Climate Craziness of the Week – cool (E)motional Icebergs

A group called http://www.coolemotion.org/ got funding from WWF to build a giant sculpture on an iceberg. As of May 6th the iceberg was still trapped in pack ice;

http://coolemotion.blogspot.com/2010/05/iceberg-still-stuck.html

https://i0.wp.com/4.bp.blogspot.com/_9AzmXYHX3Ss/S-KE-RxyTMI/AAAAAAAAADk/QMhjsleU0lA/s1600/ijsberg+klein.jpg?w=1110

But now they claim that the iceberg sunk/melted after just a few weeks:

http://coolemotion.blogspot.com/2010/06/no-iceberg-anymore-comments-of-ap-1.html

Iceberg disappeared, GPS signals from Satut. What happened?

“In the very early morning, 2nd of June, we could see at our GPS tracker that something was going on. Later we noticed that our signal moved constantly to the South East faster than the iceberg ever moved , and then suddenly moved to the North into the settlement of Satut.”

You have to read this below to really experience the cool-E-motion of it all:

The iceberg sunk………. Can you believe that an iceberg like this one disappears in only a matter of weeks? Last week I interviewed my very good friend Ole Jorgen Hammeken, standing in the sun, sweating because of the heat, while normally they can go for dogsledding untill [sic] June. It raises some questions… The whole day and night you can hear icebergs exploding, or collapsing because of this heat. What is going on? I am an artist who travelled [sic] many times through the Arctic and every year it becomes warmer and warmer. I am not a scientist, but only listen to the stories that people tell me. I am not interested in the question: Who’s guilty at this situation? Is there global warming? Not at all, I am asking the question: What if Climate Change enters my world: Can we anticipate on these fast changes? In Uummannaq the extremes started only a couple of years ago, and now it is warmer as ever before, with all consequences. I am personally convinced that we soon will experience what is happening over there, even if we only feel the tail. We need all energy and focuss [sic] on the future. My question is: How can we create a more flexible society? Climate Change is from all times, people always adapted to these changes, but are we now capable to cope with these extreme changes? We have to stop naming, blaming and shaming, and put this energy in another direction.

“What is going on?” he asks. Gosh, exploding icebergs! Gaia must be really angry right now. Since we are talking about “art” here, let’s venture back to artists of the past that traversed the Arctic, like this one.

From the website: In Search of Icebergs: Tracing the 1859 expedition of the painter Frederic Edwin Church  to Newfoundland and Labrador

http://www.vanishing-ice.org/

An excerpt from the link above, reading from the book:

Reading from the book: After Icebergs with a Painter: A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland, 1861, by Louis Legrand Noble

Warnings passed down through local lore flowed with stories of exploding and capsizing icebergs. The author registers a sigh of relief each time the captain signals the return to a sheltered cove. On one occasion, the two companions enjoyed the sounds and sights of a collapsing berg from a safe distance. The painter, known throughout the book merely as C—, contributed a sketch of this astonishing event to Noble’s book.

Huh, exploding and capsizing icebergs in 1859. Whooda thunk?

Some in the press are eating this “iceberg sculpture cum Titanic disaster” up:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2010/06/08/iceberg-sculptures-sink.html?ref=rss

What’s really funny is the pic of the sculpture, iceberg and boaters for reference in this article: http://www.adn.com/2010/06/08/1313027/global-warming-sinks-dutch-artists.html

The iceberg looks to extend about 3.5 meters above the waterline. According to DMI, Arctic temps have been trending below average and are still mighty cold;

Thus it seems likely the sculpture probably slid off the iceberg when it tipped/flipped something like this:

or this

or this

Mega hat tip to WUWT reader “Just the Facts”, who gathered most of the content and links and placed them in comments.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9AzmXYHX3Ss/S_-6WnYAH5I/AAAAAAAAAF0/tYwGfD-QEaQ/s1600/Ap+water+2.jpg
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hunter
June 10, 2010 1:12 pm

A brain hooked on CAGW stories and hype is a terrible waste.

June 10, 2010 1:20 pm

The researchers were evacuated from the station one month ahead of schedule
by a nuclear icebreaker because of a powerful ice stream(!!?)
moving toward the station.
http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/06/10/9558839.html
Perhaps a passing Russian nuclear icebreaker
nicked the sculpture.

June 10, 2010 1:31 pm

Five metres of ice instantaneously melted. The temperature in the Arctic must be several hundred degrees.

Eddie
June 10, 2010 1:33 pm

I find it hard to believe that the iceberg melted in a matter of less than a week. May 28th it’s still huge, June 3rd it’s melted and gone?…

June 10, 2010 1:35 pm

Holy flipping icebergs!!!!
Why does part of the sculpture look like a spermatozoa? Can any artists enlighten this philistine earth scientist?

