Via Tom Nelson:
Another warmist in the Arctic: GE sponsors 15-year-old on polar trip.
Photo courtesy of GE and Scott Draper
Shortly after twice reporting a temperature of -34 C, he suggests that the ice is “falling apart” around him.
Skiing and trekking to the North Pole: Parker Liautaud blogs to save the earth – Update
Parker Liautaud, 15 years old, is reporting on his progress skiing his way to the North Pole. He has made his goal to become the youngest person to ski to the North Pole, and to use that attempt to bring greater awareness to the urgent environmental issues of the arctic.
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And more importantly for his purpose of letting the world see the ravages of global warming on the arctic – There was a lot of open water today. It really shows what’s been going on in the Arctic – it’s falling apart. Right now we’re camping on this patch of old ice, but all around us is open water, broken and thin ice. To our north there’s a massive pan of very thin ice. Everything is freshly frozen, if not open.
That’s called “leads” kid, part of the regular landscape well before your trip. Oh but wait…what is the Temperature? Thanks to Twitter reports we know.
Twitter / Parker Liautaud: Temp -34, Windchill -42. W …
Temp -34, Windchill -42. We did about 11 Nm today, it was a really good day. We have about 35 Nm left, and about 5 before we’re half way. 3:00 PM Apr 4th via API [His previous tweet also reported a temperature of -34]
Son of Venture Capitalist Gets Foursquare Badge for Polar Trip – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
Normally if you’re the teenage child of a multimillionaire, you might expect a nice car or designer clothing as a present, VentureBeat reported.
But if you’re the 15-year-old scion of Bernard Liautaud, who founded and later sold Business Objects to SAP for $6.78 billion and is now a partner at Balderton Capital, you can probably do a lot better.
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Mr. Liautaud fils rounded up a sponsorship from G.E. for a trip to the North Pole promoting environmental awareness.
Of course, anybody can go to the North Pole, and blog about it, by paying a tour guide like this one that is with the 15 year old right now.
From the San Fransisco Examiner “offbeat places” blog:
Parker’s journey is part of an expedition that is open to the public. For more than 10 years, Doug Stoup has been guiding teams across the frozen Arctic Ocean and Antarctica. From numerous ‘Last Degree‘ treks to his most recent 660-mile epic journey to the South Pole.
Cost: €25,700 but for a quickie (I’ll bet you didn’t know you could do this as a quickie), fly from Longyearbyen to Ice Station Barneo, then take a helicopter to 89.599? North. Spend some quality time on the ice for photos and celebration and then return. Cost: €16,900.
I always like to encourage young minds in science, but this is just a glorified field trip with a guide. What a bunch of suckers GE is for paying for such an expedition.
The ice from Cryosphere Today looks better than 30 years ago.
I’ve really got to think hard about selling my GE stock. What a bunch of nonsense.
GE’s Immelt has been serving gallons of the green koolaid too. GE stands to gain enormously from energy related mandates from western governments (subsidies and industrial upgrades). He is in cahoots with MIT’s President Susan Hockfield both preaching unfounded doomsday scenarios and helping stuffing MIT with funding grants.
It would be funny if it was not all so disgustingly dishonest – pigs at the trough.
There are always well funded fools who are quickly separated from their money.
Daddy made a cool 6.8 Billion and they had to sucker GE to foot the tab?
I guess daddy likes playing with OPM.
How’s the poor rich kid going to react when he grows up and discovers Dada let him go out and make a complete fool of himself at such a tender age? On second thought, it probably won’t really affect him because by that time he’ll have been inducted into the school of “Truth doesn’t matter, but there’s money to be made in publicity – any kind of publicity”.
Ernest Shackleton and the rest of the crew of the [i]Endurance[/i] must be rolling their eyes. The ice heaves, groans, splits, and moves. Routes open and close, and Shackleton’s crew pushed and carried their boats to take advantage of patches of open water until they could get free of the ice and get stranded elsewhere.
In the arctic, people are like little ants on frozen flotsam trying not to die in one of a dozen horrible ways. There’s a reason the permanent human population on the arctic sea ice stubbornly remains at zero, and it’s not because lettuce doesn’t grow there.
On the other hand, should this kid survive his journey, both it and his father’s money is bound to get him laid with scores of hippie chicks. So he needs to ask himself one thing: Does his father prefer that he tragically die a horrible death while innocently trying to save the planet, or is his father betting on plan B, that the kid survives and moves in with a couple of hippie chicks, leading to a life of disolution and ending in an inevitable drug overdose?
Option C, that the kid is rescued by a US attack submarine investigating a crashed alien space ship, then transported into the alien space ship and eventually to an alien planet, though unlikely, would still get him out of the house and out of dad’s hair, so it would also satisfy dad’s goal.
If I was fifteen and surrounded by hundreds of miles of heaving ice, that’s what would be running through my head. How about you?
Sooner or later, “The naked north will win in the end” paraphr. Robert Service.
Kinda on topic. 🙂
Please visit to participate in “The next big scare” competition.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB20001424052702304017404575165573845958914-lMyQjAyMTAwMDAwNjEwNDYyWj.html
It’s the worst he’s seen in his entire life!
25,900 Euros. Wonder how many children in a thrid world country could get food, medicine, and clothing for that??
Oh, sorry, humans are the cause of the problem and should be killed, er, culled till they can’t damage Gaia.
Related…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bdneX1djD0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]
I hope this kid won’t increase his carbon footprint unnecessarily by needing a rescue team to save his sorry backside from getting frostbite.
