First, let’s get our bearings. Unlike the Northwest passage, which traverses the icy north above Canada, the Northeast passage is an entirely different route, shown on the map in red.
Source: UK Register graphic
From The Register: Also called the Northeast Passage or North Sea Passage, it’s a trade route that in summer months links the North European and Siberian ports to Asia, around the Arctic Circle. Orient-bound traffic heads east, then South via the Bering Strait. The route offers significant gains over the alternatives via Suez or the Cape, it’s shorter, quicker and cheaper. But until technological advances in the early 20th Century it was considered too hazardous for commercial operation.
The merchant ships MV Beluga Fraternity and MV Beluga Foresight arrived this week in Yamburg, Siberia. Ownership is Beluga Group Shipping Gmbh. From the company website: “During the passed days which led through the East Siberian Sea, the Sannikov Strait and the Vilkizki Strait as northernmost part the Beluga vessels were part of a little convoy behind the Russian Atomflot-ice breakers “50 let Pobedy” and “Rossia”.”.
Icebreaker & Merchant ship - from the company website
“We are all very proud and delighted to be the first western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary Northeast-Passage and delivered the sensitive cargo safely through this extraordinarily demanding sea area”, Niels Stolberg said, President and CEO of Beluga Shipping GmbH, after the masters Captain Aleksander Antonov and Captain Valeriy Durov had notified that they had dropped anchor at their port of destination. “To transit the Northeast-Passage so well and professionally without incidents on the premiere trip is the result of our extremely thorough and accurate preparation as well as the outstanding team work between our attentive captains, our reliable meteorologists and our engaged crew”, said Stolberg.
One newspaper is making the most of this “first ever event”, according to a story in the UK Register:
The Times has liberally papered London underground carriages with a fascinating new ad campaign. One poster shows a ship navigating some treacherous icy waters, with the accompanying copy reading:
Climate change has allowed the Northeast Passage to be used as a commercial shipping route for the first time.
The Times advertisment
Impressive – if only it were true.
According to the ad copy:
To help you navigate the changing world we have more dedicated science and environment correspondents than the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail or Independent.
Only one problem: The Northeast Passage has been opened for commerce since 1934 – and never ‘closed’.
Over the years hundreds of thousands of freighters have passed through, and after Russia put Soviet-era politics aside it was extended to foreign commerce in the 1990s. As the Register reported two weeks ago.
It’s a disaster all right, a disaster of bad journalism. I won’t mince words. It’s crap.
But we all know the MSM can’t get much right these days. My guess is that the MSM simply confused the difficult and almost always closed Northwest passage with the Northeast passage.
Bloggers once again were the leaders in discovering the real truth instead of paid journalists. Is it really so hard to use Google? For example the EU referendum had details and pictures of many previous transits of the Northeast passage. In this story, they show the history of this shipping lane.
Read the details of the latest failure of journalism turned advertising opportunity in the UK Register, here.
Thanks to Andrew Orlowski of the register for his assistance with this story.
===
Readers, especially those in the UK, I’d like to make a suggestion. Let the Times know they screwed up, not only for the journalistic failure, but also for the touting of the failure as advertising. Letters to the editor, letters to the managements, and to the advertising office might be a good start. If nobody calls them on it, they’ll never learn.
There’s also the UK Advertising Standards Authority, that works to keep advertising legal, decent, honest and truthful. The ad being run by the Times is failing most of those points. Here’s where you can complain:
The merchant ships MV Beluga Fraternity and MV Beluga Foresight arrived this week in Yamburg, Siberia. Ownership is Beluga Group Shipping Gmbh. From the company website: “During the passed days which led through the East Siberian Sea, the Sannikov Strait and the Vilkizki Strait as northernmost part the Beluga vessels were part of a little convoy behind the Russian Atomflot-ice breakers “50 let Pobedy” and “Rossia”.”.
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Indiana Bones
October 7, 2009 10:02 am
superDBA (09:01:41) : If this were an isolated incident it would be one thing, but it’s not. So why do we continue to allow these idiots to run the world?
