First, I loathe having to write another story about Pen Hadow and his Catlin Arctic Ice expedition, which I consider the scientific joke of 2009. But these opportunistic explorers are once again getting some press over the “science” data, and of course it is being used to make the usual alarmist pronouncements such as this badly written story in the BBC:
WUWT followed the entire activist affair disguised as a science expedition from the start. You can see all of the coverage here. It’s not pretty. When I say this expedition was the “scientific joke of 2009”, I mean it.
On to the Top Ten List.
Top Ten Reasons why the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey data can’t be trusted
10.
High profile news and PR from the beginning, plus an unrealistic vision of self importance related to the mission. The entire venture was publicized well in advance of the actual expedition, and the mission was “too important to fail” according to the January 23rd interview with The Guardian Catlin team leader Pen Hadow said:
“During this mammoth expedition we will gather the essential data that scientists need to more accurately determine when the permanent floating sea ice will disappear altogether. We cannot afford to fail on this mission – there is too much at stake.”
With pronouncements like that, you also can’t afford not to bring home a result consistent with the theme of the expedition.
9.
Reality Show Science as reported here, “The trio will be sending in regular diary entries, videos and photographs to BBC News throughout their expedition.” When you tie science too closely to the media from the beginning, it predetermines some outcomes. That pressure is always there to produce the story rather than focus on the task. This is why most proper science is done well away from the media and the results are reported afterwards.
8.
Hadow, by his own admission, has an unrealistic and biased warmer view of the Arctic that doesn’t match the current data. In his Curriculum Vitae posted here, he writes:
“Twenty years ago, you could walk to the North Pole – now you have to swim part of the way there.”
Only problem is, the satellite data showed a completely different picture of solid ice, and Hadow’s expedition encountered temperatures of -44F (-42C) along the way, and the vast majority of the trip was below 32F (0C). He didn’t encounter vast leads of water along the way, and in fact encountered ice conditions far worse than he expected. This shows his bias for a warmer trip from the start.
7.
The Catlin team’s scientific advisor at the beginning of the trip seemed to already have a predetermined outcome for the Arctic. In this BBC article and interview they write of Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, a science advisor to the survey:
“Ultimately, Professor Maslowski hopes to finesse his forecast for when the first ice-free summer might arrive.
Currently, he has it down for 2013 – but with an uncertainty range between 2010 and 2016.”
So if they already had this figured out from the beginning, why make the trip at all? Is it so the BBC could recycle the headline again today saying Arctic to be ‘ice-free in summer’? Why do “science” at great personal risk when you already are sure of the end game? There’s also another nugget of predisposition wisdom by Catlin’s science advisor Professor Maslowski. Read on.
6.
They failed to advise of major equipment failure in a timely manner, inviting suspicion. The ice radar sounding equipment that was designed to do the thickness survey failed miserably, almost from day one, yet even though they were “sending in regular diary entries, videos and photographs to BBC News throughout their expedition,” the world didn’t learn of that failure until day 44 of the 73 day expedition. When Apollo 13 had a problem, the world knew about it almost immediately. When Catlin had a problem, it was covered up for well over a month, yet that didn’t stop the BBC from paraphrasing Apollo 13’s famous words for a headline ‘London, we have a problem’ as if there was some parallel in integrity and timeliness here.
5.
Hadow and his scientific advisor erroneously believed that their expedition was the only way ice thickness measurements could be done, and they seemed oblivious to other efforts and systems.
From this BBC article and interview:
“No other information on ice thickness like this is expected to be made available to the scientific community in 2009,” explained Arctic ice modeller Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, a science advisor to the survey.
While this was obviously a selling point to sponsors and an ego boost for the team, it was flat wrong. For example, there’s a bouy network that provides ice thickness data,. Then there’s ICEsat which provides mass and balance measurements, as well as ice thickness maps, shown below:
ICESat data for Fall 2008, source NASA Scientific Visualization Studio
As reported on WUWT, another data source of Arctic Ice thickness in 2009 came in the form of an aerial survey with a towed radar array from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. They didn’t have to risk lives, create drama, or bleat constant headlines to the BBC while doing the science. They simply flew the plane over the ice a few times.
Here’s some excerpts of what was reported on WUWT in the story Inconvenient Eisdicken – “surprising results” from the Arctic
At the North Pole ice sheet is thicker than expected
The “Polar 5″ in Bremerhaven
The research aircraft Polar 5 “ended today in Canada’s recent Arctic expedition. During the flight, researchers have measured the current Eisstärke measured at the North Pole, and in areas that have never before been overflown. Result: The sea-ice in the surveyed areas is apparently thicker than the researchers had suspected.
