Guest post by Steven Goddard
In Woody Allen’s classic 1977 movie “Annie Hall,” there is a wonderful scene in a theatre queue where he is having a heated argument with a Columbia University academic about the meaning of Marshall McLuhan’s writing. His opponent is getting quite agitated, so Woody Allen pulls Marshall McLuhan out from behind a sign to prove his point.
Man in Theatre Line: Oh, really? Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media and Culture.” So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Woody Allen: Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me…
[pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]
Woddy Allen: come over here for a second… tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Woody Allen: Boy, if life were only like this!
Sometimes life is like that. Pen Hadow has been reported to be telling the press some interesting things this week :
and from the Catlin Web Site :
Fortunately, there is an expert standing behind the sign. The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research has just completed a much more expansive investigation of Arctic Ice, and yes they did actually make it to the North Pole – the old fashioned way – in an airplane. Below is the original German text and the Google translation :
At the North Pole ice sheet is thicker than expectedDas Forschungsflugzeug “Polar 5” beendet am Dienstag in Kanada seine jüngste Arktis-Expedition.The research aircraft Polar 5 “ended on Tuesday in Canada’s recent Arctic expedition.Bei dem Flug haben Forscher die aktuelle Eisstärke am Nordpol gemessen, und zwar in Gebieten, die nie zuvor überflogen worden sind.During the flight, researchers have Eisstärke the current measured at the North Pole, and in areas that have never before been overflown.Das Ergebnis ist überraschend.The result is surprising.Das Meer-Eis in den untersuchten Gebieten ist offenbar dicker, als die Wissenschaftler vermutet hatten.The sea-ice in the surveyed areas is apparently thicker than scientists had suspected.Normalerweise sei neu gebildetes Eis nach zwei Jahren gut zwei Meter dick.Normally, ice is newly formed after two years, over two meters thick.“Hier wurden aber Eisdicken von bis zu vier Metern gemessen”, sagte ein Sprecher des Bremerhavener Alfred-Wegener-Instituts für Polar- und Meeresforschung.“Here were Eisdicken up to four meters,” said a spokesman of Bremerhaven’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.Für die Wissenschaftler steht dieses Ergebnis derzeit noch im Widerspruch zur Erwärmung des Meerwassers.For scientists, this result is still in contradiction to the warming of the seawater.
And from the Wegener Institute web site :
Another focal point of the campaign were large-scale measurements of ice thickness in the inner Arctic, which were conducted in close collaboration of the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the University of Alberta. An ice-thickness sensor, the so-called EM-Bird, was put into operation under a plane for the first time ever. To conduct the measurements, Polar 5 dragged the sensor which was attached to a steel cable of eighty metres length in a height of twenty metres over the ice cover. Multiple flights northwards from various stations showed an ice thickness between 2.5 (two years old ice in the vicinity of the North Pole) and 4 metres (perennial ice in Canadian offshore regions). All in all, the ice was somewhat thicker than during the last years in the same regions, which leads to the conclusion that Arctic ice cover recovers temporarily. The researchers found the thickest ice with a thickness of 15 metres along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island.
So the question is – why does the suspect Catlin data get unlimited press coverage, while the comprehensive data of the Wegener Institute gets buried by the press? Is it possible that some members of the press have an agenda?
Woody Allen made some great movies in the 1970s, while the press was up to it’s usual antics – as reported by The Business and Media Institute.
The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend.Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974.“It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude,” the article continued.That article also emphasized Bryson’s extreme doomsday predictions. “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest.”Bryson warned, “It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” However, the world population increased by 2.5 billion since that warning.Fortune had been emphasizing the cooling trend for 20 years. In 1954, it picked up on the idea of a frozen earth and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.”The story debunked the notion that “despite all you may have read, heard, or imagined, it’s been growing cooler – not warmer – since the Thirties.”The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming.“The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.”If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.”There were more warnings. The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. about global cooling worries. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said.If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age, Mitchell continued.Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”A city in a snow globe illustrated that March 1, 1975, article, while the cover showed an ice age obliterating an unfortunate city.In 1975, cooling went from “one of the most important problems” to a first-place tie for “death and misery.” “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” said Nigel Calder, a former editor of “New Scientist.”He claimed it was not his disposition to be a “doomsday man.” His analysis came from “the facts [that] have emerged” about past ice ages, according to the July/August International Wildlife Magazine.The idea of a worldwide deep freeze snowballed.Naturally, science fiction authors embraced the topic. Writer John Christopher delivered a book on the coming ice age in 1962 called “The World in Winter.”In Christopher’s novel, England and other “rich countries of the north” broke down under the icy onslaught.“The machines stopped, the land was dead and the people went south,” he explained.James Follett took a slightly different tack. His book “Ice” was about “a rogue Antarctic iceberg” that “becomes a major world menace.” Follett in his book conceived “the teeth chattering possibility of how Nature can punish those who foolishly believe they have mastered her.”