Tim Clark
June 10, 2010 1:36 pm

Great, we had tipping islands, now we have tipping icebergs. Anthony, is this a subliminal attempt to get us to hit the tip jar?

NoAstronomer
June 10, 2010 1:41 pm

I love this site. So much to learn here everyday. Today I found out that icebergs sink. Brilliant.
/sarc
Mike.

James Sexton
June 10, 2010 2:03 pm

What’s really fascinating it that the WWF had so much extra money to hire someone to create……….art? What the heck is that? We should sue the WWF just for the bad taste, not to mention the junk they left littered on the ocean floor.
How does one put the words “iceberg” and “sank” together? I like that angle. We can invent a whole new area of science to study how ice sinks in water!
He asks “What if Climate Change enters my world:(?) ” I wonder what world he’s been living in and what color the sky is in his world?

Charlie A
June 10, 2010 2:05 pm

It sure sounds to me like some local fisherman saw some metal that might be of use.
Apparently the GPS tracker device was broadcasting its position as being inside a house in the settlement of Satut.
The website says that the GPS apparently was taken off just before the iceberg “sank”, but to me it seems more likely that once the GPS tracker was taken off, that it became nearly impossible to relocate the same small iceberg.
Sounds pretty fishy.

John W.
June 10, 2010 2:13 pm

I’m going out on a limb here …
My guess is that some starving-due-to-global-warming polar bear ate it.
8^)

David L.
June 10, 2010 2:15 pm

No way that iceberg melted in weeks. After this “global warming” winter, we had so much snow that at work they piled it up in half the parking lot and we all parked in the other half. The mound was about 100 feet in diameter at the base and about 20 feet tall (much smaller than this iceberg). At the end of the winter, we had a few weeks of warm weather (60-70F) and lots of sun. This thing is sitting on black asphalt and after a few weeks, they finally brought in front-end loaders and hauled the pile away because it just wasn’t melting fast enough. So there is no way that iceberg is melting in 33F arctic water even in full sunlight and 70F air temps inside a few months!

George DeBusk
June 10, 2010 2:15 pm

“Later we noticed that our signal moved constantly to the South East faster than the iceberg ever moved , and then suddenly moved to the North into the settlement of Satut.”
Maybe a passing fisherman liked the look of the GPS transponder and took it with him to the “settlement of Satut?” Maybe the berg yet lurks somewhere South of Satut?
Or perhaps the Heat Miser took a like to the berg and melted it just for fun.

tarpon
June 10, 2010 2:24 pm

Maybe we should examine how you scientifically determine the top and bottom of an iceberg. Can we get a government grant and make a scary movie with the money?
Or maybe — Did anybody see the GPS float by and stop to pick it up? You can get a lot of money for scrap these days.
Need bigger iceberg.

DirkH
June 10, 2010 2:24 pm

If anybody else would have mounted some useless steel structures on an iceberg the WWF would have called it pollution.

June 10, 2010 2:28 pm

Mike Odin says:
June 10, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Making the dot over i:
1. http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/06/05/9175021.html
2. http://en.rian.ru/infographics/20100524/159136732.html
Regards

John in NZ
June 10, 2010 2:32 pm

The iceberg reached a tipping point and then it tipped.

Oslo
June 10, 2010 2:33 pm

Reminds me of the photos in the report: “Melting snow and ice”, presented by the Norwegian Foreign Minister Støre and Al Gore at Copenhagen, where there were photos of icebergs with clearly photoshopped penguins on them, at strange angles.

Les Johnson
June 10, 2010 2:37 pm

stevengoddard: your
Five metres of ice instantaneously melted. The temperature in the Arctic must be several hundred degrees.
More than 5 meters of ice there. Assuming the guys are about 1.8 meters tall, the ice above water is over 5 meters alone. That means there is about 45 meters of ice underwater.
50 meters of ice melted in 1 week? My BS detector is going off.
Especially as their website states:

Thursday, 3 June 2010
Iceberg disappeared, GPS signals from Satut. What happened?
In the very early morning, 2nd of June, we could see at our GPS tracker that something was going on. Later we noticed that our signal moved constantly to the South East faster than the iceberg ever moved , and then suddenly moved to the North into the settlement of Satut. At the very moment that something happened with the iceberg, the GPS system was taken into a fisherboat that continued fishing untill he finally went home. ( Ap’s version )
We contacted our friends in Uummannaq, who took a boat to have a look, but they couldn’t find our iceberg anymore. What happened we never will know. Too many options are open.

In other words, a fisherman “liberated” the GPS device, and they have lost the iceberg.
Much better story to say that it “sunk”.
Idiots.

Gary Hladik
June 10, 2010 2:49 pm

Hey, don’t laugh! That could be Guam some day!

hunter
June 10, 2010 2:51 pm

Iceberg sinking = new laws of physics.

