Sharp eyed WUWT reader Rick K spotted this advertisement on Yahoo News:
I double checked what Rick K reported, and yes, they are running this ad. Either they just don’t care that they are running ads for “results” prior to any hard data being published or this is some sort of advertising scheduling slipup. Given how sloppy this laughable facade of a scientific expedition has been so far, publishing “live” biometric readings that were actually 30 days old, I’m guessing the latter.
Readers, feel free to witness this yourself, double check the experience. Here is the URL:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090422/sc_space/darkgulpingcouldexplainblackholes
You may have to refresh a few times since ads in the spot rotate. Here is the full sized advertisement:
The link simply goes to their main website, I’m betting though that there is some sort of “results” page that it was supposed to be linked to. And what sort of advice could some Arctic ice trekkers possibly give me about my business related to “global warming” anyway? The absurdity of such advertised advice is mind boggling.
This is what happens when you mix the following ingredients:
1) An insurance company (Catlin)
2) Environmental zealots willing to stage an expedition in exchange for money on the premise that “science will be done”(Pen Hadow et al)
3) Gullible celebrity sponsors (Charles, Prince of Wales)
4) Gullible real scientists, like Ron Kwok of NASA Jet Propulsion Lab who was lured into making statements like this one, proudly displayed on their web site:
Tell me, Dr. Kwok, just how will Catlin Arctic Survey tell me how soon “global warming will affect my business’?
A better question might be, “how soon will your association with these people ruin your career”? Do you already have the results of the data analysis ready to go with the advertising campaign?
Perhaps we should let Mr. Kwok know what is going on, because the sooner he distances himself from these people, the less chance that JPL will be tarnished further. As a US taxpayer I am concerned that our publicly funded science programs have anything to do with the Catlin farce. Fortunately, our scientists are required to keep their contact info in the public domain
The results of a Google Search tell us how to warn Mr. Kwok of this Catlin farce, perhaps he is unaware:
R. Kwok, is with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, 91109-. 8099, USA telephone: 818-354-5614, e-mail: ronald.kwok@jpl.nasa.gov
Perhaps their media relations people and director would be interested to know what Mr. Kwok has gotten himself and JPL connected with also.
I respect the work of the fine men and women at JPL, there is still time to step away before real damage is done. In the meantime, I weep for science.
National Geographic is reporting on the expedition and the single-year ice.
Apr. 22 article.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090422-arctic-ice-survey-video-ap.html
If someone is dumb enough to believe in scientific consensus, they will be gullible enough to invest their money with Catlin. This is Al Gore’s whole premise. Just another sideshow charlatan.
Sure looks like the sales folks gearing up to flog a little bit of insurance.
Whats with all the snippy?. Is it the same person trying to get attention by changing name?
REPLY: I’m growing tired of people just posting anything that comes to mind and is not at all related to the thread. To many threads turn it free-for-alls unrelated to the original subject. – Anthony
You can’t get the revenue coming in unless the ads are out there!
But something occurred to me. An insurance company makes money by selling “protection”. They are making a bet that the revenue stream that comes in from premiums will be greater than the revenue paid out.
So what if the whole world “believes” in Global Warming which will cause something like, say, sea level rise. Now lets say there is an insurance company willing to sell a policy to mitigate against the impact of “Global Warming”:. Lets pick “sea level rise” as one of the things they will insure you against. But lets also say that they know the globe is really cooling and they won’t ever actually have to pay a claim that could be linked to “Global Warming”. It would be in the interest for such a hypothetical firm to foster the “Global Warming” hype while they sell insurance against it knowing they will never actually have to pay off. The hype becomes a cash cow for them.
I don’t know if anyone is actually DOING this or not, but it would be a rather brilliant thing to do. I call it “boogieman insurance”.
Oops, just noticed in the comments that Pamela Gray’s mind sort of went down the same path as mine when I made my last comment. Hmm. GMTA I suppose.
I am sitting here in Scotland and wondering how NASA can get involved with this Catlin expedition considering the negative exposure it has received on this Web site. Having looked through the thread here I do not see a single US citizen having declared they have contacted R. Kwock or his supervisors as suggested.
