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.
Who first penned the term “plotting a trend from a single data point?” That’s what we have here — somebody who knows absolutely noting about the Arctic but instinctively knows it’s falling apart.
Look at the picture. What is that structure off to the right side of the photo? It looks like there is one dead ahead of the person walking also.
Seal hunting stand? Oil rig? Weather station? What is it?
Maybe a buoy, remember red, right returning!
JT
Breaking apart might be more what he meant.
Ice always break in the waves though.
Sorry, OT, RockyRoad: you wrote on another thread that Equatorial temps rise by 5 degrees Celsius during Ice Age conditions. Would it be possible to provide links or any more information about that?
wonder what he paid for his carbon credits to fly so close to the north pole so he could be the first 15 year old to “ski to the north pole” ?
One degree of skiing.
I have already stopped buying anything made by GE, as well as Coke. I have quite an extensive list of brands that I no longer purchase due to their shameless pandering to what is in fact a tiny minority of their customers. Folks should pay close attention to which brands they purchase and not buy anything from those that are supporting the AGW myth. Nor any company that makes ridiculous claims of “being green” for merely pumping buckets of cash into the WWF or the Suzuki foundation et al.
The real number of those that would boycott a product for not being green enough would start out at perhaps 10-15% and rapidly drop to below 5% after a few weeks and fizzle completely in a short time. Most AGW “believers” lack any staying power or focus really. Besides, nowadays its all about appearing to be green; not actually being green. A boycott from those who like most of us have had enough of the crap surrounding AGW hysteria would turn out to be as many as 25-30%! Probably increasing as time goes by and the movement gathers momentum.
It is well past time to start turning the tables on the Carbon Crazies by withdrawing their funding! Stop buying stuff from the companies that give these loons their money!
Henry chance (05:34:15)
GE is to Washington what Gasprom is to the Kremlin.
I’ve been looking at historical events and comparing them to certain factors and have come to the conclusion the Holocene Interglacial ended about 500 AD and all we need is a Heinrich Event to show all these silly people where we are really at. Despite the fortunate blips of the MWP and in the late 20th century (Modern Solar Maximum), we are drifting colder and I have my fingers crossed we have a millenium to understand that.
Some Homosapiens on the Russian Steppe apparently went from houses of timber to houses of mammoth bones while whole herds died off in a human life time … I don’t have that kind of fortitude 😀
http://www.history.ca/video/
Ancient Weather … toward the bottom. It seems people pick up on cues from one another and you get parallel enquiry. Really quite good … talks about ‘Climate Change’ in a very general way … so far.
What a catastrophe that so many of the pampered generations of the “Western” societies are willing to learn so little about their existence prior to their surrendering theirs and future generation’s opportunities to the perennial exploiters of others and their own gullibility’s (including scientist and non-scientist AGWer zealots).
At least we have experienced a significant, if temporary, reprieve with the Net Neutrality ruling reprieve. Onward WUWTand associates!
I wonder about the obviously human built structures in the picture?
Perhaps they are oil derricks? Or maybe observation platforms for the lifeguards that are there in the summer.
Just to clear some confusion, I don’t think that this trip has been specially organized.
A couple of years back the daughter of a work colleague was sent by her company (a major UK high street bank) to the North Pole, via Canada. Apparently it is a regular trip (annual?) that companies with too much money can send employees on as some sort of ‘management training’. She came back with a lot of photographs of snow and the occasional polar bear (photos of, not actual bears) – just the sort of thing that will prove vital in her job as an HR executive.
I am guessing that this is the same trip.
@RockyRoad (05:43:31): Did you notice the obviously man-made structure on the right edge of the picture? And a similar structure in the background just to the right of the skiers head?
On my many (long-past) “free trips” to the area (provided by the USAF – they even provided Parkas and free coffee!!) from a bit “higher” perspective, I agree. The polar area didn’t look like this at all.
Pete Olson (04:17:14) : Clive: “I’d not be sad if the little snot lost his life…”
I’m afraid I don’t share your disregard for this kid’s safety… That’s just the kind of quote that some would love to smear us all with. And…
Pete, I understand your comment and that it can be taken out of context. I did not say I wished his death. I do not wish that at all. I merely said I’d not be sad if it happened and his father was sued. At least one other here suggested this was a form of child abuse. And it is. i.e. Using a child for promotion of oneself and religious beliefs about AGW.
Clive
Steve in SC (07:33:02) :
“I wonder about the obviously human built structures in the picture?”
Steve, the kid is reporting “open water” while looking at channel markers.
Both area and extent are now normal or above normal.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
I don’t own a lot of GE stock, but I just voted against Immelt on the GE stockholders meeting proxy. If enough do so, maybe we can get rid of him and have him move on into his full time job in the Obama administration.
Just so everyone knows, Dad rocked at the U of Victoria !! Safe and sound and Weaver nowhere to be found !! He had some great questions and handled them all. Dad has some real cajones to walk into the lion’s den and the cowardly lion was too scared to show. Someone in the crowd said that Weaver “couldn’t be bothered to debate with a minor player”. The rest of the crowd let him know what they thought of that statement. A lot of them were computer modelling students of Weavers, and did not bring their knowledge of the climate (if they have any). They were defenseless. Many had believed what they read on the internet (read DesmogBlog ) about my father ( eg, faked doctorate) and were quite unprepared for strong scientific arguments. It was a good day!!!
The media is in the Advertising/Entertainment business. “News”, or what we expect to be news, is of the quality we, collectively, desire in order to continue subscribing to the advertiser/entertainers program. The media is now accessible to almost everyone and almost everyone has money to spend, so don’t expect the quality of “News” to improve. It just requires more effort to sift through the garbage to find information.
Parker L. is merely an interesting prop. As is CAGW for that matter.
P.T. Barnum (I think): Nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of an audience.
Catlin reports that the Arctic is cold.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/
Climate science is taking us to unimaginable new places in the 21st century.
So now people’s understanding of science is so bad that they can’t figure out ice doesn’t melt at -34F … And there must be some other reason, like wind or ice movement that is making the ice crack up around him?
Where do the mountains in the picture with their obvious man-made structures come from out in the Arctic? One of the typical journalists tricks is out of context photos, like the ones made of the obviously not stranded polar bears to get to people’s emotions.
Unless people reboot their brains, we are in trouble.
You people really don’t yet.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100406_Figure3.png
Mike (08:01:28) :
Good point. Arctic ice has declined all the way to above average.
I avoid GE at all costs these days. It’s Fascism as they are getting closer and closer to the US government.
No, we don’t yet. Your point beeing?
I think they are from Svalbard