Yet another global warming expedition gets trapped in icebound ideology
Guest opinion by Paul Driessen
Will global warming alarmists ever set aside their hypotheses, hyperbole, models and ideologies long enough to acknowledge what is actually happening in the real world outside their windows? Will they at least do so before setting off on another misguided adventure? Before persuading like-minded or naïve people to join them? Before forcing others to risk life and limb to transport – and rescue – them? If history is any guide, the answer is: Not likely.
The absurd misadventures of University of New South Wales climate professor Chris Turney is but the latest example. He and 51 co-believers set out on the (diesel-powered) Russian charter ship Akademik Shokalskiy to prove manmade global warming is destroying the East Antarctic ice sheet. Perhaps they’d been reading Dr. Turney’s website, which claims “an increasing body of evidence” shows “melting and collapse” across the area. (It is, after all, summer in Antarctica, albeit a rather cold, icy one thus far.)
Instead of finding open water, they wound up trapped in record volumes of unforgiving ice, from Christmas Eve until January 2 – ensnared by Mother Nature’s sense of humor and their own hubris. The 52 climate tourists were finally rescued by a helicopter sent from Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, which itself became locked in the ice. The misadventurers were transferred to Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, but the Shokalskiy remains entombed, awaiting the arrival of US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star. (Meanwhile, Tourney hopes to get more grants to study manmade global warming, to help him make more money from his Carbonscape company, which makes “green” products from CO2 recovered from the atmosphere.)
As to his expertise, Dr. Tourney couldn’t even gauge the ice conditions the 74 crewmen and passengers were about to sail into. And yet we are supposed to believe his alarmist forecasts about Earth’s climate.
NASA reports that Antarctic sea ice is now the largest expanse since scientists began measuring its extent in 1979: 19.5 million square kilometers (4,806,000,000 acres) – 2.1 times the size of the entire United States. Another report says ocean melting of western Antarctica’s huge Pine Island Glacier ice shelf is at the lowest level ever recorded, and less than half of what it was in 2010. Reminding us of Monty Python’s pet store clerk, Turney nonetheless insists that the sea ice is actually melting, and his communications director says the record sea ice is due to … global warming! (As they say, fiction has to make sense.)
Equally amazing, the Shokalskiy was apparently not equipped with adequate wind and weather monitoring and forecasting capabilities. The expedition had to contact climate realists John Coleman, Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo for information that would allow them to plan their helicopter rescue.
All of this raises serious questions that most media have ignored. How could Turney put so many lives and vessels at risk – people he persuaded to join this expedition, the ship and crew they hired, the ships and helicopter and crews that came to their rescue? How did he talk the Russian captain into sailing into these dangerous waters? Who will pay for the rescue ships and their fuel and crews? What if one of the ships sinks – or someone dies? What is Tourney’s personal liability?
This may be the most glaring example of climate foolishness. But it is hardly the first.
In 2007, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen set off across the Arctic in the dead of winter, “to raise awareness about global warming,” by showcasing the wide expanses of open water they were certain they would encounter. Instead, temperatures inside their tent plummeted to -58 F (-50 C), while outside the nighttime air plunged to -103 F (-75 C). Facing frostbite, amputated fingers and toes or even death, the two were airlifted out a bare 18 miles into their 530-mile expedition.
The next winter it was British swimmer and ecologist Lewis Gordon Pugh, who planned to breast-stroke across open Arctic seas. Same story. Then fellow Brit Pen Hadow tried, and failed. In 2010 Aussie Tom Smitheringale set off to demonstrate “the effect that global warming is having on the polar ice caps.” He was rescued and flown out, after coming “very close to the grave,” he confessed.
Hopefully, all these rescue helicopters were solar-powered. Hardcore climate disaster adventurers should not be relegated to choppers fueled by evil fossil fuels. They may be guilty of believing their own alarmist press releases – but losing digits or ideological purity is a high price to pay.
All these intrepid explorers tried to put the best spin on their failures. “One of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability,” Bancroft-Arnesen expedition coordinator Anne Atwood insisted. “But global warming is real, and with it can come extreme unpredictable changes in temperature,” added Arnesen. “Global warming can mean colder. It can mean wetter. It can mean drier. That’s what we’re talking about,” Greenpeace activist Stephen Guilbeault chimed in.
It’s been said insanity is hitting your thumb repeatedly with a hammer, expecting it won’t hurt the next time. It’s also believing hype, models and delusions, instead of real world observations. Or thinking taxpayers are happy to pay for all the junk science behind claims that the world faces dangerous manmade global warming. Or that they are delighted that the EPA and IPCC are increasingly regulating our lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards and life spans, in the name of preventing climate change.
