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

Anthony, please remind John Coleman to say Antarctic. In his fine report, at times he said Arctic instead.
Congratulations on taking the high road once again Anthony, and offering any assistance to help protect human lives.

On a side note may mention that they left from Invercargil in NZ, home of the notorious Bluff Oyster – no doubt that all involved feasted on these before setting sail for the deep south so you can be rest assured they will find an outlet during those long cold antarctic days as they sit and wait to be rescued.

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
January 1, 2014 at 10:14 am
[1] How can a ship carry a helicopter which can’t fly over water?
[2] The helicopter doesn’t need to actually land on ice in the sense of apply its full weight;
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[1] – The captain was quoted as saying he could not fly on open water without floats. You comment that this rule is limited to commercial tours but in fact it applies whenever passengers (“non-essential personnel”) are onboard. Having two engines does get around the rule to some extent but the KA-32 is a very special aircraft with counter-rotating blades and not a single main / tail rotor. It may not be able to climb at above the minimum specification required for 2 engine aircraft. I assume the captain of the ship knows this and that explains his comment. Also there are different rules for flying over open water. Essential personnel (yes) versus passengers (no). I do know them – I hope I didn’t give you the impression I did. I’m involved with helicopters but not for search and rescue or ferry service so we only have essential personnel onboard. There are additional rules that include flotation devices. I’m not sure whether life jackets (I assume from the boat) qualify as floatation suits (one piece with zipper) that may be required by the crew and all passengers when flying over more than a few hundred meters of open water.
[2] – I’ve seen these helicopter rescues in the movies too. They usually use small R-44 or Bell 206 helicopters, with trained pilots and stunt men. Having 12 people climb aboard a 5 tonne helicopter while it is hovering at maximum rotation over moving pack ice seems rather dangerous to me. I’d like to watch that movie but I wouldn’t want to star in it. I expect the helicopter will set down on the pack ice, lower rotor speed and then have each person climb on board one after the other with help from the flight crew. Twelve people at 175 lbs each is literally a tonne of people. I hope the ice doesn’t move under the helicopter.
As I understand the captain of the Snow Dragon is waiting at the edge of the ice-field for the Aurora to pull alongside. Assuming the weather cooperates (good visibility and no wind) the helicopter will then set off for the stranded climate scientists who will journey down to the pack ice in groups of 12. If everything works out it should only take a few hours to make all the moves. Then the climate scientists will be transferred from the Snow Dragon to the Aurora and taken to even greater safety.

janama says:
January 1, 2014 at 11:12 am
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Some accounts have the origin of the cruise from Bluff, NZ with the fog grounding the helicopter coming from Watt Bay.
Yet more irony.

Soberly:
0. These people are adults, not children AFAIK;
1. The ‘organising minds’ of the expedition are heavily involved in promoting falsehoods which are perhaps already costing lives;
2. They play by different rules to you guys;
3. The game they are playing started out as collective-neurotic, ie characterised by self-fueling anxiety about the world;
4. Now they are being successfully challenged and refusing to step down, they are inevitably transitioning to a much more dangerous state for the rest of us, ie delusional psychosis;
5. This means they are truly starting to deny reality, eg seeing things that aren’t there (clear water), and bumping into things that are there (ice);
6. They will get better at doing this, and their strategies will increasingly and nakedly be based around ‘the big lie’;
7. It’s not going to get better, despite areas where sanity appears to be rearing it’s head at last (Australia);
8. A mosaic iron-curtain of news/information/knowledge domains will arise (the BBC is finding less and less that it can actually report on);
9. Maybe skeptics will find themselves labeled first as dissidents, then as lunatics, and marginalised Soviet-style.
10. Maybe none of this will happen, is happening – I think it’s interesting to imagine it, and just to remember that the first casualties of conflicts are often the good, whose goodness is simply used against them.
My wife says using ‘they’s and ‘them’s proves I’m the crazy one.

“if these anti-rational warmists ever got to implement the anti-industrial policies they advocate, they would kill hundreds of millions of people”
That’s their goal, Hume. >:-(

bbc world service spoke to Luck-Baker overnight australia time. missed the start, but finished by asking him if – when it’s all over – the Expedition will be seen as a failure or a success. Luck-Baker pauses briefly to feign careful consideration, but says “as a success” because some particular penguin species’ numbers are greatlly depleted. can’t find it online as yet.
bbc documents the Luck-Baker info:
31 Dec: BBC: Rescue for Antarctic ice-bound ship under threat
However, the captain of the Xue Long has told the Shokalskiy that he is keeping his vessel in a “holding position”.
The Aurora Australis, is now understood to be planning to carve through the dense thick pack to assist the Xue Long…
Under the initial plan, the remaining crew members would have stayed on board until another, more powerful US icebreaker arrived in up to 10 days’ time, the BBC’s Andrew Luck-Baker reports from on board the Akademik Shokalskiy
However, it may now be that all of those on board may have to wait for the US icebreaker, the Polar Star, he adds…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25558276

should have made it clear Luck-Baker was suggesting the depletion in the numbers of the particular penguin species was discovered by the scientists on board, with the inference CC did it.

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
January 1, 2014 at 12:07 pm
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Most countries recognize US/FAA regulations. Canada has its own. Some European countries have even stricter regulations. Mexico recognizes both Canada and US regulations. I’m not sure how things work on international waters but I suspect Chinese crews would use their own regulations as American crews would use theirs. Helicopter pilots cannot automatically fly into other countries air jurisdictions. In Mexico, for example, our Canadian pilot could not fly without a Mexican pilot also at the controls (so we required dual control aircraft).
We are not in an emergency situation yet. No lives are eminently at risk. The course of action therefore is to stay put while normal procedures are put in play. Hopping into a helicopter that is not equipped to evacuate people over open water would lead to serious consequences for the crew if anything really bad were to happen. So they stick to procedure.
But what if the hull of the ship was suddenly crushed and the ship began sinking? The climate scientists would drop their martinis and get out onto the pack ice and the Chinese helicopter would fly over at top speed – damn the poor visibility and lack of flotation suits, those are just rules. And while the ship sank beneath the icy waves the head of the expedition would shake his head and say “It really was worse than I thought.”
But unless that happens we will have a drawn out “safe” evacuation. One where the climate scientists slowly run out of booze while the Chinese ice-breaker waits ever patiently on the edge of the ice sheet. As someone once said “Adventure is when you don’t stick to the plan.”