UPDATE: BBC (and now the Independent) commit the same FAIL. See below.
More “Row to the Pole” nonsense writ large:
Ummmm…no, Mr. Hough, the Telegraph’s headline and story are simply wrong. You are a victim of spin and/or a failed geography lesson.
First congratulations, to the RttP team for reaching their destination, which is not a pole of any kind, much less the actual “North Pole”. I didn’t think they would make it.
As I explained before the trip even started, there’s no “pole” achievement here, not even close. They are 738 KM short of the actual magnetic pole. The 1996 magnetic pole doesn’t exist there anymore and thus can’t be a pole of any kind.
The Telegraph article says:
The successful trip to the Pole, described as the “greatest ocean rows of all time”, was only possible because of more seasonal ice-melt in the Arctic that has opened the waters up.
No mention of the fact that they aren’t even close. The actual North pole is 790 miles away:
The FAIL is strong with this one. h/t to reader “Angry Exile”
And the BBC is in on the act of shoddy journalism too:
Kitefreak says:
BBC reporting that the Pultney rowing expedition has reached “the north pole”. Reported on Radio Scotland at 8am (main news bulletin) and on the news website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-14665937
Absolutely no mention on the radio or the website that it’s the magnetic north pole from ’96, no, they just say the folks have rowed TO THE NORTH POLE.
Pure propaganda.
UPDATE: The BBC commits the same FAIL here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9573000/9573302.stm
What a bunch of liars.
UPDATE2: The load of porkies continues…now the Independent repeats the lie.
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This really ticks me off, and makes me want to double my efforts against the liars.
This is what the warmists don’t understanding. Lies like this is why an army of skeptics is being born.
An army of very motivated skeptics!
I think most here are missing the more important thing…. The North Pole is MOVING! Clearly the impact of Global Warming on the location of the North Pole needs to be considered. How can we function with our compasses all going crazy because Global Warming is causing our North Pole to move about?
Think of the penguins and whales – won’t someone think of the penguins and whales!
Rhoda …polar bears do not hibernate. In winter they go north looking for seals or whales or hapless humans.
From that area over into Eastern Siberia the ice edge appears to be solidifying and will soon start its annual equatorward progression. One thing I’m noticing is that as with past years, the remoted sensed depiction of the ice edge position and concentrations is out of whack with what the NWS Anchorage Ice desk has been reporting. Also, FYI, the Ice Desk forecast plenty of new ice to show up West of the Date Line, over the next 5 days.
A final observation – The various graphs depicting continued decrease in extent are either reflecting net loss in lower longitudes or are flat out wrong.
“”””” Lord Beaverbrook says:
August 26, 2011 at 8:03 am
‘The father-of-two captained the team that broke the London to Paris rowing record in 1999 and walked unsupported to the North Pole in 1992′ “””””
Well even if they walked on water, they would still have been supported; well maybe excepting walking on the bottom as a special degenerate case !!
@ur momisugly Jit August 26, 2011 at 3:08 pm
Scotch whisky, no ‘e’
Irish whiskey, definitely an ‘e’.
But, to be fair, we are talking about Old Pulteney Scotch Whisky.
The Whiskey boat expedition was never more than a publicity stunt. And the media always gets things wrong. So why is WUWT making such a big deal out of this? There has been far more coverage of these Whiskey boat clowns than they deserve. Meanwhile actual coverage of the real conditions of the ice on WUWT has been minimal this year. Why is that I wonder?
Go look at the graphs? (Thanks Anthony for a wonderful resource). We have already achieved a “lowest ice since 2007” with the clear possibility of a record low. It is going to be very close. Go look at the satellite coverage of ice extent. Both passages are open. You really could circumnavigate the pole in clear water right now in a fast enough boat.
Will we break the 2007 record low? When Irene blows itself out in the Arctic in a couple of weeks time it is going to carry some unusually warm air and strong winds up there. I would expect to see the ice graphs take a bit of a dip when that happens. And a bit of a dip is all that is would be needed to drop us below the 2007 level into record low territory.
So by all means poke fun at the clowns in the whiskey boat and the media who wouldn’t know a fact if they tripped over it, but the real story is that Arctic ice levels have NOT recovered from 2007 and we may indeed be headed into record low territory.
Is that a problem? I don’t think so. But if it happens the news media will be full of stories of “record low” ice levels in a couple of weeks time which will be a lot less easy to poke fun at because, not to put too fine a point on it, they’ll be perfectly true.
TedK says:
August 26, 2011 at 11:31 am
because either the Scotch are easily misled . . .
They won’t like that!
Richard111 says:
August 26, 2011 at 8:41 am
Ummm…., in the Arctic (and Antarctic) circle, the sun shines 24/7 in the summer…..
Come on! Where Josh when you need ‘im?
LexingtonGreen says:
August 26, 2011 at 9:25 am
Probably because you spell ‘Whisky’ the Irish way. Not a thing tolerated for Scotch!
Wish Jon Stewart would get ahold of this one. Let’s see:
1. Didn’t make it to either the magnetic or geographic pole.
2. Didn’t row all the way, had to carry the boat over ice at the end.
So which part of “Row to the Pole” did they actually accomplish?
Epic Fail all around.
In 1994 with friends I sailed a small boat to latitude 80N, which last time I checked was 600 nm from the real North Pole. That year the ice pack was 100 or so miles further north (of Svalvard). We got closer than these yahoos did and no one noticed. Perhaps it’s because we didn’t announce it and weren’t trying to make headlines. Or perhaps it’s because we didn’t have a whiskey brand sponsoring us, although we did consume quite a bit during the trip. Or maybe it was because in 1994 AGW was no big deal and no one cared how far the ice pack receded each year.