Because most human beings lack the urge to question. They have not been taught to question or be skeptical, except toward the opponents of accepted doctrine. There, they sit smug in the arms of the main stream media that feeds them stories like this. Replacing fact and historical record with carefully crafted messages that keep them comfortably numb. They are sheeple. Until woken.
But truth is a wicked sword. And the quarantine thereon will be lifted – shortly. And these deformers of fact will be asked to explain themselves. And they will claim “We lied for the greater good.” And someone will have to judge the veracity of that claim.
GP
October 7, 2009 10:05 am
The Times is part of the Murdoch media empie.
It does what he tells it to do.
His son runs the Sky satellite TV arm. The son seems to be greener than green. Quite why he can’t see that the greenest thing he could do, as a person running a TV business that clearly uses a lot of ‘fossil fuel’ in both production and delivery, would be to close the business is something I don’t understand. He is, as I understand it, the product of the finest US education establishments. One would have thought the logic would be obvious.
BTW the mention of ‘hundreds of thousand of ships’ is likely wrong, though ‘hundreds of thousands of tons of shipments’ would be likely right.
People ‘in power’ really don’t care about the reality of the situation. Those who desire social influence and control have found the perfect vehicle. Those who have more than enough wealth for any changes in the world to be meaningless for them personally have found a new way to gather more wealth for themselves, thus fortifying thier place.
Neither group are likely to want to upset the other too much, hence why so many large corporations simply rolled over and now support the socialist charge.
The suckers in the middle will end up feeling the brunt of the effect in ways they did not anticipate when they decided that they would be safe just letting others make the decisions for them. But they will probably never realise what is going on around them whilst the global Murdoch machine, along with others, tells it like it isn’t.
GP
October 7, 2009 10:11 am
That should, of course, have read “Murdoch Media empire”.
John Silver
October 7, 2009 10:12 am
You can’t teach them anything. [snip – sorry, a bit over the top]
P Gosselin
October 7, 2009 10:18 am
It’s the new jounalism – write today,
fact-check tomorrow!
Michael
October 7, 2009 10:18 am
Wow.
RC actually published my previous comment.
Ben
October 7, 2009 10:29 am
Done. Here’s my email to letters @ur momisugly the times (though I don’t expect it will be published):
Dear Sir
I remember reading with amusement your article about ships navigating the North East Passage “for the first time”, and how this was a sure sign of the effects of Global Warming. I assume your journalists are very hard pressed and short of time, as 2 minutes googling or a short visit to Wikipedia will show that it wasn’t the first time. The passage is also known as the Northern Sea Route, and a Directorate was set up by the Soviets in 1932 to manage it. I now read in the Register that you are parading your mistake all over the London Underground system. Astonishing!
The dead tree press has got serious competition from the internet. Your business model will surely fail if readers have to do the double-checking your journalists should have done in the first place.
Regards
Ben Gardiner
John Wright
October 7, 2009 10:31 am
WUWT:
“My guess is that the MSM simply confused the difficult and almost always closed Northwest passage with the Northeast passage.”
Yes, and it has occurred to me that according to the NSIDC sea ice index, had the NW passage been in the state it was this year, Amundsen in his Gøa would never have been able to get through in 1905.
And in 2007 the NE passage seems to have been closed.
How do the warmists explain that?
Anthony, the title of this entry is incorrect. It is not surprising AT ALL that the media botched it.
Russia is the largest user of the Northeast passage and sends 200,000 tons of cargo through there each year.
Wikipedia has a good piece on the Northeast Passage, or Northern Sea Route as it prefers to call it. “Possibility of navigation the whole length of the passage was proven by mid-19th century. However, it was only in 1878 that Finland-Swedish explorer Nordenskiöld made the first successful attempt to completely navigate the Northeast Passage from west to east during the Vega expedition.”
It was closed to the free West during the time of Communist Russia, while Russians used the Northern Sea Route regularly and established various Arctic ports on the way that have now fallen into disuse.
