there is some great video evidence to the contrary. In May 2007, the BBC Top Gear team drove in Toyota pick-up trucks all the way to the magnetic North Pole. Yes, they did find some thin ice, but their main challenge was too much ice, not a shortage!

Here’s a BBC video of the event – please have a look!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/extras/production_notes/polar_special.shtml

and a Wiki article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilux_Arctic_Challenge

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/data_collection_on_thin_ice/