First Sail Boat Through the McClure Straits

[jackdale]

A Passage Through Ice: First sailboat passes through McClure strait | Canada | News | National Post

[GordMay]

'A Passage Through Ice' Sailing Expedition has just completed the crossing of the infamous M'Clure strait in the Canadian Arctic to become the first sailboat ever to achieve this feat. The international expedition team consisting of Edvin Buregren, Nicolas Peissel and Morgan Peissel have spent the last three months at sea on a 31 foot boat sailing from Newfoundland Canada to Greenland, through the Canadian Arctic to track the depleting polar ice cap and bring awareness to climate change*.

More ➥ A Passage through Ice

The Northwest Passage ➥ Northern Passages | Weather Underground

* "Climate Change": A myth perpetrated by left wing, tree-hugger commie perverts.

[jackdale]

Originally Posted by GordMay;1026336

[I

* "Climate Change": A myth perpetrated by left wing, tree-hugger commie perverts.[/I]

The Canadian government is looking forward to the economic opportunities afforded by an ice-free Arctic.

Arctic sea ice makes record-setting retreat

Stan Rogers - Northwest Passage - YouTube

[micah719]

Don't worry, the ice will be back. It was worse in 2007. If you're starved for ice, go south, the antarctic is accumulating the stuff the north lost. It is a Canadian-NZ plot to tap into the tropic cruiseship industry, and to increase the Kiwi skifields.

Ice Extent Archives

THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: New blockbuster paper finds man-made CO2 is not the driver of global warming

Seadragon (SSN-584), foreground, and her sister Skate (SSN-578) during a rendezvous at the North Pole in August 1962. Note the men on the ice beyond the submarines:

[jackdale]

Originally Posted by micah719

Don't worry, the ice will be back. It was worse in 2007.

Wrong

[Andrew Troup]

Micah got his info from a denialist website whose owner was crowing about the situation in April this year, in a piece whose headline proclaimed the ice area was approaching "Abnormally High"

It turned out it was looking as though it might exceed 1 standard deviation above normal. (In fact it never did)

Which is pretty funny, considering the website also proclaims itself to be a venue for "Real Science". In practice, the coverage should exceed +1 SD 1 month in six, and it should do that to qualify for normal (rather than trigger celebrations about it being "Abnormal").

The event he was hoping to point to as abnormally high would have been a first, in sixty months.

The website author's response to suggestions that it looked as though it could be as much as 5 standard deviations BELOW 'normal' by the end of this year's melt is not printable on this website, but evidently he sees nothing abnormal in that.

According to statistical probability, -5 SD should normally happen less than one month in one hundred thousand. Now THAT might justifiably be called abnormal. Abnormally low.

[nigel1]

Originally Posted by GordMay

'A Passage Through Ice' Sailing Expedition has just completed the crossing of the infamous M'Clure strait in the Canadian Arctic to become the first sailboat ever to achieve this feat. The international expedition team consisting of Edvin Buregren, Nicolas Peissel and Morgan Peissel have spent the last three months at sea on a 31 foot boat sailing from Newfoundland Canada to Greenland, through the Canadian Arctic to track the depleting polar ice cap and bring awareness to climate change*.

More ➥ A Passage through Ice

The Northwest Passage ➥ Northern Passages | Weather Underground

* "Climate Change": A myth perpetrated by left wing, tree-hugger commie perverts.

It was good they made the effort to bring attention to this climate change, but a crying shame that they had to and were able to do so.
What good bringing this to the world's attention will do waits to be seen, but I doubt it will bother the majority of the worlds population.

[Andrew Troup]

Originally Posted by micah719

..... the antarctic is accumulating the stuff the north lost.

And as things warm up there will continue to be an increase in precipitation in Southern Polar regions, as anybody with any knowledge of cold maritime climates was pointing out thirty years ago.

The Antarctic is technically a desert. Too cold to snow. As it warms up, it will snow more and more. Until it gets as warm as the Arctic has already become, but that's such a horrible scenario (and will take so long, and other things will have become so bad centuries earlier) that we'll be long past caring.

There's a phenomenal amount of cooling potential trapped in the Southern Polar IceCap. The mass of ice, many kilometers thick, is such that it's depressing the continental crust -- which will spring back as the ice melts.

