US Coast Guard Ship To Attempt Rescue of 2 Icebreakers In Antarctica 382
PolygamousRanchKid writes "A U.S. Coast Guard heavy icebreaker left Australia for Antarctica on Sunday to rescue more than 120 crew members aboard two icebreakers trapped in pack ice near the frozen continent's eastern edge, officials said. The 399-foot cutter, the Polar Star, is responding to a Jan. 3 request from Australia, Russia and China to assist the Russian and Chinese ships because 'there is sufficient concern that the vessels may not be able to free themselves from the ice,' the Coast Guard said in a statement. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Rescue Coordination Centre, which oversaw the rescue, said the Polar Star, the Coast Guard's only active heavy polar icebreaker, would take about seven days to reach Commonwealth Bay, depending on weather. Under international conventions observed by most countries, ships' crews are obliged to take part in such rescues and the owners carry the costs."
America, FUCK YEAH! (Score:5, Funny)
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah!
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Re: America, FUCK YEAH! (Score:2)
How would you know unless... You saw it?
Minds. Blown.
One blue ship stuck upon the ice. (Score:5, Funny)
Along came an icebreaker and there were...
Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice. Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice, along came an icebreaker and there were...
Three blue ships, stuck upon the ice...
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From http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/cgcpolarstar/PolarStarNews.asp:
"The Polar Star is the U.S. Coast Guard’s only active heavy polar ice breaker. The ship is 399 feet in length, its maximum speed is 18 knots, it is able to continuously break six feet of ice at three knots, and able to break 21 feet of ice backing and ramming. The Polar Star is specifically designed for open-water icebreaking with a reinforced hull and special icebreaking bow."
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I don't get it. (Score:4, Funny)
Along came an icebreaker and there were...
Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice. Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice, along came an icebreaker and there were...
Three blue ships, stuck upon the ice...
I don't get it.
I was thinking the ice breaker was along the lines of ... "So, come to Antarctica often?"
"near the frozen continent's eastern edge" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"near the frozen continent's eastern edge" (Score:5, Informative)
There is a western and eastern hemisphere, of which antarctica occupies both parts.
http://geology.com/world/antarctica-map.jpg [geology.com]
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Nonsense. Antarctica has at least two edges: a northern edge and a US coast edge. The US coast guard only guards the US coast edge and that is where all those icebreakers get stuck because ice freezes over while they wait to get through customs.
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I could have sworn Antarctica only has a northern edge.
Only at the South Pole. As soon as you're off that point you are on a point of Latitude and Longitude.
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I interpret "near the continent's frozen eastern edge" as meaning "along the eastern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula [wikipedia.org], which sticks up to 63 degrees or so south latitude. This tends to collect floating sea ice on its eastern side (the western Weddell Sea [wikipedia.org]) when there are strong easterly winds.
Oddly enough I have not been able to find the coordinates of the stranded ships anywhere. Does anyone here know this?
In one week... (Score:5, Insightful)
In one week will we be reading about how country X is sending an icebreaker to free the three stuck icebreakers?
Good thing it's summer down there. Wouldn't want to be stuck all winter [amazon.com]. That would be a pain.
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Might as well reschedule the International Icebreakers Convention to the Arctic right now, everyone can have a jolly good bash at it!
Or, for the more paranoid among us, its a ruse by Icebreaker crews to have a excuse to finally organize the International Icebreaker Olympics!
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It's early summer, it will get warmer. It's supposed to be colder here in Illinois tonight than it is in Antarctica right now.
Re:In one week... (Score:5, Funny)
It'll be Canada to show you amateurs how it's done.
Semper Paratus (Score:4, Insightful)
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Life Imitates Art (Score:2)
Hey, that's one of my favorite novels! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Star_(novel) [wikipedia.org]
International Cooperation and a Happy New Year. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:International Cooperation and a Happy New Year. (Score:5, Funny)
Or at least get collectively owned by mother nature.
