The Catlin team has been on the ice for 10 days, and has traveled a total of 17 miles so far as the crow flies. At that rate, they will reach the North Pole in September, except that the ice gets too dangerous by early May and they will have to evacuate. Their current position is 85 47 N 78 22 W, after starting at 85 32 N 77 44 W on March 15. Their web site uses a cool Google earth plugin to map their tortuous route – seen below.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/GoogleEarth.aspx
The Google Earth map below shows how far they have traveled in reference to the North Pole. Note that their starting point and current position are almost right on top of each other at that scale.
The team have been making lots of noise about how unusual the ice conditions are in the Arctic, based on the tiny fraction of the Arctic they have navigated.
“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 map below shows just how insignificant their coverage has been. Their starting and end points appear to be right on top of each other at Arctic scale.
The Arctic Ocean covers 5,427,000 square miles. Catlin 2010 has seen maybe ten square miles of it, meaning they have sampled less than 0.0002% of the ice. They also choose to travel on refrozen leads because they are flatter and smoother, so their sampling is not random. No serious scientist would attempt to draw any conclusions about the quality of the ice based on a cherry picked sample representing less than 0.0002% of the Arctic, but this is no ordinary scientific expedition.
Same story, different year. From 2009 : Can the Catlin Arctic Survey Team Cover 683 km in the Next 21 Days?
Catlin Team Averaging 1.7 Miles Per Day – Only 295 Miles Left to Go!
The Catlin team has been on the ice for 10 days, and has traveled a total of 17 miles so far as the crow flies. At that rate, they will reach the North Pole in September, except that the ice gets too dangerous by early May and they will have to evacuate. Their current position is 85 47 N 78 22 W, after starting at 85 32 N 77 44 W on March 15. Their web site uses a cool Google earth plugin to map their tortuous route – seen below.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/GoogleEarth.aspx
The Google Earth map below shows how far they have traveled in reference to the North Pole. Note that their starting point and current position are almost right on top of each other at that scale.
The team have been making lots of noise about how unusual the ice conditions are in the Arctic, based on the tiny fraction of the Arctic they have navigated.
“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 map below shows just how insignificant their coverage has been. Their starting and end points appear to be right on top of each other at Arctic scale.
The Arctic Ocean covers 5,427,000 square miles. Catlin 2010 has seen maybe ten square miles of it, meaning they have sampled less than 0.00002% of the ice. They also choose to travel on refrozen leads because they are flatter and smoother, so their sampling is not random. No serious scientist would attempt to draw any conclusions about the quality of the ice based on a cherry picked sample representing less than 0.00002% of the Arctic, but this is no ordinary scientific expedition.
Same story, different year. From 2009 : Can the Catlin Arctic Survey Team Cover 683 km in the Next 21 Days?
At least this year, they started closer to the Pole. Too bad they decided to start on ice drifting away instead of getting the drift to help them. Who wants to lay odds that they end up further from the Pole than they started if they have to sit through a few storms, or have to wait for resupply?
Here’s some interesting bits some of you might be interested in doing something with…
These guys have no realistic idea how many polar bears there are. Most of the count information is 10 years old or more.
•Status: Data deficient
•Current trend: Data deficient •Estimated risk of future decline: Data deficient (but put in a rating of High)
Summary of polar bear population status per 2010
http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/status-table.html
Data deficient Data deficient Data deficient
••Amstrup rebutts unscientific audit
http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/news/archive/2009/Rebuttal2009a.html
Data deficient Data deficient Data deficient
•Original reports from USGS
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/special/polar_bears/
Data deficient Data deficient Data deficient
•Armstrongs audit
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6317/
The extinction of polar bears by the end of the 21st century has been predicted and calls have been made to list them as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The decision on whether or not to list rests upon forecasts of what will happen to the bears over the 21st Century…
Much research has been published on forecasting polar bear populations. Using an Internet search, we located roughly 1,000 such papers. None of them made reference to the scientific literature on forecasting. We examined references in the nine unpublished government reports that were prepared “…to Support U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Polar Bear Listing Decision.” The papers did not include references to works on scientific forecasting methodology. Of the nine papers written to support the listing, we judged two to be the most relevant to the decision: Amstrup, Marcot and Douglas et al. (2007), which we refer to as AMD, and Hunter et al. (2007), which we refer to as H6 to represent the six authors. AMD’s forecasts were the product of a complex causal chain. For the first link in the chain, AMD assumed that General Circulation Models (GCMs) are valid. However, the GCM models are not valid as a forecasting method and are not reliable for forecasting at a regional level as being considered by AMD and H6, thus breaking the chain. Nevertheless, we audited their conditional forecasts of what would happen to the polar bear population assuming that the extent of summer sea ice will decrease substantially in the coming decades.