The fact is, Antarctic ice shelves have broken up many times over the millennia. Arctic ice has rebounded since its latest low ebb around September 2007. Despite steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, average global temperatures have been stable or declining since 1997. Seas are rising at barely seven inches per century. And periods of warmer or colder global and polar climates are nothing new.
Vikings built homes, grew crops and raised cattle in Greenland between 950 and 1300, before they were frozen out by the Little Ice Age and encroaching pack ice and glaciers. Many warm periods followed, marked by open seas and minimal southward extent of Arctic sea ice, as noted in ships’ logs and discussed in scientific papers by Torgny Vinje and other experts. But warm periods of 1690-1710, 1750-1780 and 1918-1940, for instance, were often preceded and followed by colder temperatures, severe ice conditions and maximum southward ice packs, as during 1630-1660 and 1790-1830.
“Not only in the summer, but in the winter the ocean [in the Bering Sea region] was free of ice, sometimes with a wide strip of water up to at least 200 miles away from the shore,” Swedish explorer Oscar Nordkvist reported in 1822, in a document rediscovered by astrophysicist Willie Soon.
“We were astonished by the total absence of ice in the Barrow Strait,” Francis McClintock, captain of the Fox, wrote in 1860. “I was here at this time in 1854 – still frozen up – and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.”
In 1903, during the first year of his three-year crossing of the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen noted that his party “had made headway with ease,” because ice conditions had been “unusually favorable.”
The 1918-1940 warming also resulted in Atlantic cod increasing in population and expanding their range some 800 miles, to the Upernavik area of Greenland, fisheries biologist Ken Drinkwater has reported.
Climate change is certainly real. It’s been real throughout Earth and human history – including the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, Little Ice Age and Dust Bowl, and through countless other cycles of warming and cooling, flood and drought, storm and calm, open polar seas and impassable ice.
Humans clearly influence weather and climate on a local scale – through heat and emissions from cities and cars, our clearing of forests and grasslands, our diversion of rivers. But that is not the issue. Nor is it enough to say – as President Obama has – that the climate is changing and mankind is contributing to it.
The fundamental issue is this: Are humans causing imminent, unprecedented, global climate change disasters? And can we prevent those alleged disasters, by drastically curtailing hydrocarbon use, slashing living standards, and imposing government control over industries and people’s lives? If you look at actual evidence – instead of computer model forecasts and “scenarios” – the answer is clearly: No.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
Note: this post was updated on 1/10/14 7:30AM to fix a units error related to sea ice square kilometers as square MILES.
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A lovely summary of some of the misguided expeditions to ” prove” global warming but I believe you missed out the two canoeists who were going to paddle to the North Pole and predictably got stuck in the ice a short way into their journey and ironically had to be rescued by a wicked oil tanker.
SM says: @ur momisugly January 9, 2014 at 9:53 pm
…That’s not his job. It was the responsibilty of the Captain of the AS to determine if it was safe to proceed into
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It was Prof Chris(tmas) Turkey’s JOB to see that his flock was herded off the ice and back to the ship on the deadline demanded by the Captain which he did not.
WORSE he allowed his son onto the ice knowing there was a blizzard forecast for the immediate future.
I wouldn’t invite this guy on a caving expedition to a commercial cave. He would probably wander off into the off limits areas and get lost.
R de Haan @ur momisugly 10 57 , Thanks for the lemming video, I could only hope that some of the GAGW lemmings follow suit (OK maybe not, we’ll stop them from doing that before the final leap). Was that not a great “photo shopped” piece of art? or was it called “cutting edge editing” in those days?, “Under great personal peril our courageous” on the spot “live camera men and scientists”.etc etc.
But then again dropping a few in a swimming pool like they did in the vid might wake a few of them up !
R the Haan @ur momisugly )9-01-14 around 10.27 re your video
Thanks. The credentials at around 2.40 t0 2.50 show the word “knowledge”,
What I noticed was that the letter O had a nice slash through it . Kind of cryptic if you (painfully) sat through the whole video. Was it a “Studio” and now called “Photoshopped” ?? history”?? (I am not knocking you at all btw to me it was another example of the “Gore” syndrome). I am just trying to hear the NYT tomorrow “the lemmings are coming the LEMMINGS are coming! (dr Mann and dr. Holgren included).
You forgot to mention this :
The Catlin Arctic Fiasco of March 2009
The idea was that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the Arctic ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams.” The professor predicted that summer ice could be completely gone by 2010. But there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since March 2008 the ice had thickened by “at least half a metre.”
The only problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice was fast disappearing was the fact that it was actually getting thicker.