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Well, they have the ice! I guess the russians bring in vodka and the amis their "idea of" a whisk(e)y.
The Chinese are invited, ofc.
Re:International Cooperation and a Happy New Year. (Score:5, Funny)
A Western European led research vessel, a Chinese ice-breaker, a Russian ice-breaker, and and American ice-breaker, walk into a bar. Which one talks to the pretty girl at the bar?
The American vessel, of course; it's the only one good at breaking the ice.
Obligatory...? (Score:2)
Am I the only one reminded of this [snopes.com]?
while you still "down" there (Score:2, Funny)
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Three! (Score:5, Funny)
Three! Three stuck icebreakers!
Muahhhaaaahhaaaahhaaahhaaahhh!
I *love* to COUNT! That's why they call me the COUNT!
Muahhhaaaahhaaaahhaaahhaaahhh!
Re:In the middle of summer (Score:5, Insightful)
How's that global warming thing working out for you?
You mean, for us? Not so well. Chaotic weather, not even, gradual warming over the entire globe, is what we can expect for quite a number of years.
Don't say that like you're not in the same boat as the rest of us.
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It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
Tornado activity hits 60-year low [usatoday.com]
2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years [washingtonpost.com]
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It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
Tornado activity hits 60-year low [usatoday.com] 2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years [washingtonpost.com]
Yes it will. Or next week. That's kind of the point.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/unseasonable-tornadoes-in-midwest-damage-illinois-towns-killing-6/2013/11/18/36c26332-5064-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html
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. Chaotic weather
Chaotic weather will be here, whether the earth warms or cools. Weather conditions on Jupiter are chaotic, and it's a lot colder than here.
Arguably it's the temperature differential that causes chaotic weather, not the mean temperature. Blaming every weather event on AGW is what makes people doubt AGW.
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Chaotic? Sure, but the explanation is simple. (Score:5, Informative)
At least in principle. The exact details of *weather* are always complex.
Here's a link to an article explaining where the ice in question comes from [theguardian.com]:
“There's a misconception here – we are not trapped in new ice that's been created because its cold,” said Turney. “This is very old, thick ice that's been re-mobilised. It was attached to another part of the continent and has broken out and, with the south-easterly winds we've had, has pushed it up against the coast and pinned us in.”
The austral sea ice situation is complicated by the fact there's a continent down there and it's not perfectly round. It sticks out into the sea in irregular ways. This means that the extent of sea ice (which is present year round) is dependent on the wind, which in turn is stronger with a more energetic (warmer) atmosphere.
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You need smoking gun? (Score:4, Informative)
As for "not predicted in theory", how does a result from 1902 [wikipedia.org] grab you?
The relatively greater importance of wind over thermodynamics in antarctic sea ice extent was well established over thirty years ago;
[Ackley, S. F., 1981: A review of sea-ice weather relationships in the Southern Hemisphere. Sea Level, Ice and Climatic Change, Vol. 131, I. Allison, Ed., International Association Scientific Hydrology, 127–159.]
If you want a smoking gun, here is one from 2001 (Flato, G.M. and G.J. Boer, 2001: Warming asymmetry in climate change simulations. Geophys. Res. Lett., 28:195-198. [doi]:
In summary, the models did not predict a reduction in Antarctic summer sea ice extent, because has been well-established for decades now that wind patterns account for more than 2/3 of the annual variation.
And, *yes*, there have een
Re: In the middle of summer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: In the middle of summer (Score:4, Insightful)
We are too dumb to understand climate. Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar, unless they put it in the context of being relative to the rest of mankind. That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science. We've seen that the climate scientists are afraid of being wrong. This is an area where our system of academia is a weakness not a strength. People are too invested in not being wrong and finding new truths. In the climate sciences it should be about being wrong and being able to better understand that. Bad predictions should be more celebrated then correct ones, because it's easier to learn from something that went wrong.
skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness. There is learning to be done, and a future that is uncertain. Those are things we should be concentrating on.
