Fun happenings at the poles. About that Global Warming? Nevermind. From Autonomous Mind:
Reality of sea ice is starting to bite
One problem with "global warming" that scientists and journalists seem to gloss over is that it doesn't seem to be, well, global. Some areas have exhibited more warming than others.
The Arctic is one area that gets a lot of focus. Each summer the media makes a big deal of the extent of Arctic sea ice melt during the warmest months of the year, focusing on navigation passages and often proclaiming that before long the summer will see all the Arctic ice melt away. The BBC never misses an opportunity to relay the story, even if it is barely mentioned elsewhere, and rolled out the latest iteration of it last week.
However there seems to be a lack of coverage about the increasing extent of sea ice in the winter. With the non stop global warming narrative burned onto the subconscious of decision makers, it the therefore of little surprise that there has been barely any investment in new maritime icebreaking capability.
Always ahead of the game, EU Referendum pointed to this problem in March this year. Richard North reported the former Prime Minister of Estonia Tiit Vihi arguing that the country should urgently order a new icebreaker, Instead of spending money on buying icebreaking services.- The reason? The country's two existing icebreakers cannot cope with the "difficult ice conditions" in the Gulf of Finland. Elsewhere, North was an almost solitary voice in the western blogosphere as he reported on shipping trapped in the Sea of Okhotsk by a huge volume of thick sea ice and the subsequent challenging rescue effort.
And a bit more:
After increasingly bitter winters that have resulted in more iced over navigation passages, the Swedish government wrote to US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to announce that the icebreaker Oden will be kept at home and not be made available to support the work of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Antarctica, for the first time since 2006.
And more:
But it seems the National Science Foundation only has itself to blame for the position it found itself in, for the NSF is responsible for managing the U.S. icebreaking fleet. Under NSF management the US icebreaking fleet has been 'emasculated'. The American fleet of icebreakers numbers three - for now. It boasted two of the most powerful non-nuclear icebreakers on the seas, Polar Sea and Polar Star, but that changed some years ago. Polar Sea is to be decommissioned next month and Polar Star has been undergoing a re-fit since 2006, but there is speculation it might never to return to service. The third, Healy is not designed for heavy icebreaking of the nature required in Antarctica.
This begs the question, why did the NSF not properly maintain the US icebreaking fleet? Could it be the faith in its own belief that global warming is reducing ice cover and therefore spending money on icebreakers would be a waste? No matter, the NSF was forced into an embarrassing and desperate search for a suitable icebreaking replacement.
Just shows the huge difference between climate modeling and temperature proxy studies and actual boots-on-the-ground measurement.