George E. Smith
June 10, 2010 2:56 pm

Well when I see four idiots standing up in a rubber boat; or even one idiot for that matter; I can’t help thinking about their rubber boat tipping over in a teachable moment.
Well unfortunately; in this case they all survived; and will likely reach breeding age; so we can continue to have new generations of idiots in the future.
These folks probably have ancestors related to those of the Catlin expedition.

tallbloke
June 10, 2010 2:58 pm

Oslo says:
June 10, 2010 at 2:33 pm
photos of icebergs with clearly photoshopped penguins on them, at strange angles.

Maybe the penguins were drunk on the appearance fee money?

Robert
June 10, 2010 3:07 pm

Does remind me of a Salmon that was equipped with a tracking device by scientists years ago in order to do research on migration patterns. It remained very static at one place for longer period of time, at closer inspection that location appeared to be a freezer of a fisherman 🙂
“In the very early morning, 2nd of June, we could see at our GPS tracker that something was going on. Later we noticed that our signal moved constantly to the South East faster than the iceberg ever moved , and then suddenly moved to the North into the settlement of Satut.”
Never go for the easy explanation, its all global warming, what else could it be. I bet that someone in Satut is making better use of this sculpture than the artist ever could have thought off.

Ray
June 10, 2010 3:09 pm

It is well know that when there is a global warming ice sinks. This was the sort of science back in the 60’s. Remember the story of “Voyage at the bottom of the sea”? It was another kind of global warming though!!!
Anyway, in the movie, the Seaview was casually going along under the Arctic cap when suddenly big icebergs started to sink and crash against its hull…. they soon found out that the sky was on fire and the ice melting was sinking…
You should read the plot. It is amazing how it sounds like today’s rhetoric.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_to_the_Bottom_of_the_Sea
Look at 44 seconds…

Al Gore's Holy Hologram
June 10, 2010 3:10 pm

“I am not a scientist, but only listen to the stories that people tell me. ”
Uh-huh

Douglas DC
June 10, 2010 3:14 pm

It’s not so much they tried this stunt but the credit they give to our collective intelligence….

June 10, 2010 3:14 pm

I’d bet a nickel that some environmentally conscious locals spotted it and recycled it for 72 cents a pound.

Roger Knights
June 10, 2010 3:15 pm

Always something new out of Arctica.

Ray
June 10, 2010 3:20 pm

Aliens were tired of dissecting cows. Now they are after icebergs with abstract metal sculptures and GPS on top. They melt the icebergs in order to hide any trace of their obscure activities. Because they know humans will blame it on Global Warming. Mmmuuuuhaaahahaha.

Al Gored
June 10, 2010 3:23 pm

Les Johnson says:
June 10, 2010 at 2:37 pm
“In other words, a fisherman “liberated” the GPS device, and they have lost the iceberg. ”
This seems to make perfect sense.

pat
June 10, 2010 3:26 pm

‘The iceberg sunk……….The whole day and night you can hear icebergs exploding, or collapsing because of this heat.”
Apparently I don’t get out enough. First we have ice sinking in salt water, no less. Then we have these explosions and implosions.The former no doubt caused by the frequent plasma bursts the planet is undergoing. The latter likely because the micro-black holes that famously infest icebergs.

TomRude
June 10, 2010 3:41 pm

And unsuspecting panda loving WWF donors funded this…

RockyRoad
June 10, 2010 3:42 pm

The reason AGW continues to spin out of control is that the world is full of unthinking, apparently uneducated sheeple that can’t see through a relatively simple case of scrap metal theft.

jorgekafkazar
June 10, 2010 4:01 pm

Ray says: “Remember the story of “Voyage at the bottom of the sea”? It was another kind of global warming though….You should read the plot. It is amazing how it sounds like today’s rhetoric. Look at 44 seconds…”
I much preferred 2:22.

