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.
…
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.
…
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.
Just a thought – isn’t the ice due to start to melt bigtime about now? Not sure it was a good idea to set off at this time of year, didn’t those idiots…err… dedicated polar explorers at the PratlinCatlin Team try this stunt last year & got stuck – miles from the NP? Does no one ever learn? Wonder if young Parker has his body metabolism all wired up somewhere too?
BTW, just had my electricity bill in today, (on top of the woodburner, & portable 15kg cylinder gas fires, price has doubled in 2½ years from £15.50 ($25US) a pop to £29.99 ($50US) a pop!), it’s “WOW” time, you know, the sort of figure that comes half way between a “sharp intake of breath” & “OUCH!” However, it is partly commensurate with length of use over this last winter, I thank the Lord that I am as far south as I am. The shape of things to come I fear, so it looks like I am going to have to do some serious budgetting for the next “as mild or milder than average winter” later this year!
@ur momisugly Pete H (00:17:04) :
Then again, to paraphrase from the film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”…
“I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a boy at an impressionable age and he is mine for life.”
Yes, that’s just what Lenin said, too. 🙂 “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Really interesting to watch General Electric openly support this kind of thing. They’ve been betting heavy into energy-saving everything and it would really bite them if all of that fell apart. This is a visible example of a corporation quite nakedly supporting a hysteria that helps their bottom line.
The kid’s probably having good time but I bet the butler’s really pissed off.
Are you all kidding, this is a great spend by GE. First I bet you will see a TV special about it on GE’s NBC, but more importantly GE is one of the companies best poised to gain the most from carbon taxing, so this will be a great propaganda showcase.
Steve Goddard (07:50:10) :
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
What’s up with that huge decline in ice on Feb 20th ?
Isn’t February peak suicide season in Norway ?
Are they going to hide that decline later ?
It seemed to have occurred right before the ice went on to unusual growth…
Anyone that makes mistakes, can’t be trusted.
Just ask the IPCC.
do you remember this: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html
here is the answer of an angry german “leading climate scientist”:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/climate-scientist-bashing/
have fun 🙂
greetings from germany
BBC World is today plugging what is “happening” at the Poles with a live broadcast of the launch of Cryosat 2 under the subtitle “Scientists hoping to find out more about Global Warming”. The satellite, we are told, has been sent up to find out “how fast the ice is melting
DeNihilist, Those are the weather stations that Jones used. LOL
George Turner (20:35:33):
OK George… you owe me a new keyboard and a bottle of screen cleaner. That *required* a warning “empty mouth of all liquid before reading” alert. Came close to needing new underwear too.
Congratulations for a brilliant post.
Steve Goddard (07:50:10) :
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
It doesn’t count, because 2009 was the warmest year *evah* in the Southern Hemisphere.
/sarc
The pictures show a lot of man made structures on the slideshow on the examiner.
Son, don’t let the silver spoon freeze to your tongue. It will hurt like touching your tongue to the flagpole up there.
@Steve Goddard (08:04:34) :
Apparently it is okay for the Arctic to have a 30 year process in one direction, but if there is evidence of a 30 year process starting in the other direction, that must not be talked about until 30 years later. Healing doesn’t count until “healed” is achieved, and only wild-eyed zealots would dare talk about it while in-process.
Alz has it right.
Steve Goddard (07:56:23) :
Catlin reports that the Arctic is cold.
Climate science is taking us to unimaginable new places in the 21st century.
Catlin probably also needs to report the intrepid explorers have been drifting farther away from the pole in the week it took them to figure out how to build an outhouse on an ice floe.
From the book ”The third man” (Norw. “Den tredje mann”) by author Ragnar Kvam Jr. on Nansen and Johansen’s expedition to reach the North Pole, 1895, more than a hundred years ago. The book is based on the official log books, the published accounts and the private diaries of the two men. The two guys were some 2 years alone on the ice, unassisted.
They reached the record 86o 14’ N. Translated excerpts are from pages 145 – 149, concerning the period mid March to 30 March 1895(!):
“They strived through a mess of open water areas and ice. With fingers bleeding from frostbite, sleds rolling over constantly and dogs already starting to wear out.
Nansen had been sure that the ice would improve the further north they came, and that temperature would rise now that they had waited with the start until mid March. But the ice got worse, and the cold would not let up. Already after a week, they almost lost their courage.
