Well I’ve ignored the “new” Catlin Arctic survey as long as I can. Like last year, they’ve gone off the deep ends of the earth with wacky claims.
Apparently the team isn’t watching the sea ice extent data closely. Me thinks they just like having the insurance company pay them to trek the ice. There’s no real science being done. Just commentary. At least they aren’t pushing bogus biotelemetry this year
From Tom Nelson’s link aggregator, comes this simple set of points:
The Catlin warmists think that we’re stupid
“The conditions we’re experiencing are unlike anything I’ve seen in any of the nineteen expeditions I’ve previously been on,” says Martin Hartley. “There are great swathes of only recently refrozen open water peppered with small snow-covered islands of ice in the distance. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come for Arctic travel?”
The open water is revealed when fields of the floating ice break apart due to underlying ocean currents and pressure exerted on it by winds or tides.
A massive weather event forced the Ice Base to go into lockdown mode for two days this weekend. Starting on Friday evening, the team experienced gusting winds of up to 60mph and temperatures of -45 C, giving an effective ‘feels like’ temperature of -75 C.
[Flashback: If SUVs caused the open leads in 2006, what caused the open leads in 1909?]
Check out the New York Times article here, where Commander Peary talks about Arctic conditions in 1909.
Excerpts from Peary himself:
The difficulties and hardships of a journey to the North Pole are too complex to be summed up in a paragraph. But, briefly stated, the worst of them are: the ragged and mountainous ice over which the traveler must journey with his heavily loaded sledges…
…the open leads already described, which he must cross and recross, somehow…
h/t to Pierre Gosselin
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Oh come on… gives these guys a break. It’s f..ff…f..freezing cold because of global warming. And it’s only poor and new thin ice and the POlar \bears are extinct as they haven’t seen one.
Where are they supposed to be, by the way?
“By reviewing the distance and direction that the team’s campsite drifts each night as they sleep, we can roughly determine how mobile the sea ice has been over the course of their first 9 days of the expedition. It would seem the extent of their drift due south is around 42km.”
How about turning on the ol’ GPS?
@ur momisugly Stephen Skinner (15:23:37) :
“…They concluded that the melting of the ice pack during the summer of 1997 caused the water to be proportionally less salty. Such a change can have serious consequences for marine life as well as for how ocean water circulates and interacts with the atmosphere. In addition to altering salinity, melting sea ice also raises worldwide sea levels, with potentially significant effects for coastal cities and towns.”
It makes you feel all warm and cosy when a scientific report says something that stupid and nobody notices until its published.
I have to say I much preferred the Top Gear expedition when they drove to the North Pole.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkvASxfEWQ&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
Are they wrapped up nice and warm this time with real furs? Last year, if I remember aright, they were complaining of the cold due to 100% synthetic clothing (no animals were harmed in the setting up of this “expedition”).
PS I don’t love these guys at all – their inanity is depressing. One year they’ll leave their hides there. The media will love that:” Just going outside for minute….” recorded on a cell phone.
These intrepid explorers wouldn’t know “science” if it came in a white fur coat in the middle of the night, pounced and ate them.
Why don’t they just do what the “Top Gear” crew did and drive there?
old44: That was the magnetic north pole.
As for Caitlin, on their summary of last year’s trip they say their data contributed to a group that thinks all the ice probably will be gone in 20-30 years. Well, they’d better get paid now to camp on the ice.
Here is a great graph from that link that Steve G provided above
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/snowice/sea-lake-ice/Brw09/Melt-out.png
Notice just how much cloudier it was last year than in previous years. Also note the anomaly of 2007.
Interesting
So, are we going to be blessed with another German research DC-3 flight that collects scads of more useful data than these meandering maritime merkin merchants?
04/28/09
“This is a news story from Germany outlining another Arctic ice measurement expedition. This one was conducted by flying the scientists across the north polar ice cap using the WWII era workhorse Douglas DC-3 airplane equipped with skis, and towing an airborne sounder twenty meters above the ice surface. It makes the Catlin Arctic Ice Survey look rather pointless, but then we knew that. BTW “Eisdicken” translates to “ice thickness”. – Anthony”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/28/inconvenient-eisdicken/
AnonyMoose (17:57:16) :
Jeff Wood (14:29:48)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click
Hey! Look at the good side at least now we can get real temperature readings from the arctic for the GISS data base instead of the normal fakie recordings we get now!
Speaking of Way up North:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/Sitka.GIF
Sitka, Alaska going back to 1833 via CRU 99 for the orange line, and COOP from 1948 to 2008.
Note the station jump in 1972-4.
1973 was too messed up to plot.
All the stations in Alaska have huge holes in their data, makes it really messy.
With that big ugly mess, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on up there.
Too bad the Russians are down on handing over thier raw data, can’t blame them.
p.g.sharrow “PG” (22:37:24) :
Oh, you mean those temp guages mounted next to the shelter exhaust?
Or is it the propane torches used to defrost windows for readings?
SSam (21:50:08) :
Great, I haven’t seen the word “merkin” mentioned for about 40 years. Glad it’s still extant.
Are the Catlin crew using merkins?
No use bringing up Peary in 1909. Catlin explorers don’t believe in history, they believe in CAGW. It is apparent, their minds can’t handle the complexity when the two are mixed, even if the history is just four days ago! They like to keep it sweet and simple, anything implying colder is weather, anything implying warmer is climate.
The Catlin effort is rendered absolutely asinine by comparing it with the Clarkson and Mays’ ‘Top Gear’ effort in driving a relatively standard Toyota ute to the North Pole, while the third presenter on the show drove a dog team. Sadly, after it was completed, the British Autombile Association publicly criticised the Toyota pilots for encouraging “drink driving”! The two intrepid Toyotaists cracked a celebratory bottle and toasted their feat as they reached the North Pole.
If you send astronauts to the moon to find cheese, they can hardly come back with lumps of rock.
… but they can find rocks and all them “moon cheese”, thereby justifying the huge expenditure to send them to the moon to look for cheese.
well, as we all know out of personal experience how -75°C feels like… [/sarc]
@Disputin (01:48:18)
Dr Strangelove had Peter Sellers as Merkin Muffley, the President of the USA.
You can also check out:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin
(Wikipedia has its uses in areas Connolley doesn’t get to – in more ways than one)
But I guess you already know all that.
I thought this expedition was out to prove WAGTD from ocean acidification.
If so, then how do they titrate their sea water samples at -45C?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I’m glad you mentioned that movie (Ice Station Zebra). Most of America and all the world’s journalists must have formed their impression of the Arctic from watching it.
The depiction couldn’t be more wrong — vast, flat plains of solid ice as far as the eye can see.
RHS (14:31:09) : “I’m curious at which latitude they’re making these observations from. If they’re making them from the 90th rather than the 60th(exaggerations intended), then we should be concerned about warming. Otherwise, they should be concerned about camping out in the habitat of the only animal known to hunt man rather than ice conditions…”
Strange, I wouldn’t think there’d be many mosquitos at their latitude this time of the year. 🙂
At least this year they are using using a motorized drill instead of Pen’s hand crank from last year.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/assets/photos/m_e206df4e-b727-4c75-8627-818fa0ef0ac9.jpg
For the experts perspective on trekking to the North Pole I’d refer you to http://www.explorersweb.com/ specifically http://www.explorersweb.com/polar/ where you will find blogs from teams making the attempt this year.
There is also this description of leads and how common they are
http://www.thepoles.com/expguide/arctic.htm
Basically if you are going from Canada to the true North you are pretty well guaranteed to have to swim a bit when you get close to the pole. They carry survival suits for just this purpose and their sleds can convert to canoes.