NW passage not so busy after all

Cosmology has “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Climate scientology has Trenberth’s “dark heat”, also known as “in the pipeline”. No doubt the abundant but undetectable vessels taking the northwest passage will be classified as “dark shipping”. 🙂

Does the truth really matter to these morons? A young TV news announcer at my local station introduced a comment about the weather this morning with, “Since it it heating up everywhere in the world,….”
I don’t remember the rest of her statement. It’s discouraging; I don’t see how anyone can fight such stupidity.

I think those “dark ships” are sometimes referred to as “nuclear submarines.”
Mark

jbird says:
July 11, 2012 at 6:43 pm

Does the truth really matter to these morons? A young TV news announcer at my local station introduced a comment about the weather this morning with, “Since it it heating up everywhere in the world,….”
I don’t remember the rest of her statement. It’s discouraging; I don’t see how anyone can fight such stupidity.

You can fight such stupidity, but don’t expect to win.
The other day a good-looking but otherwise lacking commentator on the Global TV news hour opined on the rolling power blackouts we experienced in Alberta on Monday, caused by the highly improbable coincidence of six major power generating stations (four were coal-fired and two were natural-gas-fired) having to be shut down for various reasons. She observed that the problems had been compounded by, and I kid you not, “windy turbines” (because it so happened that along with the hot weather there was an absence of wind and therefore no wind-power generation, but she did not mention that, even though the lack of wind-power generation accounted only for an infinitesimally small fraction of the total power shortfall).
What is the use of fighting? Stupidity is a gift by the gods and should not be punished.

Lol, Robert, I hope you gave them a heads up! Last year, I did a post using the ship tracker, and it was down for days. ……. oops.

I can’t resist throwing this little tidbit into the discussion. Apparently the huge ice melt isn’t cooperating according to Shell Oil. See the link here. http://www.worldoil.com/Ice_delays_Shell_Alaska_drilling.html Story was from July 9th. See bottom for date line.

jbird said:
July 11, 2012 at 6:43 pm
Does the truth really matter to these morons? A young TV news announcer at my local station introduced a comment about the weather this morning with, “Since it it heating up everywhere in the world,….”
I don’t remember the rest of her statement. It’s discouraging; I don’t see how anyone can fight such stupidity.
———————-
Against stupidity, even the gods contend in vain.
-Friedrich Schiller

“Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.” –Robert A. Heinlein

“You can lead a person to knowledge…. but you can’t make them think.”
MtK

It is a modern day Marie Celeste – not only are all the passengers missing but ships are missing as well!
(It is worse than we thought!!)

This nonsense about the Northwest Passage is just that – nonsense. Even if the Northwest Passage were completely free of ice year round it could not compete with the Northeast Passage for two important reasons – one, the distance to the Far Eastern markets from Europe through the NE Passage is shorter: two, the NW passage is uncharted – that is, the risk of running aground is greater. The NE passage has been regularly traversed since the 1920’s with the aid of Soviet (and later Russian) icebreakers and is extensively charted. The NW passage has had no commercial traffic pass through it on a regular basis and has several incidents of vessels grounding because of the poor charts.
Encyclopedia Britannica
“In the 1920s the newly established Soviet Union began developing the Northern Sea Route as a shipping lane, and domestic cargo ships started using portions of it during the summer months in the 1930s; the first successful one-season through-transit of the passage was by a Soviet icebreaker in 1934. Portions of the route were used between 1942 and 1945 during World War II by ships carrying Allied supplies from cities on the U.S. West Coast to ports in northern Siberia, notably Tiksi at the eastern edge of the Lena River delta. Domestic regional shipping grew after the war, made easier by improved navigational aids, a growing fleet of icebreakers to allow passage through the sea ice, and a lengthening shipping season—the latter having become year-round in the western section by 1980.
In the late 1960s the Soviet Union made some overtures toward allowing foreign ships to use the Northern Sea Route, but they did not officially open it to foreign shipping until 1991. However, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union late that year, Russia subsequently experienced years of economic slowdowns and political instability, which negatively affected the operation of the passage. Shipping through it thus declined into the early years of the 21st century, after which domestic use of it began to increase again. Interest by foreign shippers in using the passage also grew at that time as the Russians introduced more sophisticated icebreakers and made improvements to port facilities along the route—aided also by a general trend toward longer ice-free periods each year. The first full traverse of the route by foreign merchant ships occurred in 2009. In 2010 a passenger ferry and a tanker ship (both Russian) each became the first of its kind to successfully navigate the passage’s entire length.”
Interestingly, from a historical perspective, the German Commerce Raider ‘Komet’ sailed through the NE Passage into the Pacific with the aid of Soviet icebreakers in 1940 and Soviet warships frequently used this passage to travel from Murmansk to Vladivostok. Domestic Russian commercial traffic is quite extensive and international traffic is modest but growing.

LOL. Everyone who does not have to transit the NW passage seems to know an awful lot about it.