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Ya know, I think “The Day After Tomorrow” was a pretty good, low budget Sci-Fi yarn about AGW. Some good action, actors (ahem, characters) you could care about, and enough interesting science bits to grab ya. Kudos to the team that made that yarn.
And that’s the key. It was a good story; I think told well as long as there was “suspension of disbelief”. The problem is that many came away from that flick with the same thoughts as Gore’s Inconvienent Truth. and failed to kick in “Real World”. One was a yarn, the other propaganda. Interesting how the same set, (the breakup of the ice shelf) appeared in both…
Mike
If the Catlin program shows up on ScienceDaily.com, we’ll know it has reached the deepest depths of mediocrity 🙂
The Catlin Expedition planned to use the radar sled to map the ice thickness and drilled holes to calibrate the radar. A very standard geophysical practice. The radar broke. Not the least bit surprising as the Canadian winter has a habit of harshly testing new geophysical instruments. As a result all the Catlin Expedition produced was a small excel spread sheet of random drill holes primarily confined to thin first year ice.
The Wegener Institute used an electromagnetic sensor in a towed “bird”. A technique used to survey large areas quickly and efficiently for at least 40 years. I don’t know the sample rate but I suspect that it was several times a second. This will result in a continuous profile over thousands of precisely defined kilometers of survey. In minutes the towed EM system would have given more useable data than Catlin produced in over two months.
It will be interesting to compare the two sets of results with satellite data.
EM birds are usually towed by helicopters except in flat terraine such as inland Australia and the arctic where fixed wing aircraft are more efficient. (I suspect the EM bird used on the Wegener Polar 5 flight was first tested using a helicopter.) I understand the current EM bird was first tested with the Polar 5 aircraft over the Canadian Shield.
(Towed magnetometers date from the 1940’s, the targets were submarines).
PS EM birds shatter when they hit the ice!
Bill
Having spent time drilling holes in ice on Alaskan rivers to check ice thickness for winter truck road crossings I can assure you that without a power auger (which i assume the Catlin expedition didn’t have) , drilling holes through ice is a lot of hard work. I have my doubts as to how many holes in the ice the Catlin expedition actually drilled since they were pulling sleds, making and breaking camp and just trying to survive.
Even on river ice we would drill through the smooth parts of the ice as that was the thinnest , whereas jumbled up ice was nearly always thicker. Since they were traveling over paths of smoother ice, I doubt the sampling really was a true representation of the overall ice thickness. I would bet the flyover measurements were a better representation of ice thickness.
Never before have so few gone so far to prove so little.
I have been reading Ian Plimer’s new book. He claims the descent to the LIA was just 23 years. I find that pretty scary but maybe worth it to stop the carping about AGW.
Ron de Haan (19:08:27) :
The more alarmist reports the Catlin Team sends into the world about the Arctic, the bigger the scam.
The entire skeptic blog community is reporting on their findings and all they achieve is that they turn themselves into a bunch of cheating nitwits.
I agree with Ron, – the Catlin Team are rapidly building a Petard on which to Hoist themselves.
… make that an Australian Barking Cat …
The comment was:
—————
bill (15:31:33) :
1 Alfred Wegener have published no data as far as I know
2 It is inaccurate from their own poster:
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/2171/hembird.jpg
when towed behind a helicopter frequently 10% adrift with one 30% failure
what happens when towed behind a plane?
Which could be more accurate a man with drill and tape or a piece of electronics trying to determine the snow-ice interface. I would suggest the former.