pat
June 10, 2010 4:04 pm

O/T followup on Stanford/Krosnick poll:
10 June: SF Chronicle: David Perlman: Stanford survey finds more doubt global warming
He (Krosnick) will be organizing two more polls on climate issues this year, he said, armed with a $200,000 grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation.
The survey conflicts with several recent opinion polls on global warming…
The decline in the number of people who think global warming is real, he said, is probably caused by the fact that 2008 was the coldest year since 2000. So Americans already doubtful about the reality of climate change would have had their skepticism strengthened by what was merely a scientifically insignificant one-year drop in a 100-year warming trend, he said.
Krosnick will hold a briefing in the nation’s capital on his survey’s findings today, the same day the Senate has scheduled seven hours of debate and a vote on a resolution by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
****The briefing in which Krosnick is presenting the poll results is being sponsored by the Environment and Energy Study Institute, an advocacy group.
This story has changed since it appeared in print.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/09/BAJG1DSL4V.DTL
10 June: New Scientist: Peter Aldhous: US pollsters argue over public view on climate change
Jon Krosnick, who has previously worked with New Scientist to probe public attitudes to climate change, has run polls on global warming each year since 2006….
Of the 32 per cent of the respondents who had heard about the leak of emails last November from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, just 29 per cent – 9 per cent of the entire sample – thought the unguarded comments that were exposed indicated that climate scientists should not be trusted…
Frank Newport editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, argues that waning belief in global warming and fading concern about its effects are consistent findings. “Across a large number of polls there has been a significant decline,” he says…
Krosnick also critiqued a survey on global warming done last October by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, and Andrew Kohut, Pew’s president, has already responded in an angry letter to The New York Times: “[Krosnick’s] commentary and analysis are superficial and reflect a strong point of view on an issue on which he purports to be doing unbiased polling.”
First the scientists and sceptics, and now the pollsters: mention global warming and it seems that a fight soon breaks out.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19028-us-pollsters-argue-over-public-view-on-climate-change.html
10 June: USA Today 3.26pm: Polls show Americans concerned about global warming
The Yale survey (conducted along with George Mason University) reports that, since January, the percentage of Americans who believe global warming is happening rose four points, to 61%, and those who worry about it rose three points, to 53%. It also found that 77% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant…
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/06/polls-show-americans-still-concerned-about-global-warming/1
10 June: USA Today 1.26pm: Polls: Americans still worried about global warming
Since January, the Yale/GMU survey reported that public belief that global warming is happening rose four points, to 61%, while belief that it is caused mostly by human activities rose three points, to 50%.
The number of Americans who worry about global warming rose three points, to 53 percent. And the number of Americans who said that the issue is personally important to them rose five points, to 63%…
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/global-warming-survey/1

Alex the skeptic
June 10, 2010 4:10 pm

So the greenies saw a sinking iceberg? So what? I saw a flying pig.

Keith Minto
June 10, 2010 4:14 pm

FYI travelled [sic] is fully sick in my part of the world :).

Robert Morris
June 10, 2010 4:16 pm

Excellent recycling skills by a passing Eskimo. /end story

Feet2theFire
June 10, 2010 4:31 pm

“In the very early morning, 2nd of June, we could see at our GPS tracker that something was going on. Later we noticed that our signal moved constantly to the South East faster than the iceberg ever moved , and then suddenly moved to the North into the settlement of Satut.”

I love it – so many places you can go with this…
I will settle on:
The berg heard of a boarding house room coming available in Satut. Rooms are at a premium this time of year. It was told it had to sign the lease by noon, so it stopped what it was doing and found a cab heading that way. It arrived with only minutes to spare.
As I write this, it is really wetting the bed… Landladies in the Arctic really hate to have to rent to melting bergs, but there is a village ordinance that says they have to. The good news is the neighborhood gets lots of ice for their frozen daiquiris and lots of good drinking water if they play their cards right.

Gary from Chicagoland
June 10, 2010 4:31 pm

Three thoughts:)
1) Of course, to explain why the iceberg “disappears” use the Phil Jones logic: “we really do not know the cause of the warming so therefore it must be CO2”. How much warming are we talking about to melt this 50 meters wide x 100 meters long x 33 meters tall rectangle iceberg? The heat alone without any temperature increase to just change the phase of H2O from ice to water at 0˚C is about 77 billion heat calories. (using the constants of ice: density = 916.7 kg/meter cubed, and specific heat constant of 510 cal/kg).
2) Perhaps it was the overpopulation of polar bears that got a bit frisky during their Spring mating season as their numbers have increased from 1950’s (7,500) to today (21,000).
3) One small iceberg “disappears” is big news in the Arctic, but over 1 million km2 net gain in Antarctica ice is “no news”. WUWT?

Tiff
June 10, 2010 4:36 pm

It takes longer than a week for a pile of snow to melt in my front yard at the beginning of spring. I’m certain the Arctic is colder than that. Some people just have no common sense.

June 10, 2010 4:44 pm

Burger King explains.

Alan S. Blue
June 10, 2010 4:54 pm

Having lived in New York, where the constant plowing leaves massive piles of ice in the corners of every mall parking lot, I have to say “I doubt it.”
They aren’t even solid ice like you’d have in an iceberg, and yet those piles last through weeks without the nightly low ever dropping below zero Celsius – and pretty substantial daytime temps.

dr.bill
June 10, 2010 5:04 pm

Another little something from the silly side:
Get snipped. Save the planet.
/dr.bill