Unless air circulation patterns change drastically there will be little warming of the polar airmass (except round the margins) until most of that cooling potential has been melted by warmer water.
Causing the drowning of all coastal land areas across the planet, and of course by that stage any current seaports will be well beyond living memory.

But it's nice to know some find the prospect amusing, or even exciting.

[Andrew Troup]

As for claims that temperature leading CO2 rise somehow makes the case for AGW evaporate, they're scarily misguided:

The truth is almost the opposite: the fact that temperature rise and CO2 rise can each cause the other is the exact reason AGW is potentially a runaway phenomenon.

It's called positive feedback. Like waves slopping into the vehicle deck of a car ferry with the bow-door unlatched.

The oft-heard claim, linked to above, that if A causes B, B cannot cause A is puzzlingly naive.

Maybe the above example is not simplistic enough, or sailors are programmed for denial of this nasty feedback loop (where A is loss of freeboard, and B is wave ingress), so here's another:

Adult Insects lay eggs; eggs hatch into insects. If you plot insects vs eggs over time, sometimes a rise in one will lead a rise in the other, and vice versa.

This does not prove that either is independent of the other, as denialists like to claim.

What we do know about such a two-way linkage is that, unless constrained (in the case of insects, by predation or food shortage) the outcome (population, in the insect instance) will be runaway rise.

[Normanby]

I'm convinced by the stats that indicate that the climate is changing. It is.
And blind Freddy can read a graph of CO2 emissions and see the rise over time. It's been rising for ages.
But what I'm not convinced about is that one is causing the other. Correlation is not causation.
Geological time is measured in tens of millennia.
Don't get me wrong, I've been a mad tree hugger all my life, and still try to tread very lightly on the Earth.
But the evangelical way in which governments are embracing carbon trading schemes makes me suspicious. Something's not right. Since when do politicians and bureaucrats gang up to pass laws for any other purpose than lining their own pockets?
I don't trust 'em, and if the gumments are agreeing with each other, I'm nervous.
I think it was Mark Twain who said something like "when you find yourself in agreement with popular opinion, it's time to reevaluate your position."
So I'm not a denialist, not a climate change skeptic. I call myself a CARBON skeptic.
Yes, we're wrecking the joint. If the planet was a rental property, we are soooo not getting our security deposit back.
But I'm not convinced that CO2 is the bogey man.
Besides, concentrating on carbon so much seems to have the effect of letting people think they are doing something for the planet, and can thus forget to recycle, can eat shark fin soup, throw plastic trash out of their cars, etc...

[Andrew Troup]

Originally Posted by Normanby

....CO2 emissions .... been rising for ages.
But what I'm not convinced about is that one is causing the other. Correlation is not causation.
Geological time is measured in tens of millennia.....way in which governments are embracing carbon trading schemes makes me suspicious. Something's not right. Since when do politicians and bureaucrats gang up to pass laws for any other purpose than lining their own pockets?
I don't trust 'em, and if the gumments are agreeing with each other, I'm nervous..... I call myself a CARBON skeptic. .....But I'm not convinced that CO2 is the bogey man.
....

In the hypothetical situation where CO2 and temperature WERE causally linked, I'm unsure how you would know, by applying your reasoning above?

Would the scientific consensus about the greenhouse effect be more convincing to you if governments disagreed in the extent to which they believed it?

(As, increasingly it seems to me, they are disagreeing-- with many being towed away from their initial - and surprising - stance by the vocal protestations of the wishful-thinking sector of the voting public. A sector which seems to be in plentiful supply everywhere).

On reflection, I'm not convinced that your contention is reversible, in which case, nothing would suffice to persuade you of a linkage between CO2 and temperature. Are you happy to have a position which automatically delivers a fixed conclusion, regardless of the actual situation?

(one other puzzle for me: When you speak of geological time being measured in millennia, I'm not sure how that links into your argument?)

ON EDIT: Apologies to the moderators: I belatedly realise I've been drawn into arguing (however peripherally) about politics rather than science.

Like most on my side of the debate, I find it intensely frustrating that the question keeps being bumped sideways, almost always by people arguing for the 'other side'. Certainly the question of what to do about climate change is political, but the question of whether it is human-induced is a question for science, and it's very unfortunate that we have arrived at a situation where the "No linkage" people can destroy the debate any time they like, simply by introducing political red herrings.