Sounds like a good idea for a Stargate SG1 movie! :p
Yeah just a stoopid PR effort. As Dave Barry once said “yet another billionaire idiot wanting to balloon around the world.” Same idea. I’d not be sad if the little snot lost his life and his father was sued. Bet they have a chopper on standby at $50,000 per day to save their a$$es if need be.
However, I do have a serious query. Can someone enlighten me please.
There are all sorts of references to multi-year sea ice and how it is ever lower. Yet every year the max ice goes to ~ 14 million sq km and in summer it drops to about 5 million sq km. (Give or take.)
So EVERY year about 2/3s of the sea ice disappears. Ergo every year about 2/3s (+/-) of the winter sea ice is new.
So what is the real story on multi-year sea ice? Seems to me there is never more than 1/3 that is multi-year anyway.
Comments?
Thank you!
Clive
Gleaned from Twitter:
Parker L: Trip going well. The guys call me BB, because I’m like a bullet. They let me wear the red parka, which is like the yellow jersey in the Tour de France.
Doug S: We’ve put Bear Bait (BB) in the red parka, which we hope will act like a red shirt on Star Trek and will let us see charging polar bears before they threaten the rest of the crew, who don’t continually whine and complain that the ice is less than perfect. G-d help me, I’m never having children.
How is this for a bumper-sticker?
“Save The Planet From The Planet Savers!”
And with just a little luck, his publicity stunt will coincide with the news that the Arctic sea ice finally did crack the long term average on the NSIDC plot. I wonder how his GE sponsors will feel then.
Tonight’s JAXA figures show an increase for 4/7 and if the 4/7 NSIDC number does likewise, their plot will bend upwards (maybe retroactively). We’ll know by lunchtime on 4/8. It’ll probably take a couple more good days to nail down this milestone but the weather conditions give it a good shot. If we don’t get it this week, we’ll stay in striking range. It’s bound to happen eventually.
I would rate the actions of the parents allowing this stunt as child abuse. What a stupid justification “bring greater awareness” Is there anyone on the planet who hasn’t seen awareness stunts by the score? Either it doesn’t work at all or it isn’t needed take your pick. How often is “awareness” going to be used to justify a foolish counterproductive stunt.
When this kid is injured or killed will his parents and the idiots who fed him this line of rubbish be prosecuted? They certainly should be.
GE is trying to prop up the huge profit for no production they plan to make from carbon trading. The life of one teenager means less than nothing to them.
I always like to encourage young minds in science, but this is just a glorified field trip with a guide. What a bunch of suckers GE is for paying for such an expedition.
I don’t think that GE are suckers for paying for this expedition. Given the mega $$$ of future profits that they hope to lock in as a result of rent seeking tax payer funded sales of renewables such as wind power and solar… I would conclude that they are simply ruthless and without scruples rather than ‘suckers’.
This expedition is simply marketing for their scam, same as the caitlan expeditions.
I would be curious to know if the actual $ were drawn down from an internal GE marketing budget.
If it’s too difficult to argue with skeptic science, conduct a circus.
I wouldn’t call GE a bunch of suckers. This is cheap advertising. If overpopulation is the next big hype, they’ll be marketing the products to eradicate that problem.
How long before this happens in the US and UK?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/kyrgyzstani-government-ousted-in-violent-uprising/article1525821/
Note what caused the tipping point: high energy prices.
Catlin has now traveled over 30 miles in only three weeks. They probably should have taken Lewis Pugh’s kayak instead of a human powered dog sled.
OT but good anti-alarmist story.
Anthropogenic Mud Season, or is it the Sun?
“Real soon here in the Colorado high country, the winter white will give way to ‘green’ as the days get longer. We’re all casting up our pick of date and time when the Dillon Reservoir will officially begin it’s annual thaw. Heck, the melt and mud season will be upon us before you know it. With all this, just like clockwork, springtime also signals the beginning of the annual “Human Caused Climate Change Debate” here in Summit Daily News-land. I figured I’d get a head start this year with a factual scientific perspective before the debate tumbles into the left/right, Big-oil/Greenpeace, political fracas it usually becomes.”
http://www.infowars.com/anthropogenic-mud-season-or-is-it-the-sun/
Lastest JAXA AMSR-E extent:
03,25,2003,14800781 – 03,25,2010,14282344 – -518437
03,26,2003,14771094 – 03,26,2010,14264688 – -506406
03,27,2003,14755781 – 03,27,2010,14256719 – -499062
03,28,2003,14718594 – 03,28,2010,14299219 – -419375
03,29,2003,14647031 – 03,29,2010,14363438 – -283593
03,30,2003,14533906 – 03,30,2010,14405781 – -128125
03,31,2003,14428281 – 03,31,2010,14407344 – -20937
04,01,2003,14409219 – 04,01,2010,14395000 – -14219
04,02,2003,14335781 – 04,02,2010,14379531 – 43750
04,03,2003,14250469 – 04,03,2010,14328438 – 77969
04,04,2003,14172813 – 04,04,2010,14264219 – 91406
04,05,2003,14129375 – 04,05,2010,14228281 – 98906
04,06,2003,14098750 – 04,06,2010,14207969 – 109219
04,07,2003,14101719 – 04,07,2010,14220781 – 119062
Just keep right on gaining.
REPLY: The link I use for data here http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv
shows different numbers. Where are you getting this? – Anthony