—————
[1] So, because you haven’t seen a Wegener report, one doesn’t exist?
.
[2] One should expect almost zero drift from an aircraft owing to the greater flight stability of that platform. Helicopters are notoriously unstable in flight owing to the vibrations caused by the blades and the less than optimal aerodynamics of the hull. The downward pulsation of air caused by the blades would indeed have significant affect upon a towed aerial object in its wake.
.
[3] If it is your supposition that a device which —having been tested and =proven= to be highly accurate to a few thousandths of an inch/meter— cannot produce a MORE accurate measurement than a human with a tape measure, itself having no smaller subdivision of measurement than a tenth of an inch, then I will be asking that you produce sufficient evidence of that with proofs and double-blind peer reviewed results.
.
Additionally, the mere act of disturbing the surface of the ice presents the problem of: How much surface ice did the measurer remove to make his measurement?
.
Further what of the punch-through and breakage of the undersurface of the ice happened which would directly affected the manual measurements?
.
The quintessence of your remarks is tantamount to proclaiming that a simple hourglass exceeds the accuracy of a cesium beam time-frequency standard.
.
Further to that is the fact that U.S. Submarines used upwards looking sonar to determine the thickness of ice at the pole in order to determine places were they might surface, i.e., breach the ice.
.
One of the MOST NOTABLE aspects of those sonographs was that the underside of the sea ice had undulating features such as present a quandary: what is the average thickness of the ice overall?
.
A person standing on the upper surface and making measurements CANNOT determine whether he is standing over a thinner or thicker part of that ice. Therefore he cannot remark with ~any~ degree of certitude regarding his findings, and instead may =only= declare findings the AT THOSE SPECIFIC LOCATIONS he made his measurements — AND NO PLACE ELSE.
.
Declaring otherwise would be not unlike three blind men describing an elephant!
.
Ergo, the essence of your remarks gives one to question the motives for your post.
crosspatch (18:25:05) :
1933 didn’t get as warm as the MWP. 1998 didn’t get as warm as 1933. Overall we have been in a long, slow cooling trend for a very long time. The past 2000 years or so seems to have steepened the cooling trend.
This can be seen clearly in the plot, from wikipedia ice core:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png/400px-Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
The compressed holocene shows the slide to cool.
Hmmm, let me see, 100 days of floating ice vs. 100 hrs. of floating ice. Which of these scenario’s do you suppose is going to be more accurate?
To think that walking the Arctic for 100 days (actually, only 73) and only making it half way to the pole, is a more accurate method of data gathering than flying, covering hundreds of miles per day, 1000’s of times the coverage, in a fraction of the time. WOW! All I can say here Bill is WOW! Perhaps you should sign up for next years Catlin mission?
“Stupid is as stupid does” .. “Your wealth of ignorance is astounding”
The Catlin expedition lost all credibility early on when their real-time “telemetry” was exposed as fraudulent. What is interesting in all this is the conscious manipulation of public opinion via what a public relations specialist would call “hooks”. In politically charged situations, “truth” is almost irreverent. Since the audience is predisposed to believe that which fits its “preconception” all one has to provide in order to maintain a following is to provide a logical “hook” on which that following can hang their hats when contrary facts are presented.
When the satellite data clearly showed the Arctic sea ice “extent” was expanding, the “warming” crowd countered with, “Yes, but the thickness is diminishing.” That hook appeared relatively safe, since hard data on thickness was non-existant, save a few easily challenged U.S. Army buoy readings.
Then, ironically, the Catlin crew (warmers all) set out to drag an experimental radar skid across the ice to the north pole to “prove” the ice was thinning. When that skid failed, the crew resorted to hand drilling. Simultaneously, another expedition flew a radar platform over the Arctic ice and apparently found the ice thicker than expected. Now, in a really exquisite example of tortured logic, I see a reader presenting yet another “hook” by claiming the Catlin “hand job”, performed under conditions the Catlin crew regularly described in their daily reports as horrendous, is superior to the other expedition’s radar data. Must I remind that contributor that the Catlin expedition’s first choice was “radar data” and would have happi;y settled for that had their skid not failed?
