Guest post by Steven Goddard
From the Catlin web site today – a first hand description of what motivates the explorers, and what they are learning about Arctic warming.
Thursday, 02 Apr 2009 10:04
“Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”
Thousands of men (and three women) replied to Ernest Shackleton’s advertisement, which (the story goes) was placed in a London newspaper in 1913, ahead of his Antarctic expedition aboard the Endurance.
Polar expeditions have moved on in terms of technology and equipment, but the motivation and commitment to research that fuelled Shackleton and his team seem not to have altered.
“There’s a cocktail of motivational forces at work”, commented Expedition Leader Pen Hadow from the team tent, huddled over the sat-phone at the end of another long, cold day. “You can sum it up by saying we feel a commitment to represent the Arctic Ocean as an eco-system and the three of us have the skills that allow us to gather the information that will enable people to be better informed about the state of the region and its future“.
But given temperatures of -40 degrees centigrade with a wind chill factor in the minus seventies, does the motivation that fuelled the team from their warm UK base in the planning stages, diminish?
Photographer Martin Hartley who’s been crawling into a frozen sleeping back that becomes a wet sponge overnight for longer than he cares to remember, remarks “I’m getting extremely frustrated with the stupidly cold temperatures that are making my life a misery, day after day. All I can think about, 24 hours a day, is getting a new sleeping bag on the next re-supply”.
But Hadow says he’s speaking for all three team members, himself, Hartley and Ann Daniels, when he concludes, “We’ve absolutely no regrets about being here. Given that it’s so awful, our commitment to the research and our motivation is in fact what keeps us going”.
With a team currently preparing the next re-supply, Hartley should get his new sleeping bag within the next few days.
What I find interesting is the use of the word “But” and “stupidly cold” highlighted in red above. It appears that what they are experiencing on the ground is not what they were expecting to find.
“The team covered a staggering 16.7km today, the biggest distance achieved to date. By covering so much distance since the last resupply (134.5km in 13 days), the team have observed the ice they are crossing is getting significantly older and thicker“
So it is extremely cold and they are finding old, thick ice. That does not sound like the sub-tropical Arctic as portrayed by The Guardian.
Flashback to February, 2008 OSLO, Feb. 29 (Xinhua) — The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday.
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Incredible… I am in agreement with comments from prior threads on this topic. These folks need to be brought home before they become meatcicles.
But so far not any contemplation of the expedition members about maybe some of the global warming prediction about the artic ice are not correct!?
I wonder how Shackleton’s crew would have fared if they had satellite phones and a regular “re-supply” of sleeping bags and the like. 😉 Don’t get me wrong – I’m not questioning the Catlin team’s determination or level of commitment. It’s their “cause” that is silly. But, reality tends to boot idealist’s arses in the end.
Perhaps there will be a bit of real science contributed by this expedition. I cannot really say.
However, the greater purpose is obviously to contribute to the advocacy and awareness efforts that now make up a majority of the “climate science” community’s activities.
I fail to see how their measurements will have any use whatsoever.
It doesn’t appear they are going over a previously measured pattern.
They are randomly measuring?
Will they be compared to prior measurements?
I don’t get it.
What is the point?
To discover ice and that it’s really cold up there?
It almost appears that these fools are trying to become martyrs for the cause of AGW alarmism. Death takes all the sport out of it.
They must’ve seen the starving polar bears promoted by the AGW camp up there. Why is that I can’t find any post about this so-called ‘fact’ on their blog? Strange, very strange…
Mr. Goddard,
I would say you have a very good point here. Spending months on floating ice, in darkness and continuous blizzard conditions with temperatures reaching 40 below zero can be quite disappointing for someone who wants to see catastrophic melting. They have to face these extreme conditions day by day. Maybe after some frostbite, they will thinkt twice about warming is a disaster or not. But what had they expected in the end of Arctic winter? And about their ice thickness measurements, the results will be completely meaningless from a scientific point of view. Firstly, they can’t guarantee an acceptable coverage for their observations. Secondly, at the moment we don’t have any reliable data about average sea ice thickness in the past, so we can’t compare the newly gathered information to anything. However, I can give much more respect to the Catlin Explorers than to Mr. Pugh and his alarmist crew.
I have to believe that real motivation of these people are quite different from the one represented in the MSM. To prove the shrinkage of the polar ice at this time of the year seems to be nonsense, it must be something else. “Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. […]Honour and recognition in case of success.”
If you do not mind me saying, that is a rather poor picture of the North Pole.
Not the North Pole that I want to go to.
Oh no!
To me the North Pole should be friendly and have lots and lots of flags were we can hold hands and where we can all put on a yellow Parkas, which we can keep.
http://www.nathab.com/destinations/index.aspx?pageID=7&tripID=153&action=trip_overview
Now that is the North Pole.
None of this silliness about pulling sledges and getting frost bite.
Nature is the biggest denier of all…
The NSIDC and Walt Meier never answered when challenged about the 30 y average versus their ad-hoc 20 y average. Meier also did not explain why the Arctic sea ice has started to decline specifically from the 1970s, coincidental with the well documented climatic change in atmospheric circulation patterns (Leroux, Favre & Gershunov, Pommier).