Re: In the middle of summer (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's no reason to believe that the use of solar and wind power led to global warming because there's no mechanism to explain it. But carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and the warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions was predicted many decades before we observed it. Add to that the fact that no other plausible explanation for the warming has been found, and therefore our best current hypothesis is that the carbon dioixide emissions are causing the warming.
Do you have some other explanation for the obs
Re: In the middle of summer (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have some other explanation for the observed warming that I haven't heard of?
The point being debated is that this "observed warming" is actually occurring. As for "other explanation", isn't that what models are supposed to provide?
It seems to me that the most persuasive climate models would be those that account for temperature patterns from prehistoric records all the way to today. Anything less can only be based on an incomplete understanding. Unfortunately, the livelihood of manmade global warming scientists depends on manmade global warming actually existing. For a researcher thus employed to admit that the evidence is untenable not only jeopardises his career, but those of thousands of fellow researchers as well. Given *this* reality, if I were a climate change scientist I would never put my name on a study that promoted a contrarian view.
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Re: In the middle of summer (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop making things up. It may make you feel smart, but you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yeah, the climate is really complicated. So is the human body, but we can now 3D print working organs and implant them into patients. So is rocket science, but we now have robotic rovers driving around on Mars. If a problem is hard, that doesn't mean we can't solve it. That just means we have to work really hard. And we've been working really hard at understanding the climate for half a century. You have no clue what amazing progress has been made and how deep an understanding we now have of some really complex processes.
So if you want to know what's going on with the climate, what do you do?
1. Learn all about it, recognizing that's a big task and it will take you years of study if you really want to become an expert.
2. Listen to the people who have spent years studying it and are experts on it.
3. Don't do either of the above. Just say, "No one understands this because it's too complicated." After all, if you don't understand it then obviously no one else does either.
Yeah. That's what I thought.
Re: In the middle of summer (Score:5, Interesting)
You seem to have refuted my point about how well we understand the environment, with a couple of examples of similarly complicated systems that we are making great strides with. First of all there is the logical fallacy that progress in some complex systems implies progress in others. That's just not a sound way to refute the point. I'm considered an expert in somethings but that doesn't mean I'm an expert in everything. Then there are the examples of complex things that we have "mastered". Let's start at the Human body. Drug companies, who tend to hire some of the people that know the most about the human body end up with a lot of failed attempts at new drugs. Some of the time it happens because of unintended consequences, but a lot of the time it's because a correlation that was thought to be causal turned out not to be. ( Here's a wired article about the phenomena http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 [wired.com] ). The other is space. Sure we have some successes but we also have a number of failures. In late 2011 we were looking at abandoning the ISS because of a string of Souyez rocket malfunctions. Also of the 3 mars missions launched during the 2011 launch window, only 1 (that's 33%) reached mars, so while Curiosity is cool, it's the exception not the rule. So to say that we've mastered either field is also not logically valid. Of course in both of those fields we can perform somewhat rigorous experiments so our progress is also faster.
That's not to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with naive science. Our understanding of gravity is still undergoing refinement, but it's force has been part of our engineering for quite some time. But having a naivety of gravity employed in a lot of the engineering hasn't been a downfall. I would say that the goal should be to know when you are doing naive science and respond accordingly perhaps by leaving terms in generic equations abstract, so that they are more readily adjusted if need be or can have more complex expressions plugged in as appropriate (for example gravitational attraction to the earth).
But on the whole your comment as an attempt to refute mine was trash. You start off with an attack, which is not a logically valid method of refutation, and justify the attack with a logically invalid argument that was based on logically invalid arguments. Then you go on talking about climate experts (which I denied the current existence of and you failed to validly refute), which you then use to declare your attempt to refute my comment successful, which does not logically make it so.
My comments were about logical validity, the absolute level of our understanding of the climate, and how the nature of our academic system interacts with fields like the climate that are very hard to study. I'm happy to go off on tangents relative to discussing those topics, but if what you're really trying to do is show me to the curb because you think I'm denying climate change, then you can rest assured that that is not my goal at all.