Gail Combs
June 10, 2010 5:12 pm

Alex the skeptic says:
June 10, 2010 at 4:10 pm
So the greenies saw a sinking iceberg? So what? I saw a flying pig.
_____________________________________________________________
Yup, and I saw one too, actually several. I caught them with a butterfly net…. I thought my vet was going to bust a gut laughing. We were vaccinating pot belly pigglets and they can surely FLY.
Sinan Unur dissected Dr. Krosnick’s survey. The interesting thing was the demographic information: 40% of the respondents are Democrats and 29% of the respondents are Republicans and 24% don’t know what they are (independent was an option). It looks like if you add the “i haven’t a clue” bunch with the Democrats as those who do not watch Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh, then 1/3 of the Republicans do pay attention to Fox and Rush and therefore heard about Climategate.

wayne
June 10, 2010 5:27 pm

FOR SALE: Tubular piece of art that resembles a broken children slide but is meant to portray the recent decades in the global temperature curve. Minor damage from depth-charges unavoidable but not very noticable. :),

Editor
June 10, 2010 8:16 pm

“I’m going out on a limb here …
My guess is that some starving-due-to-global-warming polar bear ate it.”
First it fell in the water from the catastrophic melting.
Then a fish ate it.
Then a seal ate the fish.
Then a polar bear ate the seal.
Then a local ate the polar bear ….

Editor
June 10, 2010 8:26 pm

Ok, so when I put this together for tips and notes, I probably didn’t dig as deep into CoolEmotion as I should of, because I didn’t catch, “Later we noticed that our signal moved constantly to the South East faster than the iceberg ever moved , and then suddenly moved to the North into the settlement of Satut. At the very moment that something happened with the iceberg, the GPS system was taken into a fisherboat that continued fishing until he finally went home.”
This is even dumber… If you go to this page:
http://www.coolemotion.org/art-on-the-map-temp.html
and keep hitting the +/zoom button on the right, you can see the neighborhood where the tracker thinks the GPS device is. So either CoolEmotion didn’t effectively secure their sculpture to the iceberg, or their GPS to the sculpture.
It is kinda confounding being up against such inept opponents, as they seem to be doing a better job discrediting themselves than we could hope to. Part of me wants to donate some money to World Wildlife Fun so they can fund some more counterproductive Warmist adventures, but then WWF might go produce another offensive 9/11 commercial like this:
http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/9/crazy-9-11-wwf-ddb-commercial-1180487.html
The Warmist’s stratagems are becoming increasingly desperate and transparent, their rhetoric is shrill and empty, and their PR efforts are amusingly awful. I think we might have reached a tipping point where the Warmist’s desperation and incompetence will be sufficient to precipitate the complete collapse of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Narrative…

Douglas DC
June 10, 2010 8:30 pm

I have lived on the Oregon Coast and having Crabbers and Fishermen In-laws
and Friends, I’d say someone needed some metal for a bit of rigging repair. The fact that
it was on the Berg, made no difference, maybe saved a trip into town.
Didn’t have to pay for it either….

Ray
June 10, 2010 9:06 pm

I heard a bunch of polar bears were having a beer party and they all decided to write their names in yellow on that particular iceberg… this is how it melted so fast.

Larry Sheldon
June 10, 2010 9:22 pm

Is there a chance that “we” don’t understand the dynamics as well as “we” think “we” do?

stumpy
June 10, 2010 9:38 pm

or someone stole / smashed the tracker?

Joanie
June 10, 2010 10:09 pm

They should look for it on the local Craigslist! What morons. Thank our school system and self-absorbed parents.
I know… let’s dig a hole halfway down in an iceberg and bury food in the hole. Then strand a couple of these idiots on the berg with nothing but the food in the hole.
Yeah, we would have to rescue them, but at least they would have to admit that the berg didn’t melt in a week…

James Sexton
June 10, 2010 10:35 pm

Larry Sheldon says:
June 10, 2010 at 9:22 pm
“Is there a chance that “we” don’t understand the dynamics as well as “we” think “we” do?”
You’re right Larry, we don’t understand all the dynamics. Oddly, though, we don’t have to. Ice in water that is less than melting temps is plenty. Larry, the iceberg didn’t melt nor sink. I could be wrong. Perhaps the metal placed upon the ‘berg was a unique metal that had the density to force the iceberg underwater. Perhaps there was a great warm wind that moved the iceberg so far south the tropics “disappeared it” I really could happen!!

peterhodges
June 10, 2010 10:39 pm

i think i have to send this to all my warmist friends.
regarding the sculpture, it is (was) obviously a penis and vagina. that’s what all art by such impossibly vacuous artists amounts to. i bet he looks like fabio.
anyway, now it’s a bumper and boat railing 😉

Mooloo
June 10, 2010 11:04 pm

I am an artist who travelled [sic] many times through the Arctic and every year it becomes warmer and warmer.
Have these people not heard of confirmation bias?
There is no way one can say that it is getting “warmer and warmer” on the basis of travelling “many” times. Even the highest estimates of warming would be mostly hidden in natural variability.
When sceptics say that they don’t notice any warming, they are told that the measurements don’t lie and that we must discount what they think they notice. It should work both ways though – warmists should not be allowed to spout such nonsense, especially if they are not even residents.
BTW “travelled” is how the word is spelled, at least according to my dictionaries. (I think 1 “l” is an Americanism.