What seems lost to both sides of the argument is that neither the Catlin crew’s suspect hand-measurements not the other expedition’s radar data prove anything at all because, as near as I can determine, a baseline of previous ice thickness had never been established. Thicker than what? Thinner than what? look at the answers you read: “Thicker or thinner than expected.”
I’m sorry, but when I received my training in the scientific method, “expected” was not a quantifiable scientific reference point from which to depart.
bill (18:00:41) :
J.Hansford (17:24:25) :
Bill…. Wegener’s team have tested the equipment by drilling holes to compare with electronic readings….. Any Arctic ice will do.
Did you see my post above with the grapic from their poster:
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/2171/hembird.jpg
Measurements seem to be out by 1 metre in 3 in a 600metre run.,
What the $%^& are you talking about?
Better go to bed if you cannot read a plot you provide. The error in thickness is at most 20cm with a systematic bias towards thinness
Gordon Ford (19:59:22) :
The Catlin Expedition planned to use the radar sled to map the ice thickness and drilled holes to calibrate the radar. A very standard geophysical practice. The radar broke. Not the least bit surprising as the Canadian winter has a habit of harshly testing new geophysical instruments. As a result all the Catlin Expedition produced was a small excel spread sheet of random drill holes primarily confined to thin first year ice.
The Wegener Institute used an electromagnetic sensor in a towed “bird”. A technique used to survey large areas quickly and efficiently for at least 40 years. I don’t know the sample rate but I suspect that it was several times a second. This will result in a continuous profile over thousands of precisely defined kilometers of survey. In minutes the towed EM system would have given more useable data than Catlin produced in over two months.
——————-
May I suggest a technical compromise. Tow Mr. Pen from a line behind an airplane, crossing and re-crossing the ice in a grid pattern to estimate a representative sample of ice thickness.
It will certainly be more accurate and less biased than his false claims of results from his hand-run ice auger. I recall that one of the wattsup bloggers accurately predicted the conclusions of Pen’s “research” at the outset of the expedition – so Pen and his colleagues did not have to suffer through all that cold after all – his results were already known!
In the Woody Allen movie Zelig, the family had lived over a bowling alley. Zelig’s parents argued so much that the bowling alley complained about the noise.
From Catlin’s site:
“The ice thickness measurements that Pen and the team have been able to phone in imply that they are travelling over predominantly thick first-year ice.”
Predominately THICK first year ice??? I thought they told the press it was thin??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
As Anthony has already demonstrated, their route was PLANNED to be on first year ice!! THICK first year ice complicated their plans!!
This finding actually compares well with the radar flight by the Wegner Institute which also found thicker than average first and second year ice.
Given that the Catlin Team were constantly referring to the fact that their GPS wasn’t working and that they were navigating by “wind and sun” all other arguments aside, their “experiment” is not repeatable because if what they were saying is true, they have no way to verify the exact geographic location of their holes (not even within 20 meter accuracy).
Being able to measure the ice at a specific geographic location is the key.
The Catlin fraud is so obvious and yet nobody in the MSM sees the naked emperor do they?
The Arctic ice consists of some fifteen million square kilometres and the Catlin crew drilled no more than a couple of hundred holes on a route that deliberately took them over first year ice.
The crew said they would find thin ice before they embarked and they certainly found what they were looking for didnt they?
The findings were ready for publication before they set foot on the ice, this is anti science at its worst and typical of the dishonest nature of the AGW/MMCC narrative, show business science like Bart Simpson putting a hamster in a plane for his science project.
Anthony – I know this is OT but have you noticed that http://www.climate4you.com/ has started a Urban heat Island effect section where they are doing the same as you’ve done, attached a thermometer to a car and driven from one side of a city to the other – they then print out the result.
also worth checking out is their sea level data from 1992. The site just gets better every day.
REPLY: Good to see that. Replication is the sincerest form of flattery. – Anthony
Just a theory here, why did the expedition veer south east during the latter part of the trip?
Could it be that the team found thicker ice than expected on their original route so took the decision to depart from the direct route to find the thinner ice to the south they so desperately needed to find?
I find it difficult to believe that the radar unit failed, its just too convenient, the radar unit cant lie, it reports exactly what it finds where hand drilling can be highly selective, you look for surface clues and drill where it looks thinnest, the opportunity for fraud is higher when manual drilling is used.