Re:Where's the 1998 spike? (Score:4, Informative)
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Kind of resembles the NASDAQ
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http://davidpratt.info/climate/warm7.jpg [davidpratt.info]
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter16/isotope.html [vsc.edu]
Global warming is a complete scam.
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Re: In the middle of summer (Score:4, Informative)
Von Storch concisely summarizes the dilemma of global warming proponents, as well as the frustration of sceptics. In particular: "It [science] is not just writing a computer simulation and then, when the predictions are wrong, tinkering the parameters (adding more "ocean temperature damping" in this case), and hoping that eventually your program will converge on the truth."
This is an ice age. Is that good or bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some complex facts that usually don't get dragged into this discussion because they make it so much larger. But some interesting facts to color the warming issue are:
1. We are currently in an ice age. The current Quaternary glaciation [wikipedia.org] (i.e., the current ice age) started 2.5 million years ago.
2. Within that ice age, we are in an interglacial: a period of temporary(?) warming within the ice age. Our current interglacial is the Holocene epoch [wikipedia.org], which started 11,700 years ago.
But as long as we still have ice caps, we are still in an ice age. If the ice caps melt, we'll know the ice age is over and we're back to what is in fact more normal temperatures for Earth.
However, it can't be said that Earth's normal warm is necessarily good for humanity. After all,
3. Humans, as in the genus Homo, evolved around 2.5 million years ago [wikipedia.org]. The same time as the the beginning of the current ice age. In other words, the adversity of the Earth's freezing put heavy evolutionary pressure on our ape ancestors.
So, cold = good? Well, remember the current interglacial started 11,700 years ago. Now that's interesting. The Old Stone Age [wikipedia.org] begins with the first humans, that ~2.5 million years ago. But...
4. The Middle Stone Age [wikipedia.org] started right around when the interglacial started. That's when humans first began to make more advanced tools, create advanced art, develop spirituality, etc. In other words, when things warmed up a bit, humanity began to flourish.
So what's good? Warm, cold, in-between? What's "natural?" 'Cause that seems to be extremely warm... unless you're talking about humans, then it's extremely cold. Or moderate.
Complex, eh?
Now, apart from global warming, the related issue that always gets short shrift is ocean acidification [wikipedia.org], which is also caused by an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere, and which appears to be a huge threat to life on Earth. But it's harder to understand than warming, so let's not talk about it.
Re:This is an ice age. Is that good or bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Automatically my foot (Score:4, Insightful)
"Oh let the Moorlocks sort it out while we play in the garden, doing nothing more useful than contributing to the food chain."
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Now, apart from global warming, the related issue that always gets short shrift is ocean acidification [wikipedia.org], which is also caused by an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere, and which appears to be a huge threat to life on Earth. But it's harder to understand than warming, so let's not talk about it.
Actually, I think that ocean acidification is easier to understand. People can handle a wide range of temperatures, such that many will scoff at the notion that a difference of a couple of degrees is problematic for the planet. But acid? People understand that acid can be dangerous. Tell them the ocean is becoming acidified, and it will make sense to them that that's probably not good for the things that live there. (Even though the most pH change, according to Wikipedia, also looks like a tiny number at -0
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The reason you warmers fail is precisely because you treat people like they are stupid. You know what else is acidified with CO2? Soda. Soda doesn't scare anybody. Normal people understand fish don't want to swim in soda anymore than plants crave Brawdo, but when they ask "How much will it acidify?" your attempt to deceive them with what you admit is a very small number is uncovered and you lose their trust.
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I don't know what you do for a living, but I'll bet you're pretty good at it.
Wind. Riiiiight... (Score:2, Interesting)
In this case it was wind, not temperatures, that has pushed the ice tightly together in the area where these ships are stuck.