The Beluga ships planned to be the first Western commercial ships to do the run without icebreakers, but in the end there was a Russian icebreaker there. Beluga is a Bremen-based shipping company, founded 1995, now 63 large vessels, evidently skyrocketing with the help of Times ads.
Antonio San
October 7, 2009 10:45 am
And after that the media are surprised when they are accused of bias…
This story appeared in my 10 year old son’s “TIME for Kids,” which is a new version of the the ‘weekly reader” that is published by TIME Magazine and has a circulation of 4 million. I wrote a rebuttal, “TIME for Kids misinforms your children,” posted here… http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/time-for-kids-misinforms-your-children/
and sent a hard copy to my son’s teacher.
When The Times ad claims that:
“Climate change has allowed the Northeast Passage to be used as a commercial shipping route for the first time”
we all know that that it is not true. What is not so clear is whether it breaches the advertisers’ code of conduct.
From personal experience, a complaint to the ASA is time-consuming to prepare. It is also likely to fail and rebound.
By all means write to The Times but I’d advise caution before getting embroiled in an ASA complaint, esp as it can legitimately be argued that anyone here who does so is using a complaints procedure to make a political point.
Since the Times took a shot at the other papers, perhaps writing to the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Independent would be more productive than writing the Times.
tallbloke
October 7, 2009 11:25 am
Boudu, nice work with the animations!
Al Gore's Holy Hologram
October 7, 2009 11:42 am
I’ll print out this article at The Times where I work and leave copies littered about the place tomorrow.
i think it is the duty and interest of the beluga company to correct the unture story (again appearing in their report on their webpage).
it should be in their own interest, that their customers and competitors do not regard this company as one that promotes and takes advantage on the basis of an untrue story. http://www.beluga-group.com/en/#Contact-Contactform
If you believe in the premise of the book 1421, and I do, the Chinese sailed across the top of Europe and Asia on their return voyage. http://www.1421.tv/
In his first book, 1421, Gavin Menzies argues that a huge Chinese fleet circumnavigated and charted the world years before the first great European voyages of discovery. The evidence for this comes in many different forms: from shipwrecks and ancient maps, to local peoples accounts and their DNA.
Stephen Brown.
October 7, 2009 12:33 pm
Complaint to the ASA submitted; the following sent to the Editor of the Times:-
Sir,
I consider it to be incumbent upon you to become acquainted with the contents of the article referenced here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/07/the-surprising-real-story-about-this-years-northeast-passage-transit/ .
I would then consider it incumbent upon you to require your ‘science’ correspondent to undertake some remedial journalism education, primarily in the area of factual checking.
Finally I would request that the advertising campaign, which you have mounted primarily in my experience on the London Underground and which is based on the fallacious story published in your erstwhile august pages, be removed forthwith.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Brown.
October 7, 2009 12:36 pm
The body of my complaint to the ASA …
“The advertisement relied on a story printed earlier in the Times and linked a supposed maritime feat to global warming. The story related to the alleged first passage of cargo vessels through the North East sea route accomplished in 2009. The story was manifestly false as this sea route has been in relatively regular use since 1934.
The Times newspaper used the advertisement to claim scientific reporting superiority over a number of named rivals based on this patently false story. The advertisement is thus also false and should be removed.”
No politics here, just simple fact!
writing alarmism about climate sells, but hanging ads on the london tubes costs money. this is not ignorance or the usual media BS, this is something carefully planned, and someone is paying for it.
Retired Engineer
October 7, 2009 12:57 pm
P Gosselin (10:18:04) :
“fact-check tomorrow!”
Obviously. As ‘tomorrow’ never comes (as soon as you get there, it’s ‘today’) so they never have to check those inconvenient facts. A good thing, as many of them wouldn’t know how.
The science is settled. The dabate is over. Eliminate the need for thinking. Pacify the folks carrying torches, pitchforks, tar and feathers.
