Aurora Australis rescue ship told to hold position to potentially assist Chinese vessel Xue Long

I am contemplating the dynamics how one ice breaker would rescue another. As one would approach, there would be extreme danger from the movement of one icebreaker shifting the pressures from the ice and pushing into the hull of the other. There must be something more to it: a distance or angle of approach that has to be maintained? Or does one shift the ice about so the other can proceed? Does someone know anything about it?

One intresting point… is the ship is currently @ur momisugly 67 degrees south. the water is still filled with ice in summer. Here is a webpage of city @ur momisugly 67 north… http://www.bodo.no/wips/1251439321/

Both science and politics are involved in the CAGW movement, and the entrapment of the ships in the Antarctic sea raise issues for both that are inconvenient.
It was a deep strategic political mistake for the warmists to bring so much attention to the Antarctic. Regulars at WUWT know that though Arctic sea ice is down since the 1970’s, Antarctic sea ice is up by a greater amount, so that global sea ice is up overall.
This is very inconvenient to the CAGW cause for several reasons. Consider just one: one of the supposed positive feedbacks adding to the fear of catastrophic warming is the albedo effect of reduced sea ice leading more solar radiation to absorbed by the Earth (rather than reflected back into space). But the reality is that more sea ice is now present, hence a negative feedback is in place, contributing to global cooling.
Far better for the CAGW’ers to distract attention away from the South pole, where the news is inconvenient to their case. The news may get worse if the ships are not freed before the Antarctic fall weather sets in and the ice gets worse. The ship(s) could be stuck for years, or at least until next southern summer. Every attempt to free them will be on display in the media and will be bad political news for the CAGW’ers.
The global spotlight will be on the enlarging Antarctic sea. The attempts to portray the rising volume of Antarctic sea ice as a consequence of rising CO2 will be understood by most to be asinine

re: Rob Ricket says January 3, 2014 at 9:52 am
Rob, some of the Russian nuclear-powered ice breakers seem to use this power plant design: “KLT-40 reactor”. Google returns sufficient information to determine how much ‘cooling’ water would be required to cool a power plant capable of generating the 130 to 170 or so MWt (thermal) energy a KLT-40 plant is capable of producing.
The IAEA reviews a proposal (below) to implement this power plant into ‘floating’ seaside electrical generating stations that could be towed to a pier where it could then ‘feed the grid’:
http://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/aris/2013/25.KLT-40S.pdf
.

Phaaz Spaas:
At January 3, 2014 at 8:44 am you say

It would be more convincing if the scientific case against AGW could be made.

Clearly, you have not been paying attention, so let me inform you of the fundamentals of the “scientific case against AGW”.
Firstly, there is no evidence of discernible AGW; none, zilch, nada.
Please note the stark nature of my statement: it requires only one item of empirical evidence for it to be refuted. But there is no such evidence. If you can find one item of evidence for discernible AGW then you will surely be awarded at least one Nobel Prize because three decades of research conducted world-wide at a cost of over $5 billion per year has failed to find any. (In the 1990s Ben Santer claimed to have found such evidence but his claim was almost immediately shown to be an artifact of his having cherry-picked a subset from the data he assessed.)
Secondly, the Null Hypothesis applies.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
In the case of climate science there is a hypothesis that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs, notably CO2) in the air will increase global temperature. There are good reasons to suppose this hypothesis may be true, but the Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed the GHG changes have no effect unless and until increased GHGs are observed to increase global temperature. That is what the scientific method decrees. It does not matter how certain some people may be that the hypothesis is right because observation of reality (i.e. empiricism) trumps all opinions.
Please note that the Null Hypothesis is a hypothesis which exists to be refuted by empirical observation. It is a rejection of the scientific method to assert that one can “choose” any subjective Null Hypothesis one likes. There is only one Null Hypothesis: i.e. it has to be assumed a system has not changed unless it is observed that the system has changed.
However, deciding a method which would discern a change may require a detailed statistical specification.
In the case of global climate no unprecedented climate behaviours are observed so the Null Hypothesis decrees that the climate system has not changed.
Importantly, an effect may be real but not overcome the Null Hypothesis because it is too trivial for the effect to be observable. Human activities have some effect on global temperature for several reasons. An example of an anthropogenic effect on global temperature is the urban heat island (UHI). Cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Clearly, the Null Hypothesis decrees that UHI is not affecting global temperature although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect. Similarly, it is very probable that AGW from GHG emissions are too trivial to have observable effects.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of
Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
To date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree. That is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
Thirdly, all – n.b. ALL – predictions of the AGW-hypothesis have failed.
In science an hypothesis is falsified if the hypothesis makes a prediction which is wrong.
The AGW-hypothesis induced several predictions which have all been wrong ; e,g.
Tropospheric ‘hot spot’ (failed to occur).
Reduced polar sea ice (polar sea ice has increased).
AGW would overwhelm natural climate variability to induce global warming (global warming stopped at least 17 years ago).
Committed warming would induce global warming at a rate of of 0.2°C per decade from 2000 to 2020 (no such warming has happened).
etc.
Now, having done what you consider to be “more convincing” can we now return to the more important activity of ridiculing and reviling the activists who have created the fiasco of the Ship Of Fools?
Richard

Sorry that the fromatting went wrong in my post. Richard