Normally, ice is newly formed after two years, over two meters thick. “Here were Eisdicken up to four meters,” said a spokesman of Bremerhaven’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. For scientists, this result is still in contradiction to the warming of the seawater.
![Das Forschungsflugzeug "Polar 5" in Bremerhaven [Quelle: AWI]](https://i0.wp.com/www.radiobremen.de/wissen/nachrichten/polarfuenf100_v-slideshow.jpg?quality=83 "The research aircraft Polar 5 \"in Bremerhaven [Source: AWI]")
Gosh. Where’s the polar death defying drama in that?
4.
Due to the extreme cold conditions they were not fully prepared for, they completed less than half of the planned trip. Originally it was to be a 1000 kilometer trip to the North Pole which according to early interviews given by Hadow was easily done, yet they failed. The original start point was to be at 81N 130W but they actually started closer to the pole by about 100 kilometers.
Click here to explore the Catlin Arctic Survey in Google Earth (right click and save as)
According to the Google Earth KML file provided by Catlin, they started at 81.7N 129.7W and ended at 85.5N 125.6W for a total distance of approximately 435 kilometers over 73 days. Hardly a broad survey of the Arctic Ice when put into perspective on the Google Earth and ICEsat maps shown below:
Here’s the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey Route overlaid on the ICEsat map. You can see just how little of the ice was actually surveyed.
Note that the ICEsat image is from Fall 2008, while the Catlin trip was in the Spring of 2009. Since we all know sea ice moves, often connected to the Beaufort Gyre, it is likely that the path depicted does not represent the ice Catlin actually traveled over. The sea ice may have moved so that the Catlin path traversed some of the thinner ice to the west, though some thickening of the ice would also be expected during the winter of 2009. The point of this map was to put the route in perspective.
3.
There’s very little actual data return for 73 days on the ice, only 39 datapoints. See the dataset they provide in the Excel file here:
CAS Snow Ice Measurements – Final 2009
Final surveying results from the 2009 expedition.
The actual number of holes drilled and measured for ice thickness by Pen Hadow is said to be in the hundreds, and what we see in the Excel file is the average of those many holes at each drilling session. While I commend them for providing the raw hole data, problems with potential measurement bias don’t appear to be well addressed in the methodology paper they provide here (PDF) while it is mentioned in the preliminary June report:
“One further consideration, when interpreting the ice thickness measurements made by the Catlin Arctic Survey team, may be navigational bias. Typically, the surface of First Year Ice floes are flatterthan that of multi‐year ice floes and because the team systematically seeks out flatter ice which is easier to travel over and camp on, there is a risk that the ice surveyed will not be representative.”
Since they make no mention of the potential measurement bias in the final report, it appears that there wasn’t anything but lip service consideration given to it in the early report, possibly to appease critics.
2.
One of the most prominent sea ice researchers in the world, Dr. Walt Meier of NSIDC said he would not use the Catlin data saying in a post here on WUWT:
“I don’t anticipate using the Catlin data.”
That begs the question then, beyond the use of the data for generating news stories like we’ve seen in the BBC and other media outlets, who will? Even the media outlets have ignored the actual data Catlin made available, preferring sound bites over data bytes.
1.
The Catlin Arctic Ice Survey knowingly presented false data to the public and to the media in their web presentation.
As many WUWT readers recall, it was here that it was discovered that Catlin’s website had bogus telemetry data on it, giving the impression of “live data from the ice” when in fact the data repeated in an endless loop from a short period.
Here’s the story from WUWT
Catlin Arctic Survey website recycles biotelemetry data?
Something quite odd is going on at the Catlin Arctic Survey website at: http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/
It appears that they are presenting recycled data from the biotelemetry sensors on the team. The “live from the ice” biotelemetry data for each team member is presented here:
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/live_from_the_ice.aspx
Here is a screencap of what the biotelemetry section of that webpage looks like:
click for full sized image
A WUWT commenter posted this:
karl heuer (07:40:46) :
The “Live from the Ice” biotelemetry is definitely not live:
When the data loads,
Pen Hadow core temp starts at 33.25 C every time the page loads, then increments up to 33.57, 33.64, 33.7, 33.75
every time, I have refreshed, cleared temp files and rebooted — still the same
WUWT commenter “hotrod” did his own check:
I just tried it looking at Pen Haddow’s pulse rate — Hmmm what are the odds that 32 consecutive pulse rate measurements would be identical?
