From the truth is stranger than fiction department…
From the Independent By Roger Maynard in Sydney
Scientists are seeking the help of the Australian and US navies to repel Somali pirates who are threatening one of the world’s key climate monitoring programmes.
With about a quarter of the Indian Ocean currently off-limits to marine experts, Australian researchers have asked the navies to help them plug a critical gap in their study of international weather patterns.
They hope to deploy about 20 robotic instruments in a no-go area north of Mauritius. The instruments, which record ocean heat and salinity patterns, are programmed to submerge and eventually resurface to upload their data to satellites.
But with piracy in the western Indian Ocean making it too dangerous for commercial or research vessels to deploy the robotic devices, Australia’s government research department, the CSIRO, hope naval forces will help them out.
…
full story here
Avast, lest ye CERN data be flushed down the scuppers.
Ric Werme says:
July 18, 2011 at 4:46 am
“…they probably don’t even send an engineer to deploy them any more, let alone a bona fide climate scientist…”
A scientist worth his salt would figure out how to engineer a disposable design into a sonobouy specification. A single P-3 Orion could deploy more of them than you could imagine. The scientists would be rewarded with gobs of raw data that would keep them in research grants for analyzing the data for years.
The interesting thing about the Pastafarian Pirate theory of climate is that, unlike the greenhouse theory, it has predictive power. The world stopped warming during the decade when the Somali pirates started increasing. Coincidence? I think not!
Paul Nottingham says:
July 18, 2011 at 2:20 am
“x axis needs looking at”
——————–
It still needs looking at. Specifically, the leftmost value is neither the highest or lowest value, which it should be. (35,000 is less than 45,000 but more than 17.)
Ramon!
Rather than “Gilbert and Sullivan” pirates think of a combination of carjacking and house invasion, with the any police response hundreds of miles and hours/days away.
The pirate danger is very real, the scientists are very wise in wanting protection in that area. As skeptics we cannot simultaneously condemn scientists for lack of real world data AND for wanting to stay alive/free while collecting the data.
The article states that the buoys are, in fact, automated, but that they need to be put into place.
What the CSIRO personnel are up against:
The death toll for piracy is at 60+
There are about 19 ships and 500 people being held hostage right now by various Somali gangs.
Think of the media frenzy if a Boeing 747 or Airbus A380 with a full passenger load was to be captured and held for ransom: it would be non-stop 24/7 coverage. Because the hostages have been captured over a long period and the “giggle” factor associated with the word pirate there is a tendency to minimize the danger and horrors these people are facing.
Bob Shapiro says:
July 18, 2011 at 1:06 pm
“Should be”? Perhaps on a scientifically credible graph that would be true, but this graph is a parody and was never expected to appear in a peer reviewed paper. Well, perhaps in a paper reviewed by the author’s peers and published in a humor journal.
Or perhaps in a letter to the Kansas School Board.
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage.
As I have said before, hungry, disenfranchised and poor people will do desperate things. I am waiting for the first report that the humanitarian crisis, a REAL crisis, building in northern Kenya will be attributed to AGW. There is drought, the region IS drought prone…but the biggest “problem” is COST of food, not scarcity. It’s there, just needs to get from where it is to where it is needed.
Even people in Addis Ababa are going hungry. Why? Not drought…PRICE! Its too expensive to eat there now.
No doubt they’re worried the pirates will be attracted by their valuable cargo of carbon offsets.
Only 17 pirates in 2000?
Seems low, somehow.
mojo says:
July 20, 2011 at 11:20 am
> Only 17 pirates in 2000?
> Seems low, somehow.
The number has been increasing hyperbolically since then.