I hope someone traces the actual route of the Catlin crew and compares it to sattelite images of where the multiyear ice was at the time of the Catlin route diversion.
My theory of course is not proof of anything and nobody is going to diagnose the radar fault and nobody can prove that the route diversion was anything other than what they claim it was, but it does smell rather fishy to me.
James Allison (16:45:24) : The way I see it is that during the 60’s and early 70’s there wasn’t sufficient MSM coverage of alarmist global cooling to create any mass hysteria.
No need to speculate. I lived through it (as did several other regulars here). I clearly remember it being front and center of several publications and fairly widely discussed (not as much as AGW today, but quite enough for awareness). What happened? Despite some nervous hand wringers, most folks just took the position:
“Oh, that’s interesting, I guess. We can’t change it. It’s a long way off? Guess we’ll just cope with whatever happens when it happens.”
There were also a fair number of folks who were rightly skeptical that anyone could predict anything with accuracy into the future (and they tended to react with “Oh, that’s interesting; and probably nonsense…” )
And there were a fair number of technical folks who generally had the attitude “Ok, we can deal with cold. Don’t like it, but we’ve dealt with cold before in Alaska (or Norway or…)”
Flash forward and alarmist global warming is splattered all over both the internet and MSM. But what Hadlow and his alarmist colleagues don’t appreciate is that we (the general public) fully understand the internet’s capacity to produce instant “mis”information
Well, I think they also don’t appreciate the degree to which TV has taught folks about snake oil salesmen and the degree to which folks just don’t trust any politician. They ought to remember that it is an almost universally understood joke punch line to say “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you!” …
It certainly runs through my brain any time someone says “the government can help” with whatever…
I’d take the University data anyday over a failed expedition mentally stuck back in the turn of the nineteenth century. Oh sure, it’s a dashing story, but it didn’t get the job done, and that’s what counts.
“So the question is – why does the suspect Catlin data get unlimited press coverage, while the comprehensive data of the Wegener Institute gets buried by the press? Is it possible that some members of the press have an agenda?”
Seen as you ask the question, I follow quite a few news sites on the interent, this site is the only one that I have read about the Catlin Survey, so I wouldnt go so far as to call the press coverage unlimited, in fact how many posts have you yourself done on the Wegener Survey as compared to the Catlin? are you part of the agenda?
There is a rather significant qualification to the Wegener Institute’s story: they say their data “ … leads to the conclusion that Arctic ice cover recovers temporarily.” This seems like a hefty nod in the direction of political correctness, and gives ammunuition to the more comedic of the alarmist fanatics, who leaped on it with crows of delight. Does the Institute (or anyone else) have long-term data that shows that the 2009 ice thickness recovery can only be temporary?
JLKrueger (22:47:56) :
Given that the Catlin Team were constantly referring to the fact that their GPS wasn’t working and that they were navigating by “wind and
Wrong they used it sparingly to conserve batteries.
anna v (20:52:47) :
What the $%^& are you talking about?
Better go to bed if you cannot read a plot you provide. The error in thickness is at most 20cm with a systematic bias towards thinness.
wrong at 295 metres error is about 800cm at a ground based reading of 3.1metres. Also check out the error at 0 metres.
Highlander (20:42:35) :
1] So, because you haven’t seen a Wegener report, one doesn’t exist?
None is published yet – never said one would not be written. They say greater than last year -have youo seen that report. How were the measurements made? this was the 1st flight behind plane. helicopters will not reach the NP
[3] If it is your supposition that a device which —having been tested and =proven= to be highly accurate to a few thousandths of an inch/meter— cannot produce a MORE accurate measurement than a human with a tape measure, itself having no smaller subdivision of measurement than a tenth of an inch,
Where is your evidence for this accurtacy and its proving? I would expect that the tape was in cm with subdivisions of mm. THEIR plot does not show this mm accuracy.
Additionally, the mere act of disturbing the surface of the ice presents the problem of: How much surface ice did the measurer remove to make his measurement?
How does the electronics KNOW where the ice surface is?
Further what of the punch-through and breakage of the undersurface of the ice happened which would directly affected the manual measurements?
Agreed