Yes looks like the bio metric data is just white was to make their site look nifty, and has absolutely no value at all — perhaps they already have all their ice measurements in the can too?
When called out on the bogus telemetry data issue, the Catlin support team, rather than addressing the issue head on and with transparency, simply changed the web page for “live” telemetry to read “demonstrational”, and it remains that way today.
This is what it originally showed:
Of course they could just end the farce and remove it. Because, well, who needs demonstrational biotelemetry anyway?
They also posted this at the bottom of the main page:
An apology
We’d like to apologise to anybody who felt misled by our recent biometric data. The data was initially displayed in error in a way that gave the impression that it was live. The intended qualification and explanation that it was, in fact, delayed information, was at first missing. We have subsequently corrected this with specific information concerning the above data. We apologise for the errors and to anyone who may have found the data misleading.
The real question is: how long would they have let that “live” impression go on had WUWT not called them on it? Originally the URL for the “biotelemetry” was
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/live_from_the_ice.aspx
Now that URL if typed in your browser is automatically redirected to:
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/latestfromtheice
So with the words “telemetry” and “live_from_the_ice.aspx” it is clear what the original intent was. The apology is about saving face, nothing else.
So the question to readers and media is: with these sorts of issues listed above, do you really want to trust the data from a group of people that perform and present “science” in this way? If you do, it would seem to me that you are putting form over substance. Even if we didn’t have these trust issues, are 39 datapoints over a short section of the Arctic really that useful given the other tools shown to be at the disposal of real science?
The Catlin Arctic Ice Survey is in my opinion, nothing more than a badly executed public relations stunt covered with the thinnest veneer of attempted science.
Update: On the morning of 10/15 I fixed about a half dozen typographical and grammatical errors in the essay. h/t to Harold Ambler and others for the tips on these. This included changing the description to “opportunistic explorers” in the first paragraph as in retrospect I felt my original description of was too harsh, since despite the shortcomings, omissions, and PR fluff, these people did a physical feat that few could do. My conclusion above remains unchanged by that fact though. – Anthony
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What do facts matter when one has already reached a conclusion? And what do conclusions matter when one has already decided a goal?
It is all about convenient lies, for the greater good, of course.
Why this panic in some to halt human progress? Well, the pace can be frightening but the truth of the matter is that a corrupt, unstable economic system is making a mess of things, IMO.
The solution is to reform banking and money creation. Otherwise, expect more insanity and instability as “respectable” bankers do their mischief in a money we are all forced to use.
OK, my last word on that subject here.
Good work guys, on demolishing the CO2 scare. It could easily have much greater ramifications in restoring sanity to the earth as the current world view is discredited.
They must have been really insane and deluded to have chosen the climate as a battleground. I thank God they did.
I feel it appropriate to re-publish this article in it’s entirety. I call it TREASON!
None Dare Call It Fraud
Imagine the reaction if investment companies provided only rosy stock and economic data to prospective investors; manufacturers withheld chemical spill statistics from government regulators; or medical device and pharmaceutical companies doctored data on patients injured by their products.
Media frenzies, congressional hearings, regulatory investigations, fines and jail sentences would come faster than you can say Henry Waxman. If those same standards were applied to global warming alarmists, many of them would be fined, dismissed and imprisoned; sanity might prevail, and the House-Senate cap-and-tax freight train would come to a screeching halt.
Fortunately for alarmists, corporate standards do not apply – even though sloppiness, ineptitude, cherry-picking, exaggeration, deception, falsification, concealed or lost data, flawed studies and virtual fraud have become systemic and epidemic. Instead of being investigated and incarcerated, the perpetrators are revered and rewarded, receiving billions in research grants, mandates, subsidies and other profit-making opportunities.
On this bogus foundation Congress, EPA and the White House propose to legislate and regulate our nation’s energy and economic future. Understanding the scams is essential. Here are just a few of them.
Michael Mann’s hockey-stick-shaped historical temperature chart supposedly proved that twentieth century warming was “unprecedented” in the last 2000 years. After it became the centerpiece of the UN climate group’s 2001 Third Assessment Report, Canadian analysts Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre asked Mann to divulge his data and statistical algorithms. Mann refused. Ultimately, Mc-Mc, the National Science Foundation and investigators led by renowned statistician Edward Wegman found that the hockey stick was based on cherry-picked tree-ring data and a computer program that generated temperature spikes even when random numbers were fed into it.