kadaka (KD Knoebel)
June 11, 2010 12:19 am

This is what I get for checking out the link to that post. I found the “Previous Posts” where I found this head-scratcher:

Tuesday, 4 May 2010
‘The angle between earth and the sun changed’
Since I travel through the Arctic, I ask people what’s their explanation for climate change. Some of the older hunters, who rely on the position of the sun for reasons of navigation, have an answer I never could explain: ‘The angle between earth and the sun changed’. I got this answer many times in all different places.
Last week I read an article from a Belgian journalist who interviewed a hunter in Gjoa Haven, Northern Canada, and he told her the same answer: ‘The angle of the sun changed’. I couldn’t resist and contacted a friend of mine who next week will receive his Ph.D. in astronomy. His response was overwhelming: he asked me if I had a brain collapse. The angle between earth and the sun didn’t change, and never will in the next thousands of years!
I can’t get it out of my mind. Did the composition of atmospheric gasses change so that the breaking angle changed? I still don’t have an explanation, but am sure that something changed. Who knows the answer?
posted by Ap Verheggen at 02:42

Gee, let me take a stab at this… Because based on the native language(s) of these people, from obviously-primitive cultures who never realized the great need to differentiate between weather and climate thus never developed separate words for each, to them you were asking why the weather changed?
Gee, they might even be so primitive they can’t comprehend why all the Arctic ice will be gone in the summer by 2013. Maybe Al Gore can stop on by and explain it to them, provided they have an airstrip suitable for landing his private jet.
That’s my possible answer. Anyone else want to take a crack at it? Any of the resident (C)AGW proponents want to explain the physics behind the changing atmospheric composition altering the perceived angle? 😉

June 11, 2010 12:22 am

Pst…..Pst…..Hey, Mister……..You wanna buy a GPS Tracker?

Merovign
June 11, 2010 12:29 am


What is the opposite of Occam’s Razor? LPE (Least Plausible Explanation) Theory?
Maybe it was a test of this fully operational battlestation, as Emperor Palpatine once sort of said.
Oy gevalt.

June 11, 2010 3:16 am

As an educator in the visual arts for many years, I know that many strange and obscure pieces of so-called ‘public art’ are built using grant monies given by gullible or visually impaired donors every year. It would be interesting to read the grant history for this particular piece, to find out what it was titled and the reasons for siting it on an iceberg, a siting which would eventually result in more scrap metal somewhere on the seabed. The hilarious descripton of the GPS device suddenly wandering off to a nearby settlement is a vivd demonstration of a totally unworldly and childlike mindset which still believes in magic.

Mark in London
June 11, 2010 3:35 am

I could do without the inarticulate comments and uneducated swearing in the third video – its dramatic, now shut-up and watch.

FTM
June 11, 2010 3:35 am

Seems to me, correct me if I’m wrong but it seems to me that most of this Anthropogenic Global Warming crap is the result of half an education effecting an intellect of perhaps average depth.
This is not to excuse the antics of the “researchers” that ran with the concept in order to stuff their own pockets and inflate their own prestiege.
Take an individual in a lofty position some plausable sounding nightmare scenario and the folks with an undergraduate degree in sociology that carried a “C” average ate it all up. Versus the person with a “C” average in physics that said, “Aw, bull$h1t!”

June 11, 2010 3:52 am

WoW,
These guys are so naive. Absolutely sure George DeBusk is right. Just looking at the GPS trajectory, with the increased speed, leaves no doubts.
I can’t stop laughing!
Ecotretas

Alex the skeptic
June 11, 2010 4:18 am

Tiff says:
June 10, 2010 at 4:36 pm
“It takes longer than a week for a pile of snow to melt in my front yard at the beginning of spring. I’m certain the Arctic is colder than that. Some people just have no common sense.”
Me>And whoever thinks that greenies have common sense, or any sense at all: I m sure many of you have see this video, when greenies were redily conviced to sign a petition to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide. Have some fun here:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80769350/

Jessie
June 11, 2010 4:34 am

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
June 11, 2010 at 12:19 am
Poosible explanations of perceptual or cognitive changes producing confirmation bias from silly [anthropological] questions:
1. Recognition of oneself, respect for others, comfort:- Crawling across family members to the entrance of an igloo is different from walking from a bedroom or living room down the steps of a timber house
2. Speed and distance: – Paddling the icy waters in a skin kayak differs from motoring in an aluminium dinghy with modern day harpoons and GPS, depth sounders
3. Speed, distance and comfort:- Walking in thick hand-made animal clothing or sledding with dogs differs from snow mobiles, dinghies, helicoptors and modern day harpoons and guns
4. Speed, comfort and leisure:- Variety of dried or tinned food, condiments, kitchen fuel ‘on tap’ with cookware, alcoholic beverages and an economy other than that of survival and superstition may have provided some an angle of reckoning
5. 24 hour light derived from diesel [energy] other than the sun or candles
6. Watches? TV? Contraception? Analogue to digital?