Fortunately the IJIS website provides more objective data (graphs from 2002) and anyone can see that maximum Arctic sea ice doesn’t always translate with less melt. People like Serreze are just pushing their agenda while Meier looks like he is trying to keep his job with such an extremist breathing on his neck.
As for this Catlin expedition, their media circus is now turning against them and this is justice.
Eve (09:05:56) :
From the letter, it is obvious that this big bureaucratic machine won’t move position until the next report. Let’s just hope real science will be incorporated in the next report.
From the NSIDC press release:
In other words, the second highest in the last six years – and a 10% increase over the last three years.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
Surprising that NSIDC didn’t mention those minor details.
I am pretty sure the Catlin team feel they are extreme sportsmen rather than “explorers” or “scientists”. They know perfectly well that any science (whatever it amounts to) could have been done more safely and comfortably if science was the purpose. But it’s not and never was. The test of endurance and flirting with danger is the whole point of their approach. People don’t run marathons to get from A to B; same deal. The “science” is a fig-leaf.
Eve, the reply you got from Environment Canada seems to be in large part a form letter. We can be certain that Brian T. Gray, Ph.D. Assistant Deputy Minister is himself a devoted AGW believer. What I know as a Canadian is that PM Stephen Harper used to be a non-believer, but is now running scared of canadian and world opinion on this subject. Remember that publicly displaying skepticism about AGW cost ex-environment minister Rona Ambrose her job.
My problem with the value of detailed measurements of ice thickness, is that the state of the ice is the product of a chaotic sequence of vents over many years, particularly due to the effects of wind.
Since the ability to model wind more than a few days in advance is essentially nil, I don’t see how the detailed measurements they are taking can be particularly useful in modeling the future behaviour of the ice.
It is similar to equity modeling programs which are based on observed data from the past. They generally are completely useless at forecasting the future.
Sounds like a good blog topic………
FWIW, according to the ASMR-E Sea Ice Extent graph, 2009 appears to have had the earliest maximum ice extent on record. Horrors!
–Mark
When I was younger, I did a number of solo winter backpacking adventures in extreme cold and very deep snow in the mountains. They were all very high risk and I don’t regret having done them.
I completely respect the crew for their daring exploits, and hope they are as lucky as I was in returning unharmed. Imagine the stories they will tell their grandchildren! Kids love adventure stories.
That reminds me of pretty much all the episodes of Star Trek where the “scientists” would always die in the process of showing they were right on their “science”.
Do we have a case of Star Trek Red Uniform Syndrome? (i.e. you could always tell which one would die, because they were always new, and had a red uniform)
Gee Grandma how did Grandpa die? He died on the Arctic Ice cap, he froze to death. Why was Grandpa there? He was measuring how thick the ice was there. Why was he doing that? He was studing global warming. Grandma whats “global warming”?
Seriously these guys need to leave before they do become a footnote.
An insufferable quote from the article:
“Given that it’s so awful, our commitment to the research…”
These people wouldn’t know ‘research’ if it bit them on the nose.
There was yet another example of alarmism over the last month whose predictions failed to materialise. Conficker was supposed to hijack millions of computers on April the 1st and start swallowing up loads of bandwidth and messing around with computers. Nothing noticeable happened.
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=display&thread=346&page=28#15179
ron?
Team’s equipment designer expects the ice to be gone in a few years. Did he design equipment which can handle thick old ice?
D Caldwell (09:47:25) :
OT, but your name is a famous one amongst British mariners of WW2.
http://www.uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/4292.html
The CO when the ship was disabled in the Atlantic was Lt.Cdr. Eric Morrison Mackay, DSC, RD, RNR who went on to command HMS Braithwaite.
http://www.uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/5647.html
The full stories of both ships were recorded in the book “Yankee RN” by an American who joined the Royal Navy before Pearl Harbour.
http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/lbw/043919.shtml
Regards,
Perry
Antonio San (10:19:05) :
In response to my question some time ago to NSIDC:
“Has anyone published a narrative explanation of the entire sea ice satellite record from 1978 onwards, and what has caused the year to year variations, presumably a combination of oceanographic and meteorological factors.”
I received the reply:
“The following paragraphs were provided by NSIDC’s sea ice scientist, Walt Meier. I thought this might be helpful to you. In general sense, no, no one has published a detailed narrative explanation of the entire sea ice record from 1978 onwards. That’s because scientifically, it’s not particularly interesting. Short term year-to-year variations are mostly influenced by seasonal weather variation – warm summers tend yield lower extents, etc. – that are pretty clear and don’t yield any particular insights. Where the interesting things happen is most notably the long-term changes, about which there have been many many papers written.”
I still think that a description of the year to year variations is a worthwhile project. Anyone got a graduate student looking for a project?
tallbloke (08:52:15) wrote:
The thing is, in weather as cold as they’re experiencing, there is no reason to climb into a wet sleeping bag, or clothes, for that matter. Lay the bag out, fully open. All the water will freeze. Then you beat the ice out as you would whisk a rug to remove the dirt. Been there, done that, don’t plan to do it again.
cheers,
gary