This year, another “unprecedented” warming study went down in flames. Lead scientist Keith Briffa managed to keep his “lost” (destroyed?) all the original data.
The supposedly “final” text of the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report emphasized that no studies had found clear evidence that observed climate changes could be attributed to greenhouse gases or other manmade causes. However, without the authors’ and reviewers’ knowledge or approval, lead author Dr. Ben Santer and alarmist colleagues revised the text and inserted the infamous assertion that there is “a discernable human influence” on Earth’s climate.
Highly accurate satellite measurements show no significant global warming, whereas ground-based temperature stations show warming since 1978. However, half of the surface monitoring stations are located close to concrete and asphalt parking lots, window or industrial-size air conditioning exhausts, highways, airport tarmac and even jetliner engines – all of which skew the data upward. The White House, EPA, IPCC and Congress use the deceptive data anyway, to promote their agenda.
With virtually no actual evidence to link CO2 and global warming, the climate chaos community has to rely increasingly on computer models. However, the models do a poor job of portraying an incredibly complex global climate system that scientists are only beginning to understand; assume carbon dioxide is a principle driving force; inadequately handle cloud, solar, precipitation and other critical factors; and incorporate assumptions and data that many experts say are inadequate or falsified. The models crank out (worst-case) climate change scenarios that often conflict with one another. Not one correctly forecast the planetary cooling that began earlier this century, as CO2 levels continued to climb.
Al Gore’s climate cataclysm movie is replete with assertions that are misleading, dishonest or what a British court chastised as “partisan” propaganda about melting ice caps, rising sea levels, hurricanes, malaria, “endangered” polar bears and other issues. But the film garnered him Oscar and Nobel awards, speaking and expert witness appearances, millions of dollars, and star status with UN and congressional interests that want to tax and penalize energy use and economic growth. Perhaps worse, a recent Society of Environmental Journalists meeting made it clear that those supposed professionals are solidly behind Mr. Gore and his apocalyptic beliefs, and will defend him against skeptics.
These and other scandals have slipped past the peer review process that is supposed to prevent them and ensure sound science for a simple reason. Global warming disaster papers are written and reviewed by closely knit groups of scientists, who mutually support one another’s work. The same names appear in different orders on a series of “independent” reports, all of which depend on the same original data, as in the Yamal case. Scientific journals refuse to demand the researchers’ data and methodologies. And as in the case of Briffa, the IPCC and journals typically ignore and refuse to publish contrary studies.
Scandals like these prompted EPA career analyst Alan Carlin to prepare a detailed report, arguing that the agency should not find that CO2 “endangers” human health and welfare, because climate disaster predictions were not based on sound science. EPA suppressed his report and told Carlin not to talk to anyone outside his immediate office, on the ground that his “comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” which the agency supposedly would not make for several more weeks.
The endless litany of scandals underscores the inconvenient truth about global warming hysteria. The White House, Congress and United Nations are imperiling our future on the basis of deceptive science, phony “evidence” and worthless computer models. The climate protection racket will enrich Al Gore, alarmist scientists who get the next $89 billion in US government research money, financial institutions that process trillion$$ in carbon trades, and certain companies, like those that recently left the US Chamber of Commerce. For everyone else, it will mean massive pain for no environmental gain.
Still not angry and disgusted? Read Chris Horner’s Red Hot Lies, Lawrence Solomon’s Financial Post articles, Steve Milloy’s Green Hell, and Benny Peiser’s CCNet daily climate policy review. Go to a premier showing of Not Evil Just Wrong.
Then get on your telephone or computer, and tell your legislators and local media this nonsense has got to stop. It may be that none dare call it fraud – but it comes perilously close.
http://townhall.com/columnists/PaulDriessen/2009/10/15/none_dare_call_it_fraud?page=full&comments=true
Michael @09:49:35
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, next they fight you, then you win.
The AGWERS seem to be doing it in reverse:
1. Declare victory
2. Fight
3. Be rediculed
4. Be ignored
One of two answers come to mind. The first possibility is yes they do have an attention span. After all they dutifully sat on this story for a year before posting it. That requires both a long attention span and an agenda!
It also presumes that the reading public does not have an attention span or any historical reference for the “facts reported”. That implies a sinister agenda.
The other option is the media does not have an attention span and are just regurgitating news releases because they are too lazy to do their job, incompetent journalists, or forced by peer pressure or management guidelines (spoken or implied) to follow a party line.