Remember, the original stuck Russian vessel was retracing the steps of a century old expedition. Funny how Sir Douglas Mawson's Antarctic expedition [wikipedia.org] didn't have this problem back in 1911 despite the fact that
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Because polar expeditions never used to get caught in the ice [wikipedia.org] in the austral summer.
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Given that the Chinese icebreaker got stuck as a direct result of attempting to rescue (successfully in conjunction with an Australian icebreaker) the passengers off the Russian icebreaker, who pays the US icebreaker for the rescue of the Chinese icebreaker?
RTFS
Under international conventions observed by most countries, ships' crews are obliged to take part in such rescues and the owners carry the costs.
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Yeah, I kind of thought it was a dick thing to do for the summary to talk about who has to pay for it at all--when someone breaks down at sea, you rescue them. If there's money, great, but you don't talk money *before* you've rescued them, because it implies you would be leaving them out there to die. Like how the fire department in ancient Rome would settle the price with you as your house burned down...
Epic fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for yours.
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This bit here is pretty popular on the internet these days. Taking a single incident of global warming researchers stuck in ice and using the (rather remarkable) irony of that to debunk global warming as a whole.
My reply to that thus far has been
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South of Australia some ice breakers a stuck in pack ice.
In Australia we have a heat wave unheard of, and the summer has just started 2 weeks ago.
In Finnland we have the "hottest" winter since recorded history. At the northern polar circle, mind that, we still have + temperatures. In a real winter it would be -30 degrees there.
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They are ridiculing you (Score:2, Insightful)
They are making fun of people like you who every time a piece of ice falls off a glacier anywhere you point out that as proof of global warming. Go ahead and claim you don't, but every time I hear of a tornado in the US, the hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and on and on, each of those instances people are trotted out on the news as climate experts claiming that this shows AGW is real and we need to do something.
The person making the statement you replied to doesn't believe this single incident proves AGW is fal
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My reply to that thus far has been something along the lines of me, using that same logic, being able to prove global warming is occurring by pointing out the 19% of normal snow pack in the California Sierra right now.
Sadly, someone actually said that exact thing to me two weeks ago. Any time there is anything perceived as unusual, it is taken as a sign (sometimes even by scientists!).
It's almost like we're still in the dark ages, using weather events as omens, and peering into day-to-day changes in temperature graphs as if they were tea leaves in a cup, determined those signs will tell us that we'll win the battle.
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Way to miss my point. As I said...
My point was that many, many people on comment threads seem to be disingenuously taking the single instance of the global warming researchers' ships stuck in ice as de facto proof that global warming is bunk. My point was not to debate the me
Re:This whole incident... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that there are quite a bit of instances, most poignant of which is that southern ice has been increasing for decades, /.
I don't get why people still repeat such nonsense on
The ice is retreating since decades, however in winter it grows and in summer it shrinks.
What counts is the long term trend. Long term: every winter it is a bit less than the (or a few) winter(s) before.
If it is not important that Antarctic ice melt is this year the lowest ever recorded,
Never heard about that claim. Any proof? NASA and ESA photos don't confirm this.
The thing about science is that its supposed to be falsifiable. No it is not. It is supposed to be "investigate able" by experiments. That means it is "provable" ... no idea why americans always use the term "falsifiable". Must have a special meaning in some circumstances?
Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
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Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
I've been floating here on the ceiling all day and still no one believes me!!! There are plenty of ways to falsify it.
Re:This whole incident... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, the hole in the ozone layer only stopped growing because we actually succeeded in not pumping out CFCs.
Re:This whole incident... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, I remember when I was in grade school in the '90s, and we were constantly told of the horrors of the hole on the ozone layer that was going to burn us to death, and the rain forests that would be 100% destroyed by 1995
They didn't happen because people took measures to mitigate them. The ozone layer was disappearing because of CFCs. Now that we don't use them in spray cans and air conditioners any more the hole is shrinking and should be gone in another 100 years.