… AMD could not be rated against 26 relevant principles because the paper did not contain enough information. In all, AMD violated 73 of the 90 forecasting principles we were able to rate. They used two un-validated methods and relied on only one polar bear expert to specify variables, relationships, and inputs into their models. The expert then adjusted the models until the outputs conformed to his expectations. In effect, the forecasts were the opinions of a single expert unaided by forecasting principles. Based on research to date, approaches based on unaided expert opinion are inappropriate to forecasting in situations with high complexity and much uncertainty. Our audit of the second most relevant paper, H6, found that it was also based on faulty forecasting methodology. For example, it extrapolated nearly 100 years into the future on the basis of only five years of data – and data for these years were of doubtful validity.
In summary, experts’ predictions, unaided by evidence-based forecasting procedures, should play no role in this decision. Without scientific forecasts of a substantial decline of the polar bear population and of net benefits from feasible policies arising from listing polar bears, a decision to list polar bears as threatened or endangered would be irresponsible.
•Steven Amstrups new rebuttal
http://pbsg.npolar.no/export/sites/pbsg/en/docs/Amstrup2009Int.pdf
Steven Amstrup and colleagues have now rebutted this challenge in an article published in the same journal (Interfaces). Amstrup also included an easy to read tutorial on global warming and projections of climate models in the rebuttal. Hence, readers are made clearly aware that the threat to polar bears is real, unless actions to reduce greenhouse gases are taken.
Data deficient Data deficient Data deficient
Meanwhile down in the lower 48…
FWC News – Record cold leads to record number of manatee deaths
http://myfwc.com/NEWSROOM/10/statewide/News_10_X_ManateeRecordDeaths.htm
As of March 19, biologists with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC) Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) have documented 431 manatee carcasses in state waters so far in 2010. This preliminary data indicates that in just three months, the number of manatee deaths has exceeded the highest number on record for an entire calendar year, which was 429 in 2009. The cause of death for the majority of these animals is cold stress.
I can’t believe these idiots are at it again! Where’s a hungry polar bear when you need one?
So the poor fools really did learn something from last year’s misbegotten adventure. Then they were aiming for 1,000 km in 100 days and fell short on both counts.
But, just as in last year’s early going, they’re having trouble making headway as the ice carries them backwards when they stop at night.
Still, they just might make it to the pole this year, if only they can get to an area of ice that’s not seeing them having to make up for ground lost overnight. And they’ll probably come up with the same findings they had last year — the ice is thinner than expected. Except that they’ll be finding what they’re looking for – easy to travel, flat ice, which is by nature thinner than the ice ridges they’ll be trying to avoid.
The bad news for Catlin (the expedition & the company) — who cares?!! After this past winter in the US & UK, who wants to hear about Arctic snow and ice? We’re all looking forward to green grass and trees and warm breezes.
Now if Catlin were to underwrite expeditions to the tropics during January, that might garner some public interest, especially if winters start turning out to be as nasty as this last one.
They could read Farthest Nord; Fram expedition1893-1896
Fridjof Nansen
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30197/30197-h/30197-h.htm (volume 1)
http://www.archive.org/details/farthestnorthbei02nansuoft (volume 2)
A long read (with sludge)
Leon Brozyna (12:13:48) :
(…)
Now if Catlin were to underwrite expeditions to the tropics during January, that might garner some public interest, especially if winters start turning out to be as nasty as this last one.
They could schedule expeditions to the IPCC climate change conferences, explore strange exotic lands like Bali and Mexico City. Seems likely they could also get more scientific research done that way.