Rick K
June 11, 2010 4:43 am

The very first photo in this article looks… too perfect.

Jessie
June 11, 2010 4:46 am

‘The time has come’ the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax –
Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.’
http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html

AnonyMoose
June 11, 2010 4:47 am

At the very moment that something happened with the iceberg, the GPS system was taken into a fisherboat that continued fishing untill he finally went home. ( Ap’s version )

I see two options:
Wide-eyed credulity. He really thinks that a psychic fisherman knew the iceberg was about to explode, so the fisherman risked his life to rescue the GPS system in the last few seconds of the iceberg’s existence.
He’s lying. He knows a fisherman stole their GPS device, and maybe their sculptures.
Someone already asked an inconvenient question so we can see how that is handled.

P Wilson
June 11, 2010 5:57 am

The fact that it slipped off the iceberg shows its worse than we ever thought out there. If it had only melted, then .. well ..erm… it would have been better than what we actually got.
This is a new phenomonon in climate change, hitherto unknown – human emissions will cause us to slip off the land

JJB MKI
June 11, 2010 6:10 am

@Merovign:
Gore’s Mallet? Hanson’s Plunger? Mann’s Spoon?

Bruce Cobb
June 11, 2010 7:22 am

“The curvy, five-metre long sculptures depict the outline of an Inuit directing a dog sled team with a long whip, in homage to an Inuit way of life that is disappearing because of climate change.”
Right. I’ll bet the Inuit themselves snickered at that gem. Still, it behooves them to play the sympathy card, and push the “catastrophic climate change” gravy train as far as it will go. Money talks.

indy
June 11, 2010 7:51 am

As the cool(E)motion web site explains:
“Climate change = culture change.” An invasive idea.

Larry Sheldon
June 11, 2010 8:28 am

Mark in London says: “I could do without the inarticulate comments and uneducated swearing in the third video – its dramatic, now shut-up and watch.”
We are dealing with 4th-grade mentalities here–figure out how to attenuate the sound on your PC.
FTM says: “Seems to me, correct me if I’m wrong but it seems to me that most of this Anthropogenic Global Warming crap is the result of half an education effecting an intellect of perhaps average depth.”
I think a careful study of all the available information leads on to believe that the objective is a crippling of the world economy, concentration of all political power in a small number of people, or to make one or two people very rich.
Or some combination of those. Education is of no particular value anywhere any more, except for understanding your inner traumas. Or something.

Larry Sheldon
June 11, 2010 8:49 am

After posting irrefutable evidence that I am your worst fears in conspiracy theorists, I started my daily wander my list of “must read” blogs and stuff (I started here while reading the comments that were emailed to me overnight).
And lo! and behold! the following:

It’s been quiet here for over a month. This has been a busy time for me, I am now a college graduate (and looking for a job, know of any?). I intend to continue posting however, and when I saw a headline article on climate depot a while ago I dug a little deeper into the story.
This article from the Guardian talks about new UN biodiversity report. It’s worth reading. Here is an interesting quote:
The report will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run so that it factors in the value of the natural world. In future, it says, communities should be paid for conserving nature rather than using it; companies given stricter limits on what they can take from the environment and fined or taxed more to limit over-exploitation; subsidies worth more than US$1tn (£696.5bn) a year for industries like agriculture, fisheries, energy and transport reformed; and businesses and national governments asked to publish accounts for their use of natural and human capital alongside their financial results.
Shock! The UN is using protection of the natural world as a reason to make massive changes to the global economy? This sounds familiar, which I’m sure is why Morano posted it. Whenever the UN puts out a report that involves the world spending a lot of money, I get suspicious, so I decided to take a look at the interim report (the final isn’t going to be published until later this year). Here is the report.

Larry Sheldon
June 11, 2010 8:50 am

It is apparent that I don’t fully understand the block quote HTML. That came from http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/more-un-alarmism-exposed-by-climatequotes-blog/

Mike M
June 11, 2010 9:20 am

Mommy! Fishermen stole my GPS and now my iceberg is LOST!!!

Hyperthermania
June 11, 2010 10:42 am

WWF doorstep beggar just rang my bell, as soon as he introduced himself I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. I quickly tried to recover from what must have appeared to be a somewhat rude reaction, by politely saying “no thank you”. He asked if I would mind telling him why I wasn’t interested….. As soon as I said that I’ve seen how they spend the money on iceberg scupltures, his face dropped, as though this was becoming a bit of a recurring theme that he could do without. Aawww, I almost felt sorry for him.