You're like the people who scoff at the Y2K Armageddon that didn't happen. It didn't happen because a lot of folks did a lot of hard work to keep it from happening.
Had everyone shrugged and done nothing like you propose with global warming the ozone would still be disappearing and the Y2K meltdown would have been serious.
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You're like the people who scoff at the Y2K Armageddon that didn't happen. It didn't happen because a lot of folks did a lot of hard work to keep it from happening.
Y2K armageddon was never going to happen. At worst, it would mean some payroll calculations would be delayed, and airline flights would be cancelled. Anyone who thinks we were going to see power plants blow up and raging hordes across the landscape, well, they are deservedly mocked.
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As an embedded systems programmer, I worked on at least 100 different systems between 1995 and 1999. Some problems were just cosmetic, others caused overrun buffers, infinite loops, code paths that would no longer run, and of course the usual date comparison and cosmetic problems.
The 'doom' wasn't so much a single system going down, but a sudden coordinated failure of hundreds or thousands of systems at the same time. At least 1 in 5 of the systems we worked on were 'critical' systems that would very likely
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Boy, your grade school sucked.
Re:This whole incident... (Score:4, Informative)
I was in grade school in the sixties, and we were taught two indisputable scientific consensus facts:
That the great ice age was coming. In the early 70's, this was on the cover of Time Magazine.
Are you sure you remembered that correctly?
http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/ [time.com]
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley/ [scienceblogs.com]
And if you think that you were taught in the 1960's that Thomas Malthus essay PROVED we would all starve to death by the year 2000, well, you need to go find that teacher and have your grade changed to "F".
Thomas Malthus wrote that essay in 1798, and it had been debunked long before our great-grandparents were twinkles in our great-great grandparents eyes.
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I think that right wing talking points jumped the shark years ago.
By the way, the Ozone hole was saved by concerted international effort [wikipedia.org]. Too bad that was prevented this time around by a small band of billionaires and their useful idiots.
Funny but not evidence of anything (Score:3)
it really feels as if over-the-top global warming alarmism has jumped the shark.
It's GLOBAL warming. Not local warming. The fact that some random ship go caught in sea ice carries precisely zero relevance, nor does the fact that they happened to be studying global warming. While amusing and a bit ironic this ship getting stuck doesn't remotely constitute evidence against temperatures rising globally. Last time I checked the Antarctic hasn't thawed and thus it is a very dangerous place to sail regardless of time of year. There always is danger from ice in that part of the world.
We'll look back in 20 years and say, "Remember when that ship got stuck in the ice on their journey to drum up fear about receding ice?"
Peo
Re:This whole incident... (Score:5, Interesting)
Icebreakers being stuck in ice doesn't say much about climate change - incidents of such icebreakers stuck in ice over many decades may say something. Don't confuse an incident with a trend
I am sure there are many stupid Americans in New England seeing how amazingly cold it is this week and mocking Climate Change. (I live in Central Europe and we have at the moment one of the hottest Januaries on record). Climate Change predicts weather extremes because there is more energy available in weather systems to push to hotter and colder extremes.
That thick ice in Antarctica could be an example of climate change if, for example, more ice is rolling off the land faster, or climate change has changed currents to push more ice into that bay. Only objective longterm observations can help here.
There are problems with Alarmism, but it was right with Acid Rain in the 1970s, leaded petrol and Ozone in the 80's - those problems were reversed - and the scientific community is in consensus that CO2 today is a far more serious issue and we need alarmism before we reach tipping points.
I would rather take action with alarmism, then do nothing out of cynicism while species go extinct and Africans and Bangladeshis try to emigrate in their millions.
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Those are interesting examples. In each of those cases, the problem was solved by actually doing something (for example, greatly reducing CFC emissions). So, if by "snap people out of it" you mean they should take active steps to reverse or prevent a problem, your examples lend good support to that claim.