The expedition to the North Pole was led by the explorer Pen Hadow. With two companions, he was measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it was “declining.” His expedition was one of a series of events designed to “raise awareness of the dangers of climate change” before the December 2008 conference in Copenhagen, where the carbon dioxide Taliban hoped to get a new treaty imposing much more drastic cuts on carbon dioxide emissions.
Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing from the likes of the BBC, the WWF (it could “make a lasting difference to policy-relevant science”) and Prince Charles, the royal would-be tampon, (“for the sake of our children and grandchildren, I pray that we will heed the results of the Catlin Arctic Survey and I can only commend this remarkably important project”).
With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall.” (Sound familiar, anyone?). When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter – one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its so-called “carbon footprint” – they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of -40ºC, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”.
Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening,” reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day,” you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started.” In their last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were 48 hours from being officially classed as starving, and were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were also disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by “global warming,” wandering around nearby, doubtless eyeing them for its next meal.
After two months of frozen misery, much of it un-publicised by the BBC, they had to be rescued because the Arctic weather was too extreme and cold, having acquired scientific data of little, if any, value. But at least these pointless publicity stunts keep the climate hysterics in the media happy – until, that is, they go wrong, after which they mysteriously vanish or transform themselves into something else.
When the Catlin expedition returned, the BBC treated them as some sort of conquering heroes. From their coverage anyone would have thought they had discovered a cure for cancer, or something. No mention was made of the original intentions of the expedition or their near-death experiences or the drama of their escape.
But at least one of the intrepid trio was able to send a birthday message to his mum, via the BBC, and they were able to talk by telephone to “some of the world’s most influential climate change leaders,” including the (then) Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in front of 300 people at a conference on world poverty.
Channel 4 News also reported on the Catlin Arctic Survey. Their report attempted to make our flesh creep by filming the group of scientists camped out on the Arctic ice to measure the degree to which “global warming” and rising CO2 levels were threatening to acidify the oceans as the Arctic ice vanishes.
Channel 4 failed to mention that this study was sponsored by an insurance company which hoped to make millions selling insurance against the risks affected by global warming; that, with a pH between 7.9 and 8.2, the oceans are firmly alkaline and will remain so for millions of years; and that by February 2009 there was so much of that disappearing Arctic ice that its extent had returned to its 30-year average spring level.
Let me guest. CO2 induce global warming cause the “Artic Vortex” which led to more than expected ice around Antarctic.
Unfortunately, the alarmists will simply wait till the first moment the ice decreases for any reason at all. They will then compare it with its current inconvenient state and claim the contrast as proof of even more catastrophic warming – you wait and see…
There is no winning with these people in scientific terms – they will always play fast and loose with both the facts and people’s lives in pursuit of what is just another totalitarian political agenda. Exposing that agenda, let alone alerting people to the harm it will do them, needs journalistic and (the best kind of) political skills. Maybe these various misguided adventurers you mention could serve as paradigmatic of that harm – maybe that’s a more pragmatic course than pillorying them, which just reinforces their heroic status in Green eyes. Victims of the Green Movement could be a global charity, who knows?
Stuart B
“NASA reports that Antarctic sea ice is now the largest expanse since scientists began measuring its extent in 1979:”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
For the sake of accuracy that should be changed to:
“NASA reports that a record was set on 22 September 2013. Antarctic sea ice was at the largest expanse since scientists began measuring its extent in 1979.”
or something similar.
Very good post, many thanks.
This is one of clearest, most concise and easy to follow pieces I’ve read here in a long time. Mr Driessen’s writing wouldn’t look out of place in any of the UK’s national newspapers – except it would never be given any space in any of our national newspapers because it speaks with calm reasoning instead of trying to spin evidential facts to suit an agreed agenda.
Many thanks for this piece. Now, if you could just write an entire book this easy to follow and devastatingly effective with the simple, clear facts you might be on to a winner here…
Professor Turney just apologized on Twitter for his long silence. That’s something he hasn’t done before: apologized or be silent.
Climate stunts dressed up as science. Its easy to see why some scientists in this field are finally speaking out a little. There are clowns in the lab and they are beginning to get noticed. Good trend for everyone.
SM says:
January 9, 2014 at 9:53 pm
As to his expertise, Dr. Tourney couldn’t even gauge the ice conditions the 74 crewmen and passengers were about to sail into. And yet we are supposed to believe his alarmist forecasts about Earth’s climate.
==========================================================================
That’s not his job. It was the responsibilty of the Captain of the AS to determine if it was safe to proceed into any area.
—l
I think you are missing the point – on purpose perhaps? Anyone making statements about ice a 100 years into the future is expected to at least have a minimal understanding of the short-term ice conditions in the polar regions, if they are to have any credibility. So far, Professor Turney has not given much evidence of that kind of insight.
