Chinese Icebreaker Is Stuck In Ice After Antarctic Research Vessel Rescue 361
New submitter Cochonou writes "In an unforeseen turn of events, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long is now stuck in heavy Antarctic pack ice, just a day after its helicopter was used for the rescue of the passengers onboard the ice-trapped MV Akademik Shokalskiy. The Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, which is now carrying the passengers of the Shokalskiy, has been placed on standby to assist. The Chinese vessel is waiting for favorable tidal conditions on Saturday to make another attempt at freeing itself."
Re:It's still there? (Score:2, Informative)
Arctica !== Antarctica.
Re:It's still there? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just remember now... (Score:4, Informative)
"Don't forget that Antarctica was void of ice during the Mesozoic era. It was pretty warm then."
As I recall, Antarctica as also north of Australia at that time, and just south of Africa and South America (as in you could walk from one to the other).
Re:Just remember now... (Score:3, Informative)
That, my friend, is known as the gish gallop [rationalwiki.org] where you propose so many wrong headed ideas(each of which a reasonable explanation of would take 10 times as long as spewing out) so quickly as to appear to have an undeniable point.
Re:Just remember now... (Score:3, Informative)
Its not easy to validate when you cannot get your hands on their raw data. You only get summary reports from the "climate scientists"!
You can't?
Have you tried?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#Climate_data_raw [realclimate.org]
What exciting analysis are you going to do with this data now I've told you how to get it?
How come you didn't find it using Google? It's the first result.
Re:International cooperation (Score:5, Informative)
Millenia-old "law" of the high seas: A ship is in distress, all ships capable of safely helping shall reroute to assist.
No-one who sails for a living wants to be the guy known to break that sacred rule.
Re:Ironic (Score:2, Informative)
Yup, a one year change means we can ignore the trend.
Splendid.
Funny you didn't quote more of your source which talks about extent, not mass:
The experts added, however, that much of the ice remains thin and slushy, a far cry from the thick Arctic pack ice of the past. Because thin ice is subject to rapid future melting, the scientists said this year’s recovery was unlikely to portend any change in the relentless long-term decline of Arctic sea ice.
Re:Just remember now... (Score:4, Informative)
First, it is important to note that Dr. Roy Spencer has a track record of providing misinformation on climate issues [skepticalscience.com].
Looking at his graph and notes, I don't understand why he chose 1979 as the starting period for his graph, and what he's done to model runs that start after 1979 to extend their trend lines backwards. I would expect a single line with many points of divergence along it to show where each model begins to overestimate warming, the fact that they all seem to start overestimating by 1982 is a clue that someone is playing games with the data. Furthermore, just from looking at the graph it appears to be indicating that the average of the models is between 0.3 and 0.4 degrees per decade. That is significantly higher than the average from the IPCC1 report (which was between 0.15 and 0.3 degrees per decade) so where are these numbers coming from? Did Spencer cherry-pick the worst performing models for his graph or did he alter the results produce by the models in some way? The attached commentary doesn't provide the data or explain the methodology used to generate the graph.
Additionally, the only two reference points are an average of two sets of satellite data and 4 balloons? Where are the ground temperature series in this graph?
Skeptical Science has posted several blog posts that show a much closer match between models and observation [skepticalscience.com], so I'm inclined to believe that Spencer screwed it up unintentionally or otherwise.
Re:Just remember now... (Score:3, Informative)
When I was a wee lad, the "settled" climate science was that Earth was cooling, and we were careening head-on into a new Ice Age that was going to destroy us all.
No, it wasn't. [skepticalscience.com] What this statement shows is that you don't know the difference between a new reporter and a scientist. There was a little media hysteria over the possibility of a ice age, but the science supported warming over cooling at nearly 6 to 1 already by that point. The debate at that time was over whether the natural cooling effects that causes ice ages could overcome anthropogenic emissions (which were quite a bit lower at that point).
Then, as science, data collection, and computer modeling advanced yet further... "Global Warming" has been called into question. So much so, in fact, that many of the climate scientists of today will not use the phrase "Global Warming", but have chosen the trademark of "Climate Change". It's back to "we're not sure what's going on but we're all gonna die!" "Climate Change" is a delightfully vague yet alarming turn of phrase, and a stroke of genius.
This is also false, the IPCC has never been the IPGW. Many people don't understand this, but global warming is a specific effect of climate change. Just like warming is just one type of temperature change. The IPCC's mandate is to study climate change, whatever it is. Global warming is what we're currently getting from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The only people I'm aware of who tried to change the name for the phenomenon from global warming to climate change are George W. Bush's political advisors who suggested that climate change was less likely to disturb voters.
So now, every time something odd, unusual, rare, extreme, or even normal happens with weather, it can be attributed to "Climate Change" -- because something changed, see? Climate Change equals different weather, so something in weather that didn't happen last year or the year before is now because of Climate Change.
That is not at all what climate change means. Climate change is about changes in the long-term baseline for weather, so yes if new events are possible because the average amount of rain fall or temperature (for example) has changed over the long term, then climate change may be partially responsible for a new extreme weather event. For instance if you increase the average temperature by 1 degree over the long term, you also increase the maximum reachable temperature by one degree and the minimum reachable temperature by 1 degree (simplistically, it's actually a lot more complicated that). Regardless of that change, individual events aren't general regarded as scientific proof of climate change but changes in the distribution of events can be. For instance, in a stable climate you would expect a roughly 50-50 split over time between record highs and record lows and that the number of new records overall would decrease over time. For the last 20 years or so we've been looking at around 66-33 for the high/low split, and the difference between the number of record highs and record lows is increasing, plus the number of record highs is not falling off at the rate we would expect for a stable climate.
Go ahead, Climate Change bigots. Mod me down. I've got karma to burn. I could post AC, but I'm thumbing my nose at you.
You know, it'd be more effective if anything you wrote was actually correct.