I do hope that a good number have seen fit to express their misgivings about this unwarranted involvement. Unfortunately I cannot make contact from here not being a US citizen. I have tried several times to get a AGW sceptic letter published in the local broadsheet but they appear to be closed to anything other than the usual AGW alarmist propaganda. I have started to contact MPs in the hope that eventually some of them will see sense.
Make sure you click on the ad so they have to pay for advertising.
The Catlin website says: “Catlin is the title sponsor of the Catlin Arctic Survey, a scientific expedition to measure the thickness of the sea ice in the Arctic. This data will help determine when this ice may disappear.”
So… the intrepid “scientists” on the survey are actually in the pocket of “Big Insurance.”
Tsk, tsk.
This is cute – if you go to Catlin’s home site at http://www.catlin.co.uk/ they have a section on the left about the survey which says:
The “Find out more” link is <a href=”www.catlinarcticsurvey.com” target=”_blank”>Find out more</a> which has a typo, it should have at least a leading ‘/’ – as written it goes to http://www.catlin.co.uk/www.catlinarcticsurvey.com which would be an internal page.
You’d think someone at Catlin would be interested enough in the survey to find and report the busted link. Of course, “conducting scientific experiments” is also wrong – they’re just collecting data. Well, maybe experimenting with the effects of cold on human bodies and electronics.
For the benefit of the Catlin team, here is a handy formula for estimating your distance d in km to the pole from your latitude L expressed as a decimal:
d = (90-L)*1000/9
I suspect that Catlins involvement with this organisation makes their sponsorshgip of Pen Hadows expedition a good selling point for their services. It would be interesting to see if anyone from Catlin was on WG3 of the last IPCC assessment.
http://www.climate-insurance.org/upload/pdf/20081127_ClimateWise_News_Release.pdf
Tonyb
John in NZ presented us with this;
Monday’s location
Present location 84°46′16.4″N
127° 36’ 55” W
Friday’s location
Present location 84°52′55″N
125° 54’ 42” W
If true, the location change of 1 degree 42 minutes W in this short time indicates what? That the ice is moving East?
In relation to this topic and others I can’t state how extensive the whoppers have become over at RC.
The parade of comical comments in their latest thread breaks all records.
It is stunning.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/yet-more-aerosols-comment-on-shindell-and-faluvegi/
All of which generates from the belief that none of you or the science discussed here exists.
Ron Kwok is a crock of ……. you fill in the blank….
I recycled the page 53 times for the advertisement appeared. Yes, it’s there. No doubt, Catlin’s Arctic Ice Survey is pure propaganda.
I posted this on 4/16 and thought that it was relevant to this thread.
——-
What a farce this has been. One cannot discredit the mission of trekking to the north pole, however, the motive in which this mission has been undertaken calls into question the integrity of the data being collected.
We already have numerous quotes from Pen Hadow stating that what he hopes one of the outcomes of this mission is to secure a climate accord in Copenhagen.
So, in reality, this is a propagandist mission backed by politically motivated environmental ideologues. Akin to Mr.Hansen being put in charge of reporting global temperatures while calling for civil disobedience. Yes, we can all trust the information coming from those sources to be objective.
For example, this piece was written by Mike Hansen, president of Catlin Canada.
Ah, yes, WWF international, a good independent science organization…
But this goes even further as one peers into the juicy details. Obviously, judging by his comments, Pen Hadow has a vested interest in finding and submitting data suitable for passing the Copenhagen Accord, the realm of public discourse. But there’s another angle to this, the private sector…
As some of you may not know, Catlin is a insurer/reinsurer. I’m sure plans are in the works to use this mission to base insurance rates paid by those in areas that may be vulnerable to climate change. So not only is this propaganda, it’s also a ploy.
Continued from Mike Hansen:
Is this not a conflict of interest? Sending environmental activists to gather climatic data for an insurance company trying to asses rates due to impact from climate change? Ask anyone living in Florida or along the US Atlantic Coast how their insurance policies have adjusted their rates due to the ‘threat of more hurricanes due to climate change’.