I fear that the captain will be punished for not exercising stronger maritime discipline on a climatologist/tourist expedition. A lesson there for us all. An inquest might clarify matters, but I think all polar captains have taken this particular lesson to heart already.
It’s actually a propaganda war on the pretext of climate change just to serve the interest of handful of corporate giants. Every body is telling others what climate change is but no one is ready to tell what climate change is not. That is why whatever natural abnormality we experience we just point finger at climate change just to hide our lack of vision about the original causes.
One difference between Turney and the other idiots, they only risked their own lives. Turney risked many besides his own worthless one.
The answer to the question is “no”. Climate kooks will not stop risking their lives on their quest for the Holy Grail of Global Warming. Quests are all about proving one’s faith on dangerous, ultimately pointless, treks.
Hadn’t seen that lemming footage since I was a kid. It’s completely fake of course – wasn’t even shot in the Arctic:
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp
As for the ill-fated Turney expedition I just want to know what happened to that well-stocked bar. Did it remain onboard the ship for the delectation of the crew or did the self-absorbed Dr Turney have it flown off to the Aurora?
I feel sorry for the Russian crew who no doubt expected to spend the Orthodox Christmas with their families. Excellent article, btw, very well written.
I also was impressed by and very much enjoyed this piece!
That said, I wonder if a source can be given for the following regarding the failed Arctic mission by the two women: “Instead, temperatures inside their tent plummeted to -58 F (-50 C), while outside the nighttime air plunged to -103 F (-75 C). Facing frostbite, amputated fingers and toes or even death, the two were airlifted out a bare 18 miles into their 530-mile expedition.”
I don’t quibble with the entire narrative, which I recall well, it’s the temperature that stopped me.
Just on the level of common sense, the readings seem too low. I don’t remember where the women departed from, but the coldest temp ever recorded in Canada is -63C, and as one moves out over the Arctic sea ice, the temperature warms, due to heat rising through the ice. The North Pole in winter, because of the this phenomenon, is not the warmest location in Northern Hemisphere winter. Likewise, anywhere over the ice has a governor on the cold temperature readings that can be attained. The coldest location in NH winter is an honor that belongs, nearly always, to a location within Siberia.
Once again: beautiful writing, admirably researched. Just wonder about that single detail…
On the bright side of the Turney Icecapade, popcorn futures were definitely up.
I have answered my own question. The NYTimes appears to have been at least once source of the temps: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/sports/othersports/14sportsbriefs-northpole.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0
Perhaps they meant to say wind chills. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt?
I did like Flying Tiger’s comment to Prof Turney’s explanation piece in Nature-
“I can totally understand the nonscientific financial motivation for changing from geography (unsexy) to climatechange (sexy) but what is the actual academic process that allows someone to start as a Professor of Geography and end as a Professor of Climate Change? What is the procedure for minting a new field of study like Climate Change? I ask in all seriousness because the leading lights of Climate Change in Australia all seem to be either arts graduates or economists, with a smattering of other people totally unconnected to either chemistry or physics. Baffling. As for Turney, too many red flags. “Science Communicators” is another phrase that is way too much like weasel words. And the plan in place by the BBC and Guardian to spring some sort of climate alarmist documentary made from footage of this trip has also been blown wide open. And finally there is the Carbonscape vested interest, promoted in the past by one of the journalists from the Guardian who was part of the tour”
Indeed- ‘What is the procedure for minting a new field of study like Climate Change?’
I certainly want to know so the mates and I can jump on the gravy train as the new doyens of Humanology, sitting above all you other narrowly focussed plebs.
Come to think of it these jumped up Climatologists are treading on our patch with their ‘anthropogenic’ thingy. None of them are fair dinkum, pal-reviewed Humanologists so pay them no heed and they need to stick to the weather.
Due to it being the Southern Hemisphere Summer the sea ice figs attached to this site as of yesterday were 5.525 million square km which is a huge plus on the 4.131 million square km which was the mean average 79-08 for this time of year. On a BBC Radio4 Science programme presented a few days ago a member of the Antarctica Survey Team claimed the high sea ice was due to a sudden spell of very cold weather. He claimed that the sea ice was only 1% above the expected average. However in the real world the sea ice anomally has been plus for around two and half years if my memory serves me correctly. And it should be noted that the current anomally based on the sea ice area is plus 33.74% …
(by all means check my maths)…I have emailed the BBC and await an answer….ha.
This foolishness is unlikely to end until some tragedy happens and the resulting lawsuits have a chilling effect. Hmm, … maybe global warming could lower temperatures after all.