In the end, our intrepid Arctic explorers did not resort to cannibalism;

According to the Catlin website, the team plans to leave the Arctic later this week. I believe that they have done a fantastic job educating the public about the Arctic. Their mission has been followed breathlessly by BBC and Guardian reporters, who previously believed that the Arctic had melted and become a place for sunbathing.
Following the daily reports of ice, cold, frostbite, hypothermia, pain and general misery being endured by the team – even the most daft newspaper reporter must be aware now that the Arctic is a very cold and icy place.
[…]
This education for the public on the enduring cold of the Arctic is not marred by the fact that they failed to deliver on many early promises, including reaching the North Pole. Maybe this is why the press is pretty much ignoring them now, with only 14 hits in a Google News search for “Catlin Arctic Ice Survey”.

Oh well. There’s always next time.

This is low, even by National Geographic’s standards. There are readers here much better equipped to address the math behind the following intent to mislead, but I’ll get it started…

Even if the current solar lull is the beginning of a prolonged quiet, the scientists say, the star’s effects on climate will pale in contrast with the influence of human-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.”

The sun emits 3.846 × 10²⁶ watts, or 3.846 × 10³³ ergs/sec.
The concentration of C02 today is 387 ppm by volume, or .038% of total atmosphere – in other words, “a few hundredths of one percent”. (Here’s a convenient graph.)
Have at ‘er.

This is getting to be way too easy….

A new Australian record was set early this morning, a temperature of minus 13 degrees, at Charlotte Pass on the Snowy Mountains.
This is the lowest temperature recorded anywhere in Australia in April and is 13 below the average. Nearby at Perisher it dipped to minus 11 degrees and at the top of Thredbo it dipped to minus 10.
Across the border, on the Victorian Alps April records were broken at Mt Hotham where it chilled to minus eight degrees and Mt Buller and Falls Creek where it got as low as minus seven.

Throw a shrimp on the ski lift!

Australia’s Mt. Buller is opening its ski resort to the public five weeks ahead of schedule this Saturday and Sunday, for skiing and snowboarding on the 35 cm (14 inches) of early snowfall blanketing the ski area.
“This is the earliest we’ve opened a lift and ski run in the history of Mt. Buller resort. The closest was 45 years ago when we opened on the 16th of May in 1964,” said Laurie Blampied, General Manager of Buller Ski Lifts. “It’s so exciting to have such early and extensive falls so we decided to seize the opportunity, open up early for a special weekend and share it with everyone.”

See? Earth Day really can make a difference!

I’ve always said that 100,000 years was too long for extinction by asteroid.

“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”

100,000 years may be a “heartbeat” in geological time, but it’s still an eternity in dinosaur time.

The climate’s in the very best of hands…

“We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point – they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn’t ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there’s a lot of tundra that’s being held down by that ice cap..”

Now, there’s a question for our AGW true believers – is airborne tundra entered into the climate models as earth warming “insulation” or earth cooling particulates? (Please show your math.)

“Does reducing our dependence on fossil fuels justify promulgating scientific lies?”

Association of Professional Engineers & Geoscientists of Saskatchewan’s “The Professional Edge (PDF, pg 10 – 12)

The Guardian, April 2009 ……………………MSNBC, March 2008

WUWT: “The real question is, how often are we going to see the Wilkins Ice Shelf be a lead news story as poster child for “global warming” to illustrate ice loss in Antarctica that is actually growing. I guess as long as we have NSIDC’s Ted Scambos to help the media, it will be “something we get to see fairly often”.”

The Australian;

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast.
Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.
However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.
East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.
[…]
Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia’s Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.
A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

But never you mind, silly little deniers. Real scientists know that freezing is just another worrying sign of temperature escalation.

“The Hype of Science: Leading journals including Science and Nature are exaggerating research novelty“

When original and interesting research is distorted to garner additional attention, both the work in question and previous studies can be shortchanged. Here, I will describe a recent and notable case from the journal Science in which the perceived novelty and importance of a study were significantly enhanced…

Update – sorry about that. The link requires (free) registration, and as I’ve done that some weeks ago, I didn’t notice it wasn’t a readily accessible page when I wrote the post.
Teaser below the fold, so you can decide for yourself if you want to go to the trouble to catch the rest…

Continue reading →

Franklin Expedition – The Next Generation, continued… “A pioneering scientific expedition to help determine the lifespan of the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover”
Hot on the heels of the discovery that “live from the ice” biotelemetry data hosted on the Catlin Arctic Survey website was entirely fraudulent – a fact that wasn’t admitted until they were caught red-handed, this enlightening update from the official AGW cheerleaders at the BBC;

After enduring ferocious weather, it has emerged that British explorers studying the Arctic are struggling with a series of technical problems.
A portable radar device, known as Sprite, designed to make millions of measurements of the ice thickness has been dogged by breakdowns and uncertainties.