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of people setting out to the pole at summer, to highlight the damage wrought by global warming, and then getting stuck in the ice, and then their rescuers getting stuck in the ice... it really feels as if over-the-top global warming alarmism has jumped the shark. Right here
It would depend on these people's IQ. If you start with for example 20 feet of ice, then no ship is going to get stuck in there because they can't get in. If it melts to 10 feet of ice and breaks up because of global warming, then they get stuck.
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Congratulations for what will no doubt be the most idiotic comment attached to this story. Something we've come to expect from right wing science deniers.
1. The Akademik Shokalskiy was retracing the Douglas Mawson expedition conducted a century ago. The glacier in their vicinity was named after Xaviar Metz who died on the expedition. It's notable this original expedition was not by ship. It is the subject of David Roberts's book "Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration"
2.
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Yes, and the chlorofluorocarbons, you do remember those don't you, were and still are one of the major contributors to the ozone holes. The Montreal Protocol which started in the late 1980's, got a head of steam in the 1990's, and continues to this day pretty much banished chlorofluorocarbons from production. The expectation is the ozone holes will get back to normal around 2050 when chlorofluorocarbon have left the atmosphere.
And as someone below mentioned, there's been quite a large increase in skin cance
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Do we know skin cancer is on the rise due to the ozone hole? There are many plausible explanations, so a simple rise in numbers won't cut it.
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Do we know skin cancer is on the rise due to the ozone hole? There are many plausible explanations, so a simple rise in numbers won't cut it.
I don't mean to seem snide but do you really think that same thought hasn't occurred to anyone else? There are ways of testing and controlling for possible causes. Proving causation in cases like this is challenging but not impossible. It's sort of like proving that smoking causes an increase in lung cancer. It's difficult to prove in individual cases but actually much easier in populations. You check a lot of correlations, you test for overlapping, you slowly control for specific alternatives and over
Glad I have an AC to set the record straight (Score:2)
Skin cancer is raising in the northern hemisphere, specifically the US and UK. So there is your control group not affected by the ozone hole.
And the results of your two second "study" are published where exactly? Which form of skin cancer are you referring to specifically? What studies are you citing from which journals?
The proposed reason is bunk and if your wife is a dermatologist, not sure why you said skin doctor, and you asked her you would have known this already.
Glad you are so knowledgeable that you you can post anonymously with no citations to set the record straight. [/sarcasm]
And I said skin doctor because when I say her actual specialty (dermatopathology) most people give a deer in the headlights stare. If you know what that is, good for you but skin doctor gets the point acros
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Your facts don't suggest anything because they are in fact false. http://www.skepticalscience.com/going-down-the-up-escalator-part-1.html [skepticalscience.com]
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Re:This whole incident... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why simply err on the side of caution, when you can scuttle the entire world economy with superstitious ignorance?
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Re:A US Coast Guard Icebreaker? (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, yes we do.
Lake Superior, for example, sometimes has 6 to 12 feet of ice, and the Coast Guard opens channels in the spring for shipping to proceed as early in the season as possible.
There can be ice around Alaska coastline as well, and Coast Guard resources are used to free stuck ships.
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I've heard rumours that Alaska can get quite cold.
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I've heard rumours that Alaska can get quite cold.
They just say that to keep the tourists away.
Re:A US Coast Guard Icebreaker? (Score:5, Informative)
Why would the US Coast Guard own any icebreakers?
According to a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
Polar Star has a variety of missions while operating in polar regions. During Antarctic deployments, the primary missions include breaking a channel through the sea ice to resupply the McMurdo Research Station in the Ross Sea. Resupply ships use the channel to bring food, fuel, and other goods to make it through another winter. In addition to these duties, Polar Star also serves as a scientific research platform with five laboratories and accommodations for up to 20 scientists. The "J"-shaped cranes and work areas near the stern and port side of ship give scientists the capability to do at-sea studies in the fields of geology, vulcanology, oceanography, sea-ice physics and other disciplines.
Re: send a nuclear sub....... (Score:2)
It's the only way to be sure.
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