Adolfo Giurfa (08:12:15) :
Low frequency sound and health problems:
So this is what is affecting the Catlin marketing department. The sound from all those computer fans….. I would suggest a long vacation in the Arctic on a rowboat.
It is, however, gratifying that a survey of one year ice is producing one year thickness results. Can you say “biased”? All together now…
If the media doesn’t start exposing the deceptive, used car salesman tactics like those employed by Catlin, et al soon then I’m afraid that stunts like this are only goin to continue to grow in number. The cap&trade and/or cabon tax are only side bars IMHO. These are strategies to entrench global economies into the fallacy. Their agenda is much more grandiose (see ‘The Green Agenda’ website) it seems.
Next they’ll be teling us that the increased ice at Antartica is due to the ozone…oh, wait they already used that. Or that the rivers are drying…nope, used that one too. Well, you get the idea. This ‘make it up as you go’ science is sickening.
As more observational evidence stacks up against them the more they will have to stoke their propaganda engine, which must be so large now as to belch out more Co2 than all the oceans combined.
My prediction is that we will see more stunts like the Catlin survey unless the media picks up the ball and runs with it. This needs a firm slap-down on a global scale. Albeit, it would still only be one more nail in a coffin that now contains a preponderance of nails, how many is it going to take?
The catlin ad is unforgiveable, as is the comment by Kwok. Generally speaking this would be great if we could only get it the media to expose it!
“How soon will global warming affect your business?”
I don’t know about your business, but I moved all my manufacturing to China several years ago. The Religion of Global Warming’s first commandment is:
1) Persecute the productive for they create wealth.
The Chinese ‘communists’ see things a little differently:
1) Celebrate the productive for they create wealth.
what worries me is the automatic predisposition to a declining trend (Dr. Kwok) he states that with the new data set we can project its declining trend. These people already have the outcome figured out and will mold any data they get to make it to that outcome. there is no convincing them.
John H (10:00:22) :
Realclimate lives in their own little inbred world: click. They are insignificant and unimportant.
To get to the truth in science requires debate from both sides of the question. Realclimate censors those who do not agree with Gavin Schmidt. That makes RC a propaganda site — which is the reason they failed so miserably in the “Best Science” site awards. Thinking people don’t want to be preached to. They want honest debate.
I noted one thing on the arctic ice today. If you check the region west of the island Novaja Zemlja that is north of russia mainland there is an intersting change in ice are there.
Check the ice in that area for 22nd April the years 2006-2008.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=04&fd=22&fy=2006&sm=04&sd=22&sy=2007
It looks like warm currents has penetrated the arctic ice keeping it ice free for 3 years. This has happened in the past 30 years also, but mostly only for a single year. By looking on the ice area near Novaja Zemlja this year it looks that the current is weakening or collapsing this year again causing the ice cover to grow in that region.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=04&fd=22&fy=2006&sm=04&sd=22&sy=2009
Hmm ohh btw by looking on this link it looks like an ice free north pole allready came true =).
You can just check the main page also for the ice coverage.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Novaja Zemlja is completley surronded with ice next winter again just as it has been most of the time in the past 30 years.
There is also this possible scenario:
An insurance company is hit by huge claims because of a major tropical storm in a very built-up area. In order to recover money they paid out, the use “Global Warming” as a means to sue a government or industry for CO2 emissions so they can recover the funds they paid out. And since “everyone knows it’s true”, they get the money.
I just really don’t like the idea of an insurance company fooling around in this area as there is too much opportunity for mischief.
kent (10:00:14) :
John in NZ presented us with this;
Monday’s location
Present location 84°46′16.4″N
127° 36’ 55” W
Friday’s location
Present location 84°52′55″N
125° 54’ 42” W
If true, the location change of 1 degree 42 minutes W in this short time indicates what? That the ice is moving East?
Yes as it has been for most of this year, that’s how the multiyear ice exits via the Fram Strait.
Here’s a typical example:
http://s302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/?action=view¤t=Drift.png
This other group on the ice mentions how it’s pushing them away from the pole, very clear on their progress map.
http://thethreepoles.com/blog/