The stupid, it burns. #iceclimb is probably the dumbest and most transparent ploy for donations ever by Greenpeace. They say:
This building – modelled on a shard of ice – sits slap bang in the middle of Shell’s three London headquarters. They don’t want us talking about their plan to drill in the Arctic.
Gosh, drilling in the Arctic? Who would have thought that had never been tried before? Yet somehow they’d convinced 25,000+ weak minded individuals to sign up for mind numbing spam and to be solicited for donations. Get a load of the screencap from the web page:
Greenpeace thinks it was designed to look like ice, but they can’t even get that right. Wikipedia says
The Shard, also referred to as the Shard of Glass, Shard London Bridge and formerly London Bridge Tower, is a 72-storey skyscraper in London
…
The Shard was designed in 2000 by Renzo Piano, an Italian architect previously best known for creating Paris’s Pompidou Centre in collaboration with Britain’s Richard Rogers. That year, the London-based entrepreneur Irvine Sellar decided to redevelop Southwark Towers, a 1970s office block next to London Bridge station, and flew to Berlin in March 2000 to meet Piano for lunch. According to Sellar, the architect spoke of his contempt for conventional tall buildings during the meal, before flipping over the restaurant’s menu and sketching an iceberg-like sculpture emerging from the River Thames.[18] He was inspired by the railway lines next to the site, the London spires depicted by the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, and the masts of sailing ships. Piano worked with Broadway Malyan to develop the Shard’s design.
The Shard in 2013 (image: Wikipedia)
Note the first part. It isn’t referred to as “the Berg” by Londoners, but “the Shard” and also “He was inspired by the railway lines next to the site, the London spires depicted by the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, and the masts of sailing ships.”
Apparently the general public doesn’t see an iceberg there. But hey, whatever works for marketing to idiots.
If you want a laugh, watch here: http://iceclimb.savethearctic.org/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Irregardless of its etiology, the design looks absolutely nothing like an ice berg and one wonders why on Earth Shell would ever want its building to look like an ice berg Ice bergs and oil drilling in the Arctic have no conceivable connection.
And here’s the email they sent out, now whats up with that Artic ice loss claim ;`)
“Hi xxxxxxx
If you’re reading this email it means I’m clinging to the side of the Shard – attempting something that’s never been done before: scaling Europe’s tallest skyscraper.
If we make it to the top, we plan to install a giant piece of art in direct view of Shell’s three London headquarters down around me. We can see them, so I know they can see us.
WATCH LIVE and send your message of support to show the whole world that we don’t want Arctic drilling.
I’ve been climbing for years, but this is the biggest challenge I’ve ever taken on.
Am I scared? Hell yeah. But I know that fear is only what you make of it. For me this is a personal act of bravery, and I hope that beyond all else it can encourage anyone hesitating over taking action – no matter what scale – to take that step today.
There are only six of us up here, but there are millions of us in every corner of the world who want the Arctic protected.
The most effective action we can do now is to make everyone else care for the Arctic as we do, and to do that we need to make it news. This is not a niche subject. This affects every single person on our shared planet.
Everyone should know that we’ve lost 80% of the Arctic sea ice in the last 30 years, and that should make people want to protect it. Not to drill for more oil that caused the melting in the first place.
Follow our progress on LIVE TV and please share this page with everyone you know on Facebook, Twitter and over email. Let’s make this as big as we can.
Shell doesn’t want us talking about their dangerous Arctic oil drilling plans. Together we can shout about them from the rooftops 😉
Wish us luck,
Victo (and Sandra, Sabine, Liesbeth, Wiola and Ali) x”
They are close to the top now. Toby Young at The Telegraph questions why 6 women, and says it seems sexist, in addition to the idiocy: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100226060/the-greenpeace-shard-protest-is-not-merely-incomprehensible-its-downright-sexist/
arthur4563
It isn’t a Shell building
REPLY: can’t wait to hear “deploy the art weapon!” over the radio. 😉 – Anthony
Release the Krakpot!
Don’t give them bandwidth Anthony!
Tom Trevor says:
July 11, 2013 at 7:43 am
“It is true the people who took place in this protest are idiots. But honestly Anthony, I think you are in danger of jumping the shark on a couple of your posts here. This one and the one on the temperature records at death valley being recorded on different pieces of paper and having very slightly different numbers from each other. I have commented on the death valley post over there.”
You might have noticed that Anthony is a meteorologist by education and is therefore interested in the minutiae of historic and contemporary weather recording.
Although 1,016 feet up, I highly doubt what they refer to as “art” will be high art. Although, perhaps they were high when they made it.