Whatever…..this expedition is nothing more than “manufactured news”. Let’s get on with something more important.
Facts are not the issue. Entertainment, or the “message”, or encouragement for the effort, are rewarded here.
What else is treated thus? Ah, right. The changing climate ….
Ian H says:
August 26, 2011 at 5:53 pm
… Meanwhile actual coverage of the real conditions of the ice on WUWT has been minimal this year. Why is that I wonder?
Go look at the graphs? (Thanks Anthony for a wonderful resource). We have already achieved a “lowest ice since 2007″ with the clear possibility of a record low. It is going to be very close.
___________________________
Wow, a record low! Lowest since, what, 1970? Do you think, just maybe, there might have been even less ice at the pole sometime prior to 1970? Maybe? Or is a “record low” since 1970 a catastrophe?
And why ridicule the Row to the Pole team? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because they did neither, i.e. the hauled the boat, over ice, to a location that isn’t a pole. So which part of “Row to the Pole” did they accomplish????
Next year I’m organizing an expedition to “Walk to the Peak of Everest”… except I’m actually gonna climb Mt. Olympia here in Wisconsin and actually I’m gonna take the ski lift. Hope I can get Old Putney to sponsor me!
Well they reached their objective, so well done. To suggest any similarity to Shackleton’s feat is a big stretch IMHO and nobody really expected the media to bother with facts, did they?
Well, their latitude is not clear – very clever, youse guys! – but Ellesmere Island extends from about latitude 78 north to about 82 north. (+/- depending on the day of the week and the number of penguins landing there.)
The fiction of 24 hours of sun is sort of true for areas of the Arctic north of the Arctic circle: What really happens is that – at EVERY point north of the Arctic Circle (66.5 north, based on a ecliptic variation of 23.5) will see the sun towards the north at least once during the year.
As you go further north, the sun remains above the horizon for longer and longer periods of time during the arctic summer, during a period centered around the June 22-23 each year.
As you go further north – to a max of the pole at 90 north – the sun appears higher and higher in sky towards the north each midnight. At the “perfect north pole” you would see the sun at the same 23.5 elevation all the way around the horizon at the same height all “day” for 24 hours. Great. Fantastic.
Every foot further south you walk, the sun gets closer and closer to the horizon at midnight each day. (To be fair, the sun also gets higher in the sky towards the south at noon every day as you walk south. In Key West, just north of the Tropic at 25 north latitude, it appears just about directly overhead at this very same moment at noon on June 22.) At any given latitude between the Arctic Circle and the pole, the sun will be above the horizon for 24 hours only a very few number of days every year (the further south, the fewer the number of days!) and as you go further south for any given day of the year different from 22 June, the lower the sun gets at midnight every night.
Thus, at Ellesmere’s nominal 80 north latitude, there are several days when they “could” have photographed a midnight sun. Including today, by the way. But by Aug 30, it will have set before midnight at this assumed latitude of 80 north, then risen again in the northeast horizon at few minutes later on Sept 1.
On Sept 22, it will rise in the east at 0600, then set due west at 1800 that evening. Just like every other location on earth.
RAC;
The next one will be the first. Wrong pole.
>;-p
I wonder why the Telegraph is not allowing comments on this story!
The Telegraph now has a report with comments enabled, mentions the 1996 date but weasels a reason why that location is used.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/8726484/British-crew-become-first-to-row-to-magnetic-North-Pole.html#disqus_thread
As I have said before, the Arctic is warming thanks to warm water currents from the Atlantic Ocean, not because of any imaginary greenhouse effect. This makes any claims of this trip having “proved” global warming just childish babble. The original source of this warm water in the Arctic is the Gulf Stream which turns east in the North Atlantic and spreads out into the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The warming started at the beginning of the twentieth century, prior to which there was nothing but two thousand years of slow cooling. Temperature of the warm currents reaching the Arctic from the Atlantic exceeds anything seen for the last two thousand years. It is not out of the question that if the path of these currents should change the warming could be interrupted by a cooling incident or even stopped. The record shows that after the start of the warming at the beginning of the century there was a temporary cooling period from 1940 to 1970, after which the warming picked up again at the rate of 0.5 degrees per decade. This switch from warming to cooling to warming again can easily be understood if currents are its cause but it cannot be duplicated by any sort of greenhouse warming. There is no doubt that the changing course of the Gulf Stream is behind this. Now Nils-Axel Mörner has suggested (E&E April 2011) that the changing course of the Gulf Stream could have a much larger influence if it should be combined with the influence of a solar minimum. According to him this happened during the Little Ice Age when the Gulf Stream, instead of terminating in the North Sea as it does today, turned southeast instead and entered the Bay of Biscay. He figures that this could happen again by 2050, freezing the Arctic and cooling Europe. I would not have taken it seriously before but when I realized that the warmth behind today’s Arctic warming is actually carried there by the Gulf Stream I began to see the possibility. Monkey with the Gulf Stream and you will monkey with Arctic temperature for sure, not to mention Europe.
Lying blighters. What’s really annoying is that millions of people will be taken in by this warmist clap-trap. It reminds me of the time I drove to the summit of Everest (until I had to park up, and walk the rest of the way (until I got to Base Camp, and turned back)). OK, I made that up – but it would be about as noteworthy and demonstrable of AGW as this horlicks of an expedition.
I had the thought that Old Pultney could ask for their Whisky back, but of course the crew have been busily recycling the product to melt the ice. Damn, one for the cartoonists, depicting this heroic act – shades of yellow snow!!
TedK says:
Thanks for the link TedK… I have sent them some comments.
I wonder when the peer reviewed paper of the scientific data collected during this expedition will be published ;-)? (not holding my breath 🙂 /sarc