How’s the weather on Mars? Can we move there yet?
superDBA (09:01:41) :
If this were an isolated incident it would be one thing, but it’s not. So why do we continue to allow these idiots to run the world?
Because most human beings lack the urge to question. They have not been taught to question or be skeptical, except toward the opponents of accepted doctrine. There, they sit smug in the arms of the main stream media that feeds them stories like this. Replacing fact and historical record with carefully crafted messages that keep them comfortably numb. They are sheeple. Until woken.
But truth is a wicked sword. And the quarantine thereon will be lifted – shortly. And these deformers of fact will be asked to explain themselves. And they will claim “We lied for the greater good.” And someone will have to judge the veracity of that claim.
The Times is part of the Murdoch media empie.
It does what he tells it to do.
His son runs the Sky satellite TV arm. The son seems to be greener than green. Quite why he can’t see that the greenest thing he could do, as a person running a TV business that clearly uses a lot of ‘fossil fuel’ in both production and delivery, would be to close the business is something I don’t understand. He is, as I understand it, the product of the finest US education establishments. One would have thought the logic would be obvious.
BTW the mention of ‘hundreds of thousand of ships’ is likely wrong, though ‘hundreds of thousands of tons of shipments’ would be likely right.
People ‘in power’ really don’t care about the reality of the situation. Those who desire social influence and control have found the perfect vehicle. Those who have more than enough wealth for any changes in the world to be meaningless for them personally have found a new way to gather more wealth for themselves, thus fortifying thier place.
Neither group are likely to want to upset the other too much, hence why so many large corporations simply rolled over and now support the socialist charge.
The suckers in the middle will end up feeling the brunt of the effect in ways they did not anticipate when they decided that they would be safe just letting others make the decisions for them. But they will probably never realise what is going on around them whilst the global Murdoch machine, along with others, tells it like it isn’t.
That should, of course, have read “Murdoch Media empire”.
You can’t teach them anything. [snip – sorry, a bit over the top]
It’s the new jounalism – write today,
fact-check tomorrow!
Wow.
RC actually published my previous comment.
Done. Here’s my email to letters @ur momisugly the times (though I don’t expect it will be published):
Dear Sir
I remember reading with amusement your article about ships navigating the North East Passage “for the first time”, and how this was a sure sign of the effects of Global Warming. I assume your journalists are very hard pressed and short of time, as 2 minutes googling or a short visit to Wikipedia will show that it wasn’t the first time. The passage is also known as the Northern Sea Route, and a Directorate was set up by the Soviets in 1932 to manage it. I now read in the Register that you are parading your mistake all over the London Underground system. Astonishing!
The dead tree press has got serious competition from the internet. Your business model will surely fail if readers have to do the double-checking your journalists should have done in the first place.
Regards
Ben Gardiner
WUWT:
“My guess is that the MSM simply confused the difficult and almost always closed Northwest passage with the Northeast passage.”
Yes, and it has occurred to me that according to the NSIDC sea ice index, had the NW passage been in the state it was this year, Amundsen in his Gøa would never have been able to get through in 1905.
And in 2007 the NE passage seems to have been closed.
How do the warmists explain that?
Here is some more incite into the Hegelian Dialectic if you are interested.
http://nord.twu.net/acl/dialectic.html
http://nord.twu.net/acl/evolution.html
Anthony, the title of this entry is incorrect. It is not surprising AT ALL that the media botched it.
Russia is the largest user of the Northeast passage and sends 200,000 tons of cargo through there each year.
Wikipedia has a good piece on the Northeast Passage, or Northern Sea Route as it prefers to call it. “Possibility of navigation the whole length of the passage was proven by mid-19th century. However, it was only in 1878 that Finland-Swedish explorer Nordenskiöld made the first successful attempt to completely navigate the Northeast Passage from west to east during the Vega expedition.”
It was closed to the free West during the time of Communist Russia, while Russians used the Northern Sea Route regularly and established various Arctic ports on the way that have now fallen into disuse.