…
They went between blocks of ice that eternally scraped towards each other, driven by the forces of the sea that had once created them. The big ones crushing the smaller ones, running them over or pushing them out into the next open channel in the ice. When ice blocks collided, they could create towers and ridges teten meters high. Eight days after leaving Fram, Nansen measured the declination of the sun. It showed that they had reached 85o 10’ N. That meant a total distance of one hundred and thirty kilometers the first week, or average daily distances of sixteen kilometers. Even though they would need to keep a higher speed if they were to reach the north pole, they were so pleased they celebrated by rigging up a flag o none of the kayaks [Because the ice cap always have large open water areas and channels, they pulled sleds with kayaks strapped on top. All the gear was packed in the kayaks which they used to cross the open water areas]. One week later, March 28, Nansen measured their position to 85o 30’ N. That meant 37 kilometers, or daily average of a mere 5 kilometers. [ice drift working against them].
A disappointed Nansen believed that there was something wrong with the observation and refused to accept the result. But only new observations would provide an answer. In the mean time, they strived on.
They were no longer just fighting intense cold and ice. Ever more often, they ran into open, treacherous water. Suddenly the channels of open water were more an more common. Of ice ridges and open channels, the open channels were the worst.
30. March. The weather changes. The wind finally changes from North to South, and an encouraged Nansen and Johansen starts with the wind blowing from behind. Temperature rises from -40C to -30C.”
This was 1895 than one hundred years ago. The CAGW-guys have no sense of history (except when it fits (or is made to fit) their agenda of course).
Mike (08:01:28) :
You people really don’t yet.
I think one thing “we people” do “get” is putting a linear trend to a cyclic process is not too smart.
Steve in SC (07:33:02) : “I wonder about the obviously human built structures in the picture?”
The picture has been taken in the middle of Longyearbyen, Svalbard – a town of about 2000 inhabitants at 78N. That’s were the north pole tourists are picked up for their flight to 89N.
Drama and emotionialism
This video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/dec/12/climate-change-photography
It travels to different parts of the world in drought. They have the right whining tone of voice. It mentions several spots of drought before the rainy season. Just like taking poley bear pictures in the summer and infer it is winter. I learned this the hard way. When I was young, I saw the poor kids in mexico begging. My relatives told me they could make more money than their parents. There is a lot of flock fleecing media outhere.
…you know, if these idiots would just let the young Arctic ice alone instead of “studying” it (stomping all over it, cutting through it with ice-breakers to measure how rotten the ice is etc.) maybe the newest ice would have a chance to consolidate a bit more?
I’m surprised there aren’t teams of climatologists camping out on the ice, building bonfires!!
Because snow and ice are melting later than 30 years ago, Tom describes the cryosphere as “looking better.” Anthony does this on occasion too, evaluating the situation from an “even if you accept that there is a global warming danger” point of view. But talking in terms of the alarmists’ presumptions means being oblivious to what the alarmists are oblivious to. Given that the real danger is global cooling, late melting (in the face of a full on El Nino no less) is objectively worse, and could even be considered ominous.
We know that cooling is coming, both on account of our relatively quiescent sun, and from the ending of the El Nino, which could mark the end of a 30 year warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (declared over by NASA in 2008). Add that this year’s late melt is not just a sign, but is causing global cooling as we speak. That huge remaining snow and ice extent is reflecting away massive amounts of sunlight, actively compounding the other cooling forces. Expect a cool summer and a cold winter.
I’m predicting the first snow in fifty years where I live in Palo Alto. Well, I predicted the same thing last year too, but it got put off by the El Nino. That heat dump has been cooling the ocean for the past year, making snow more likely going forward, on top of to belated solar uptick and the prolonged ice and snow reflection. 2 gets you 3 Palo Alto has a snowball fight next winter.
So, he says he wants to bring attention to the ice melting by walking out on the ice he believes is melting? Did he bring his swim suit?
Don Shaw (07:52:03) :
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.
Don, I did the same thing. I bought my GE stock many years ago and have decided to keep it until it recovers. Maybe I’m acting against my own interests, but I voted in favor of every Board of Directors candidate except “I’m Melting” Immelt, whom I voted against. I also voted opposite to the BOD recommendation on every proposal. I’m also trying to send a message.
THIS BOY’S FATHER, BERNARD LIAUTAUD, IS AN ASSOCIATE OF AL GORE. RESPONSIBILITY FOR ALL OF THIS CAN BE LINKED TO GORE PERSONALLY.
George Turner:
Your comment made me laugh and spew coffee out of my nose.
You owe me for a new keyboard, dude.