M White
June 11, 2010 10:59 am

“Polar science diary”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10273566.stm
“Science writer and broadcaster Sue Nelson is at the world’s largest polar science conference, which is taking place in Oslo, Norway from 8-12 June. Experts have gathered to discuss everything polar – from penguins and sea ice to permafrost and Inuit communities.”

Peter Foster
June 11, 2010 11:19 am

When I was at Cape Hallett (Antarctica) in 1987 we were travelling on sea ice everyday and went past many icebergs that had been trapped at the entrance to the inlet by the winter ice. These were icebergs that had calved off from glaciers and were about 30 to 40 metres high so had about 180m + metres under the sea. In late November as the sea ice starting to melt around the bergs one of the bergs split and the bulbous bottom rotated up breaking though some 3 m of sea ice. What appears to happen is that wave action erodes the berg above sea level (like waves eroding a cliff face) creating a bigger and bigger bulge below the sea level. Eventually the upward forces on the bulge exploit any crack or weakness in the berg to break it up and allow the bulge to float.
Could be something like this happened here.

Tim Clark
June 11, 2010 11:33 am

Rick K says: June 11, 2010 at 4:43 am
The very first photo in this article looks… too perfect.

You’re right by golly. A close-up reveals what appears to be photoshopping!

June 11, 2010 11:42 am

Merovign says:
June 11, 2010 at 12:29 am
What is the opposite of Occam’s Razor?
The “Precautionary Principle” I should think…But “post-normal science” aka, “just making stuff up for effect” works as well.

Zeke the Sneak
June 11, 2010 12:30 pm

…standing in the sun, sweating because of the heat, while normally they can go for dogsledding untill [sic] June.
Artists’ impressions have always been so helpful to science! 🙂

kwik
June 11, 2010 4:19 pm

Could be the conning tower of a sub. Covered with Dark Ice.

June 11, 2010 5:21 pm

To-
Przemysław Pawełczyk —
Perhaps you might want to share any
information you have on
the mysterious “powerful ice stream”
mentioned in this article?
http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/06/10/9558839.html

TThor
June 11, 2010 6:37 pm

Does not seem very likely. Coming from acrtic land myself I know how long ice takes to melt. And a huge chunk of ice like this would take months even under summery conditions on continental Europe. Remember that what you see is 10% of the real size. I don’t think that temperature is not in the 20C despite the “standing in the sun, sweating because of the heat”. That has to be a “theatrical” exaggeration. I guess they experienced 10-15 dgrC, which by all means is “hoy” in that part of the world. The water temperature would be at 4-6 dgrC. 10% above water and 90% below, estimate a mass and it is just a matter of calculation to realize what energy it takes to melt the ice. Trust me, that piece of ice is not close by a mile to melt “in a matter of weeks”. Games are played and lies served to create attention.
What a dumb project anyway…

old44
June 12, 2010 3:15 am

Perhaps the ice is melting because of Al Gores’ 2,000,000°C heat two kilometres below the ocean.

Caleb
June 12, 2010 3:47 am

Magnify the picture of the sculpture to 400% and you’ll see the pixels (or texture) around the sculpture differs from the actual iceberg.
My conclusion is that we are being had, by clever young artists. They never actually lugged the sculpture to the frozen north and left it there. Nor did they track it with a GPS. That is much too much like Real Work.
I was a young artist once, and remember the lengths we would go to avoid getting a Real Job. The theory was that Real Work would stunt the development of our artistic talent. The very idea that people expected us to pay our bills showed how insensitive they were, and how they crushed our tender sensitivity. Therefore such cruel people were a sort of repressive Gestapo, simply because they asked us to work a Real Job and pay our bills. There was only one way to deal with such a cruel Gestapo, and that was to sneak around being dishonest, in our efforts to avoid getting a Real Job, for this proved we were a noble “underground.”
The problem was that we artists gradually morphed into being con-artists. It was hilarious and good fun at first, involving ridiculous escapades, and all sorts of silly teas with wealthy old ladies, however the sheer dishonesty eventually disgusted the more honest youths, and they gave up on so-called art and became productive members of society. Others used their developed skills of deceit to join Mad Ave, and write advertisements, such as the ones that promote “nutritious” chocolate sugar-bomb cereal, rotting the teeth of innocent children. Very few stuck with their art, even though it never paid.
Real art is based on and about Truth, while a con-artist is the opposite.
In the same way real science is based on the Truth. I fear many forms of “climate Science” are the opposite.

David Alan Evans
June 12, 2010 4:39 pm

That’s the tenth BSometer I’ve broken this year!
Cheers Anthony!
/sarc
DaveE.

Shevva
June 14, 2010 7:25 am

HELPFUL TIP – When reading this scare story it is best to sing, hum or if at work play in your head the Jaws music.
/End public service