Or they did way too much drugs and booze and are just trying to keep anyone from noticing they have no clue what is going on in the world.
Larry
Good one Robert.
That’s exactly how their minds work.
They’ve taken insanity to a higher level.
“jellyfish in the Arctic”
Possibly the Lion’s Mane jellyfish
http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/lionsmane2.html
You’ll find the Lion’s Mane in the cold Arctic and Pacific Oceans, the North and Irish Seas and around the coast of Australia. They are mostly no deeper than around 20 metres.
Well I’m not an ice expert; but if somebody were to ask me (and they haven’t) I would tell them that the secret is in how many holes you measure; not how many holes you have drilled.
So maybe the bored 1500 holes; that’s only 20 holes per day; not counting all those days they were “holed” up in their survival gear and tents.
How about those 39 “data” points; I see the first one on the list has a standard deviation almost as large as the measurement; maybe they just stuck their arm down the hole and felt for the bottom of the ice.
Could you just measure from the surface of the ice down to the water surface, and simply multiply that by 10 or 11 or whatever; well they would have to know somethinga bout the local ice density and the salinity to figure that out I suppose.
This ice core drilling is the old tree ring scam in spades; and worse because in this case the only thing they are trying to measure is the thickness of the ice.
Of course if they had recovered the ice cores, instead of slaughtering them; they would actually be able to count the rings and find out how many year ice they were on.
But in any case; this has to be one of the worst examples of Nyquist sampling theorem violation, I have ever heard of.
The best summary of the work of the Catlin Ice Survey, that I can muster, is to refer the reader to a classic Far Side Cartoon by Larsen; which consists of a single panel.
The lady with the beehive hairdo, is in her living room talking on the phone to her neighbor across the street.
“Say Hazel; take a look out your front window, and describe for me that thing that is on my front lawn !”
The reason that the lady of the house wants her neighbor’s description, is that her own front window is blocked out by one huge gigantic humungous eye; which is all she can see from inside HER living room.
That is the way I see the Catlin Ice Survey; their sampling regimen Sucks !
George
Head for the hills!
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MLK2.pdf
Al Jazeera falls for the hilarious Catlin fiasco.
Arctic icecap ‘gone in a decade
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/10/2009101542515498563.html
“hotrod (10:11:49) :
Midwest Mark (05:51:29) :
…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t these scientists also claiming that the Arctic would PROBABLY be ice free by the end of summer 2008? Does no one in the mainstream media have an attention span?
One of two answers come to mind. The first possibility is yes they do have an attention span. After all they dutifully sat on this story for a year before posting it. That requires both a long attention span and an agenda!
It also presumes that the reading public does not have an attention span or any historical reference for the “facts reported”. That implies a sinister agenda.
The other option is the media does not have an attention span and are just regurgitating news releases because they are too lazy to do their job, incompetent journalists, or forced by peer pressure or management guidelines (spoken or implied) to follow a party line.
Or they did way too much drugs and booze and are just trying to keep anyone from noticing they have no clue what is going on in the world.
Larry”
Oh, my poor dear Hotrod.
The Rothschild’s own AP and Reuiters.
You don’t know who the Rothschilds are? Google them.
They only disseminate the news they deem fit for you to hear to every news outlet on the planet.
Oh, and they own every major news outlet on the planet too.
My favorite is that the expedition made ‘thousands of visual observations’.
============================================
Fox news is reporting the same crap. People apparently do not realize that the arctic ice cap floats on water and if 100% of it melted, it would not change sea levels an inch.
Jeez.
An oldie but goodie.
The 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition
The BBC science reporter David Shukman has openly stated during a report that the Catlin crew drilled “several hundred holes in the ice” The stated number of drilled holes seems to go up and down wildly, does anyone actually know the actual number they claimed to have drilled?
Is anyone going to compile a complete list of the inaccuracies in this report which could easily have been rectified with a little simple research and lodge a formal complaint with the BBC regulatory authority?
It may have to be a team effort….
The latest travesty of an interview with junk scientist Pen Hadow on the BBC’s so-called “science” program “Material World”, all 11 minutes and 13 seconds of it, can be downloaded here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5psk
If you want to make any comments directly to the program makers (maximum 1000 characters) go here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/material-world/contact/
If you want to contact the BBC about anything you can send an email to:
feedback@bbc.co.uk
Or use their web page
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/feedback/contact/
This is one way to set the record straight for the BBC, but after listening to that load of global warming claptrap today, which went completely unchallenged by the interviewer, I know what an uphill battle it will be.