“Slap bang in the middle of Shell’s three London headquarters”. That is to say, nothing to do with Shell. And, by the way, there’s only Shell Centre on the South Bank, one stop on the tube from the Shard left: Shell Mex House on the North Bank is sold (with a few stragglers left in rented accommodation), and we have a few floors in a building at Canary Wharf as overflow while Shell Centre is redeveloped. Where I *don’t* work, because I telecommute, like a large number of my colleagues. And unlike these climate warriors.
Believe it or not, there’s not just one, but several internet forums that track the construction of skyscrapers around the world. I’m a member of two of them, SkyscraperPage and Skyscrapercity, and watched the building being planned and built through them, along with many other members. The tower was always likened to a shard of glass, not a shard of ice.
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=141871
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=407549
Furthermore, the search term “shard of ice” doesn’t even have enough hits to show up on Google trends.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22shard+of+ice%22%2C+%22shard+of+glass%22#q=%22shard%20of%20ice%22%2C%20%22shard%20of%20glass%22&cmpt=q
Anyone who says it’s supposed to represent a shard of ice is making $**+ up.
Apparently the phrase “ice shard” is relatively new. Some of the pieces of ice in the Arctic, for example, have an obelisk-like look to them. 25 meters to go.
The vast majority of Arctic drilling over the next 30 years will come from Russia with financial and technical partnerships. Let’s see them climb a building in Moscow.
ROTHFLMAO!! Best one-liner I’ve seen in a blog all week, maybe all year!
I’m in the UK and when it was being built it was always referred to a shard of glass. As for the “art” they wanted to deploy it seems its too windy for them and has been allegedly cancelled (its too windy for the normal staff to go out there at 40mph). I blame the BBC for highlighting them going up there, they interviewed some tourists at the bottom who were lass than pleased that the observation platform was closed due to this pathetic stunt and therefore couldn’t enjoy part of their holiday.
Idiots.
@ur momisugly D.J. Hawkins, seconded.
I was using the phrase “shard of ice” as an extension of the iceberg bit quoted in the article itself. If those more knowledgeable than I know that the designer never ever had ice in his mind when he was designing the building, and therefore the wikipedia entry quoted by Anthony is also incorrect, then I retract my complaint.
It just seemed very foolish to me that in the first paragraph of this original unedited article, Anthony posts that these Greenpeace protestors are foolish for likening the shard to a piece of ice, then to prove his point,quotes a wikipedia entry which says that the design itself was was inspired by ice according to the designer of the building.
If that wikipedia entry is wrong, then I retract my complaint, but maintain that posting self contradictory articles only serves to give ammunition to the climate alarmists to attack the owners, friends and supporters of this otherwise excellent site.
Trying to shed some clarity on the dispute. From the passage quoted, it appears the designer sketched something that ‘looked like’ an iceberg, but was actually inspired by the other things stated. So, although on casual observation, the design may look like it was inspired by a shard of ice, that was not the original intent of the design.
Greenpeace should be classified as a “Terrorist Organisation” and dealt with accordingly.
Louis Hooffstetter says:
July 11, 2013 at 7:15 am
“I’m slightly envious of Greenpeace. I wish I could figure out how to milk money from morons they way they do.”
In the US, Greenpeace and other green whacko groups have the willing complicity and support of the US Congress, via the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), which by it’s abuse is pretty much become the number 1 fundraiser for these morons.
For those citizens of the US on WUWT, there could hardly be a more important repeal (outside of Obamacare, of course) than the repeal of EAJA.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
July 11, 2013 at 8:10 am
…
Even at the worst accident in Alaska’s history, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, Greenpeace was hardly protesting.
Too many coincidences to be just coincidence. Maybe something to do with who sponsors them and who not?
Well, they are running a protection racket.
Well there is a rush on to save the planet before it saves itself. I hope they aren’t using modern ropes that are made of fossil fuel as the main ingredient. A good advert for Shell would have a picture of the climbers with arrows pointing at the parts of their gear and clothing made from fossil fuels. Even the metals can’t be forged with solar and wind power…. and the molds, and the spinning and weaving machines and the way they got to the tower….Maybe Josh could have a go at this.
Their stunt was successful. They made it. From their statement: “As the ice disappears our global weather becomes more unpredictable. Farming gets harder. Hunger gets worse.”
If only they had a brain.
Have they been charged yet?
The Canadian protester living in Hackney should be reminded that an Australian was recently refused permission to remain in the country after he succeeded in disrupting the annual Oxford/Cambridge boat race. His continuing presence was described as not being “conducive to the public good”. Unfortunately that also applies to more than a few members of Greenpeace, whatever their motives.
Usually I hate wet, windy days. Not any more.
Personally I always thought it looked most like a ripoff of the TransAmerica Tower in SF.