So perhaps my answer to Normanby should have been: please restate your objections to a causal linkage without invoking politics. It's a question purely of science, like those raised by Copernicus and Galileo (whose opponents similarly invoked politics)

[Sailormantx]

The climate has always been in a state of change before humans existed and will continue after we are gone. It is not a static, unchanging environment. For better or worse, humans have a growing impact on our home planet, but it is unlikely that we could do more than slightly accelerate the inevitable changes. Best to not make too much of a mess of our home and deal with whatever
nature throws at us and use it to our advantage. Less ice is opening new areas to sail for those of us who like to get off the beaten path. Rising sea levels are a non issue living on a boat...perhaps a relocated coastline will inspire more to live indepently as possible on boats.

[Andrew Troup]

Originally Posted by Sailormantx

The climate has always been in a state of change before humans existed and will continue after we are gone. It is not a static, unchanging environment.

The fuel gauge on my boat has always been in a state of change, too. It goes up, it goes down. Previous owners report the same behaviour.

Does that mean it's not a cause for concern if it starts dropping at a sustained rate none of us have ever seen?

[Sailormantx]

Concerned, yes. but instead of trying to fight the inevitable change, let's use it to our advantage. Less ice in the north will open up some incredible opportunities. It's all in how you look at it.

[S/V Alchemy]

One either notices the slick in the bilges and in one's wake, and/or switches off the engine! Frankly, the smell would alert me before I noticed the fuel gauge, but then I'm not a diesel denialist.

Denialism in climate terms is, I believe, multi-part: Denialists have found (and a good thing, too) examples of climate science that is either inconclusive or actually rigged. This leads to ideas that the whole topic is a way to garner grants and to drive social change and "socialist" schemes like carbon taxes.

The climate scientist community has not been well-served here. Fiddling with the numbers or stating that a consensus exists when such is not the case does make the neurons of conspiracy theory light up. Egregious tampering has been uncovered. This does not render the AGW thesis incorrect, but the degree, timing and mix of causes leading to AGW, along with a predictable timeline worth pondering, is rendered, once again, foggy. Planetary climate trends rest on so many variable that it is extremely hazardous, in my view, to make blanket, or smog blanket, predictions of future trends.

The other aspect of denialism, however, is harder to challenge, but perhaps easier to understand, and that is the problem of scale. Understanding how one's driving of a SUV or one's dark grey shingles or gas-heated corn-to-ethanol conversion plants can add up to climate tipping points (shaped or not shaped like hockey sticks as required) is very difficult for individual humans to understand, like accepting that our bodies are composed of ten times as many bacteria as body cells. To consider this is firstly difficult for the generally innumerate citizenry of most of the planet, but also because it is disturbing to do so.

Having a direct understanding of what one's car, furnace, international road transport system, international bunker-diesel shipping fleets, and tens of thousands of dirty coal plants is hard for most people to conceive. Understanding that such sources are cumulative in their output of certain gases and particulates is less difficult to understand, so we are fighting about matters of degree.

The weather is always changing. The climate is the cumulation of the weather. To sail an old, plastic 31 footer through the top end of the Northwest Passage would have seemed inconceivable within my own lifetime. Now it has been done. Something is changing. Whether it represents whether something is amiss or whether we have a large or small part in it is still not fully understood. I have even heard that without the Industrial Revolution, the timing of various orbital cycles might have seen by this point the start of a fresh Ice Age, but even those take centuries to boot up.

Frankly, I suspect that our numbers will kill us collectively before the climate does. Insects moving north and south with drought in food producing areas, and habitat decline on the coasts may revive old diseases or invent new ones. History is replete with examples where humans, even rich, savvy ones, have been quite easily killed off by the most common of climatic events. A less-populated Earth would buy more time, I think, to try and figure out exactly what is happening, our part in it, and whether we have any options in the matter.

The most fascinating part of this latest Nortwest Passage is that they went in a fibreglass boat and not a steel one. That to me says more about the conditions they encountered then multiple shots of them tanning at 70 degrees north to the sound of melting ice pans.