Anthony, you remember a couple years back when you started the challenge of the land record ( hat tips to steve Mc and others as well) you remember how as the debate heated up the warmists followed a tactic which I termed “running for the ice” that is, changing the topic to the ice retreat ( it was 2007) Running for the ice. I didn’t mean for them to take me seriously.
Would anyone in MSM ask Catlin/Hadow for the raw data on the 1500 drill holes? Will Mr. Hadow make this data available for other “scientists” to study in detail? Is there a map of the 1500 locations? Photos? Findings?
It would be nice to see an insurance company such as Catlin dedicated to climate science offer the wider science community access to this hard to come by Arctic ice data set.
An insurance company specialising in ‘Catastrophe insurance’ sponsors an expedition to find evidence of impending catastrophe. According to all their press releases, the expedition ‘discovered’ what they were briefed to find.
No surprises there, then.
http://www.catlin.com/
Great marketing. Poor science.
Isn’t it rich, this hypocracy!
Suppose the situation were reversed: Suppose this was an expedition sponsored by Exxon, consisting of a group of oil riggers. They then return to great fanfare (or not) and proclaim that they took 1500 ice core datapoints and found the average thickness to be 4m. The data is given to somebody like Richard Lindzen (ok, I know he’s not an ice man, but just go with me on this). Professor Lindzen announces the ice is thicker than previously thought – it won’t be disappearing any time soon.
Can you imagine the fallout! Total MSM silence, so it can only be followed on the blogs. RC jumps in and trashes the whole experiment. Ridiculous, Schmidt would trumpet, these weren’t even trained glaciologists. And to drive home the point, he would add “Yet when the German team of climate scientists surveyed the whole arctic ice extent with airborne radar they found the average ice thickness to be – ahem, only 1.8m. Perhaps we should give these eminent climate scientists them the devastating news that their results are all wrong, eh?”.
Yet, the warmists are digging their own grave, by allowing the work of amateurs and hacks to be afforded the same credulity as science. For this expedition has unwittingly set a precedent. Now, anybody can (with necessary financial support) repeat exactly what the Caitlin team has done, and if they should come back and report that the ice is now thicker than 1.8m, how could the warmists then attack their work for doing what everyone agreed was wonderful science when Caitlin did it?
“”” crosspatch (10:39:02) :
Fox news is reporting the same crap. People apparently do not realize that the arctic ice cap floats on water and if 100% of it melted, it would not change sea levels an inch.
Jeez. “””
And to make matters worse, if it all melted, the sea level would go down; not up.
It takes about 80 calories per gram of latent heat to melt ice. The vast majority of that energy is going to come out of the ocean; not the atmosphere, so for example to melt one gram of ice, you could cool 80 grams by one deg C; or coo; one gram by 80 deg C, or any other combination.
If the temperature coefficient of expansion was constant (it isn’t) then the drop in water level, would be the same no matter if 80 grams cooled by one deg C or 800 grams cooled by 0.1 deg C.
But the whole point is the sea level would fall, and not rise, if all the floating sea ice melted.
George
Alan the Brit (06:07:15) :
I think you made a good point there. How many holes you can drill with a hand-auger per day through 1-4 meters of ice? The professional ice fishermen drill maybe 20-30 holes per fishing session and they use power (petrol or battery operated) augers if the ice is thicker than 20 inches.
Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin calls these dramas, “Kabuki Theater”
Peanut Farmer Jimmah Carter was famous for carrying empty suitcases infront of cameras. He was of course doing the heavy lifting.
I have been outside in temperatures of -60C, you don’t want to do much work at all, let alone turn an ice auger 600 turns through hard ice. Windchill of -70C is almost debilitating. If they drilled 1500 holes in these conditions, they deserve some kind of award. The Darwin Award maybe.
The European Climate Exchange, one of the sponsors if the Catlin fiasco, has a ‘fascinating’ write-up of the results ofthe “expedition” at this address
http://www.ecx.eu/Catarctsur
Here’s taster …
“The Catlin Arctic Survey combines a pioneering feat of human endurance with scientific discovery on a geographic scale most would think impossible in the 21st century, a detailed and accurate mapping of one of the earth’s largest geophysical surface features: the floating North Pole sea ice. ”
That’s right! The Catlin expedition mapped the North Pole Sea Ice. All of it!