The Beluga ships planned to be the first Western commercial ships to do the run without icebreakers, but in the end there was a Russian icebreaker there. Beluga is a Bremen-based shipping company, founded 1995, now 63 large vessels, evidently skyrocketing with the help of Times ads.
And after that the media are surprised when they are accused of bias…
This story appeared in my 10 year old son’s “TIME for Kids,” which is a new version of the the ‘weekly reader” that is published by TIME Magazine and has a circulation of 4 million. I wrote a rebuttal, “TIME for Kids misinforms your children,” posted here…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/time-for-kids-misinforms-your-children/
and sent a hard copy to my son’s teacher.
When The Times ad claims that:
“Climate change has allowed the Northeast Passage to be used as a commercial shipping route for the first time”
we all know that that it is not true. What is not so clear is whether it breaches the advertisers’ code of conduct.
From personal experience, a complaint to the ASA is time-consuming to prepare. It is also likely to fail and rebound.
By all means write to The Times but I’d advise caution before getting embroiled in an ASA complaint, esp as it can legitimately be argued that anyone here who does so is using a complaints procedure to make a political point.
Since the Times took a shot at the other papers, perhaps writing to the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Independent would be more productive than writing the Times.
Boudu, nice work with the animations!
I’ll print out this article at The Times where I work and leave copies littered about the place tomorrow.
“The summer of 1991 marked the first time in recent history that Russia
offered to escort ships of other countries across the Northern Sea Route
(NSR).” CRREL Report 96-3
The Northern Sea Route
Its Development and Evolving
State of Operations in the 1990s
Nathan D. Mulherin
April 1996
Historic to journalists who haven’t learned to research their stories.
i think it is the duty and interest of the beluga company to correct the unture story (again appearing in their report on their webpage).
it should be in their own interest, that their customers and competitors do not regard this company as one that promotes and takes advantage on the basis of an untrue story.
http://www.beluga-group.com/en/#Contact-Contactform
If you believe in the premise of the book 1421, and I do, the Chinese sailed across the top of Europe and Asia on their return voyage.
http://www.1421.tv/
In his first book, 1421, Gavin Menzies argues that a huge Chinese fleet circumnavigated and charted the world years before the first great European voyages of discovery. The evidence for this comes in many different forms: from shipwrecks and ancient maps, to local peoples accounts and their DNA.
Complaint to the ASA submitted; the following sent to the Editor of the Times:-
Sir,
I consider it to be incumbent upon you to become acquainted with the contents of the article referenced here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/07/the-surprising-real-story-about-this-years-northeast-passage-transit/ .
I would then consider it incumbent upon you to require your ‘science’ correspondent to undertake some remedial journalism education, primarily in the area of factual checking.
Finally I would request that the advertising campaign, which you have mounted primarily in my experience on the London Underground and which is based on the fallacious story published in your erstwhile august pages, be removed forthwith.
Yours sincerely,
The body of my complaint to the ASA …
“The advertisement relied on a story printed earlier in the Times and linked a supposed maritime feat to global warming. The story related to the alleged first passage of cargo vessels through the North East sea route accomplished in 2009. The story was manifestly false as this sea route has been in relatively regular use since 1934.
The Times newspaper used the advertisement to claim scientific reporting superiority over a number of named rivals based on this patently false story. The advertisement is thus also false and should be removed.”
No politics here, just simple fact!
Puppet Obama and Al Gore
http://www.canadafreepress.com/images/uploads/ball100509.jpg
writing alarmism about climate sells, but hanging ads on the london tubes costs money. this is not ignorance or the usual media BS, this is something carefully planned, and someone is paying for it.
P Gosselin (10:18:04) :
“fact-check tomorrow!”
Obviously. As ‘tomorrow’ never comes (as soon as you get there, it’s ‘today’) so they never have to check those inconvenient facts. A good thing, as many of them wouldn’t know how.
The science is settled. The dabate is over. Eliminate the need for thinking. Pacify the folks carrying torches, pitchforks, tar and feathers.
How’s the weather on Mars? Can we move there yet?