The problem hasn’t stopped NASA from publishing their “data”.

Another instrument, SeaCat, meant to measure the temperature and salinity of the water beneath the ice-cap, has malfunctioned as well.
The expedition’s organisers insist that other research – such as regular drilling through the ice – has meanwhile been carried out successfully.
[…]
So with the team’s early progress anyway hampered by the weather, the Sprite only gathered data over a total period of seven hours of trekking in the expedition’s first 18 days.

These equipment failures remained unmentioned on the Catlin Ice Survey website until just a few hours ago. It was edited in real time as the crew at Watts Up With That were digging through their files.
But you have to admire their resolve. If you’ve ever gone camping at even near freezing temperatures, you know how cold it is trying to get into stiff clothes in the morning. So cold you can see your breath.

So, imagine how you’d fog over standing in an ice field, in the dark, with the bright light of a camera shining on every word…

No, I don’t know what that means. It’s just damned interesting.
Here’s something else that’s interesting. Recall the side by side polar ice photos I display here from time to time, showing the arctic cap much larger in relation to last year –

Well, no longer. Cryosphere Today “can’t” provide new images for 2009.

Click map for link (fixed).

With all due respect Mr.President … (pdf)

We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events. The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.

h/t Bob G.

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY…

… the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier.

From Australia…

Click! Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
to the Middle East…

(UN approved)
to Manitoba…

(photo courtesy “freethinker”)
Canadians nationwide are marking this Hour in our own special ways…

Don’t forget!
International Clean-Your-Oven Hour
Great Canadian Air Conditioner Stress Test
Timmy’s Drive Thru Appreciation Hour
Save the Hummer Canada Pledge Drive
And the Ceremonial Banishment Of The Snows!
Ladies and gentlemen – start your electricity meters!
That’s right. We’re getting a half-hour jump on them.
(The green lettering is a nice touch, yes?)
Update – That’s the spirit!
More reports roll in – Saskatoon SHINES!

Canvassers will be in your neighborhood on the evening of March 28th, collecting the darkened addresses of the really stupid…

One provincial British newspaper wrote this week: “Saving the planet could be as easy as switching off the lights in South Tyneside, green campaigners say.”
It will take more than the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, population 152,000, to solve global warming. Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China’s emissions for six short seconds.

…and the easily distracted.

A United Nations document on “climate change” that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

h/t Kathryn
Update: Speaking of IQ tests….

Hey, Chronicle Herald news staff – your psychic called. She wants her job back.

“This is an artist’s impression of what the Halifax waterfront could look like at high tide if sea levels were to rise by about six metres, a plausible result if global warming accelerates the melting of the Earth’s icecaps. In this scenario, Lower Water Street would have to be renamed Under Wa­ter Street.”

That’s right, Halifax could soon go the way of the Maldives. You remember the Maldives? The island nation that was swept from existence by our SUV-driven rising oceans as Al Gore’s film crew watched helplessly?
Coincidentally enough, over at Watts Up With That – ” Perhaps the next IPCC conference can be in the Maldives instead of Bali.”

Check it out. Expecially if you happen to “report” for the Chronicle Herald.
h/t AtlanticJim and Ed S.
Several commentors have also noted that “staff reporter” Kelly Shiers “has no idea where Rome is.”
Or how old.

(Click images for the links)


h/t Fritz

Bloomberg News, in a desperate attempt to keep a straight face;

Three U.K. explorers bound for the North Pole on a scientific expedition to study global warming said they are close to running out of food after “brutal” weather conditions halted three attempts to fly in supplies.
The support team hopes to decide within hours on when it can send an airplane to land on nearby ice with provisions, Tori Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Catlin Arctic Survey in London, said in an interview today.
“We’re hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice,” expedition leader Pen Hadow said in a statement e-mailed yesterday by his team. “Waiting is almost the worst part of an expedition as we’re in the lap of the weather gods.”
The severe weather is jeopardizing a journey aimed at projecting when global warming may melt the entire Arctic Ocean cap, a phenomenon that scientists say might trigger further gains in temperature.

And only 82 days left to go! On a more hopeful note, starvation among the local polar bear population may be averted…
h/t Dave K.

“No Guff” sends greetings from Vancouver Island.

“We should have seen crocuses and daffodils by St. Pat’s, with a few cherry blossoms peeking out, too. Instead, we’ve had more than 3 months of unremitting snow on the ground – and I’ve been shoveling for the last three days to boot. Unheard of. So who are we going to believe? Al Gore? Or our lying eyes?”