This is not just deja vu. They may be stuck in an infinite loop. Well, it will only be infinite if they’re very lucky. 😉
These people proved beyond reasonable doubt last year they have no talent for this kind of thing. Tell a couple of rednecks that Polar bears taste like chicken, put them on a pair of four-wheelers towing beer-sleds and they would have been to the pole and back by now (complaining bitterly that Polar bears do NOT taste like chicken).
Insanity – The process of doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result.
Monty Python did a better expedition to Kilimanjaro
I think this expedition is of supreme importance. It proves undeniably that the AGW convinced (OMG the ice is disappearing) crowd are reckless idiots. It is a shame that they must also risk the lives of the brave rescue units. For what?? Nothing more than publicity. No one is going to use their dubious data. Why would anyone buy insurance or stock, from a company, that cannot properly weigh risk/reward. GK
I don’t know if they measure ice thickness again but here are the two threads about the Alfred Wegener institute measurements:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/28/inconvenient-eisdicken/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/17/catlin-artic-ice-survey-an-annie-hall-moment/#more-7911
I say! What an absolutely wizard idea! March north on south-moving ice during nice Spring weather when the ice starts to melt to show … er … that the ice is melting.
You really couldn’t make it up, could you?
stephen richards (11:52:53) :
I thought it was “all fur coat and no knickers”. Seems apt.
Phil. (10:36:54) :
The Catlin team is already further North than the Pole that the Top Gear team went to!
Phil. (11:01:07) :
Actually they didn’t even make it to the pole, their target was the 1996 position of the Magnetic Pole 78°35.7′N 104°11.9′W, the magnetic pole has been moving northwards at ~40miles/year since then so they were a long way from the pole. The current position is 85.0N 132.6W.
Maybe that accounts for the dithering initial progress of these intrepid explorers. Nobody explained to them which Pole they were supposed to be heading towards.
By my reading of their website the focus this time is not ice thickness, but CO2 generated “OCEAN ACIDIFICATION”. Given that Wootton & Pfister 2008, one of the more cited papers in this area
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/48/18848.full.pdf+html
measured PH values varying from 7.5 to 9.1 over fairly short time spans, any measurements the Caitlin crew are able to collect will be less scientifically meaningful than one of Leif Erikson’s letters home.
Interesting book:
The Arctic problem : and narrative of the Peary relief expedition of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (1893) (in search of the icefree pole)
http://www.archive.org/details/arcticproblemnar00heil
You know, when I see the suffering in places like Haiti and Chile, and then see the enormous amount of money being literally wasted on this marketing stunt by an insurance company from Bermuda, it really puts these people’s values (or lack thereof) into perspective…
Cognitive dissonance.
Actual temps Minus 45 and wind chill minus 75
Paid to claim it is melting, getting warmer, heat is up, tipping point, Open water, Poley bears are sweating
Only a troo liberal would risk frostbite and death to claim we are reaching the boiling point.
Does is feel as cold as the readings say it is?
Priceless~!!!!
Well, you know what they say: Everything is within walking distance if you’ve got the time.
They’re just using the standard peer reviewed scientific procedure of extrapolating what all ice conditions are like within 1200 km of their current observation location.
Will our friends make it to the North Pole in time to save Christmas?
The next crossing of the North Pole by balloon.
Generali is also an insurance company
http://www.jeanlouisetienne.com/generali_arctic_observer/EN/
The first shipment “Total Pole Airship” (Total as oil) has been canceled due to crash
http://www.tvparty.com/bgifs17/rudolph07-5.jpg
This is a prime example of why many of us think that insurance companies are charging excessive amounts for premiums. Their purpose isn’t to cover us when disaster occurs. Their purpose is to get rich off the paychecks and earnings of the people and the companies they try to build. In this economy, when people are out of work, trips like this, on our premium dime, just make me boil. They are no better than loan sharks.
@ur momisugly Tony Goad (07:59:45) :
“For real science buy or rent the Top Gear Arctic Special.
Clarkson and Captain Slow in a modified Toyota pickup race the Hamster using a dog sled to the North Pole.
Great shots on the ice field and a lesson on how to make a gin and tonic in a moving vehicle.”
A broadcasting triumph and an excellent demonstration of ironic sang-froid