WUWT and WeatherBell help KUSI-TV with a weather forecasting request from ice-trapped ship in Antarctica Akademik Shokalskiy

Oldseadog says:
January 1, 2014 at 7:33 am
“As for the crew being menial workers, have you not noticed that all Merchant Seamen are the scum of the earth except during war time?”
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Absolutely I have. I didn’t mean that I think they are menial workers, certainly not, just that their employers do. That was my point really – they are just as vauable as the rest of the people, just as much people deserving of rescue. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Janice Moore writes:
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P.S. Yet another resounding blow for free markets over socialism: During Hurricane (a real one) Katrina, it was privately owned Home Depot who got the supplies and equipment through; when 33 Chilean miners needed rescuing from the bowels of the earth, it was private companies in the U.S., Germany, and other
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I went through the great ice storm of 1998 in the vicinity of Ottawa Canada. This was a massive ice storm that was so serious that it destroyed all but one of the major transmission serving Montreal. There were serious plans made to evacuate Montreal ( a city of several million people) if the remaining one failed. During the storm, the supply chains of privately owned companies failed. There were no batteries or generators to be had at any price, as two examples. In Canada, On the other hand, the Canadian army responded with an immediate and effective relief plan.
As anyone who has ever worked in private industry the archetype of the over-paid, entitled and incompetent executive is completely realistic. I remember working fro one who did nothing but sit in his office and design his home. The free market created the DOTCOM bubble, teh fiber optic bubble, the liar mortgage bubble, the sovereign debt bubble. The free market is no panacea.

[snip – comment in poor taste and not appropriate here – Anthony]

Hopefully they won’t end up as candidate’s for the Darwin awards

“The message was that they needed better weather information on the ship”
One cannot help but point out that it would have been preferable to have obtained this information in advance. If the expedition’s leader had determined at the planning stage that one of his premises was false because ice at the Antartica has been increasing rather than decreasing, would he have even proceeded with this expedition?

It appears from this tweet that there is still quite an education curve facing the expedition’s leader.
“@wendy_harmer Told Prof Chris Turney on radio this a.m. his trapped ship being touted as evidence of no global warming.Oh how he laughed at the “loonies”!
4:58 PM – 30 Dec 13″

TAG says:
January 1, 2014 at 8:10 am
Janice Moore writes:
================================
P.S. Yet another resounding blow for free markets over socialism: During Hurricane (a real one) Katrina, it was privately owned Home Depot who got the supplies and equipment through; when 33 Chilean miners needed rescuing from the bowels of the earth, it was private companies in the U.S., Germany, and other
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I went through the great ice storm of 1998 in the vicinity of Ottawa Canada. This was a massive ice storm that was so serious that it destroyed all but one of the major transmission serving Montreal. […snip…]
As anyone who has ever worked in private industry the archetype of the over-paid, entitled and incompetent executive is completely realistic. I remember working fro one who did nothing but sit in his office and design his home. The free market created the DOTCOM bubble, the fiber optic bubble, the liar mortgage bubble, the sovereign debt bubble. The free market is no panacea.
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TAG:
Although not as bad as the storm of ’98 we have had two ice storms here near Rockwood in 2013, the first knocking down power lines for 4 days and the second (Dec-23 to Dec-29) for 6 days. The first thing you learn from the public hydro company is that you are responsible for clearing the trees off your private property. The second thing you learn is you can’t start doing this until they come and pull the fuse and ground the power line. We called on Dec-23 and no one ever came to pull the fuse and ground the line. We spent two days cutting trees away from the power lines (we live in the country, have 5 chain saws and have the experience) and hired an experienced tree cutter to top the trees that were touching the line (which we then cleaned up). Most of the crews working in our area were private contractors hired by the town of Milton because they just don’t have the manpower. A few years ago we watched the town of Milton actually planting trees below power lines within the city limits – directly below the power lines. All the work that has been done to trim the trees off the power lines has not addressed the real problem. The trees remain alive below the power lines and will eventually grow in to cause the same problem in the future. The public sector is no panacea.
In the previous ice storm in early 2013 five popular trees came down and broke our line in three sections. I had to call a private tree cutter and a private linesman – both who previously worked for the public hydro company but were let go during cutbacks. The linesman would not go near the wires until the hydro company pulled the fuse and grounded the line. So we waited….
Our hydro company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading the lines for solar and wind turbine installations and yet has never even bothered to keep the trees away from the transmission lines. And the town of Milton (and other municipalities) still plants trees directly below power lines, purely for aesthetic reasons.
The head of public hydro in Ontario in 2001 (Clitheroe) spent several million dollars on her office renovation, had a limousine driver, golf club membership and when they fired her, she sued the the province over her measly $307,000 a year pension. Over-paid, entitled and incompetent executive indeed! Public service too.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftavrida.co.ua%2Fnews%2F16523-passazhirov-s-nis-akademik-shokalskiy-resheno-evakuirovat-vertoletom.html
Per Australian Maritime Safety (AMSA) request, USCGC Polar star bypassed their port call upon Sydney, Australia and are about one week out from the ice margin near Akademik Shokalsky.

“My first thought was that no matter how much we’ve been criticizing the expedition for its silliness, that if such a request had reached all the way from Antarctica to me, I’d do everything I could to help.”
BRAVO!

That was very good of you to help them. Glad you could.
I was being a bit sarcastic and silly in the main thread when I suggested they depended on their own modeling to operate under. But it sounds like they don’t know how to do real close term forecasting. Something I suspected but it is interesting to see it confirmed.

“We’re the AAE, who have travelled far,
having fun doing science in Antarctica(r)!”
I have a number of friends who were higher educated in the fine arts at various times over the last decade or so, and one phrase I noticed, popular among them that you rarely hear from non-artists, is “making art”. I always figured you paint a painting or you sculpt a sculpture or whatever, but it turns out those things are too specific and art is very unspecific. For example, making art might include things like video taping yourself take a nap, or possibly the art resides in your conscious aesthetic decision making process not to video tape the nap. “What are you going to do this weekend?” “I don’t know, I’ll probably go see Godspeed You Black Emperor and get drunk and try to make some art.” In other words, “making art” is a phrase you use to indicate that, unlike non-artists, when you dick around and waste time, what you’re doing is *important*. “Doing science” kind of has a similar ring to me these days.