UN Climate Report Confuses Arctic and Antarctic

A misidentified image of "Arctic Icebergs" used by the United Nations Environment Program. (Source: Shutterstock)

Things get stranger and stranger with the United Nations’ climate change science compendium published two weeks back.

First, it was learned that the graph indicating temperature for the past 1,000 years had been taken from Wikipedia, where it had been deposited by a non-climatologist. Now, it comes to light that the report features a photograph purporting to show Arctic icebergs melting, when the actual image is of Antarctica.

As I looked through the updated report yesterday, in which the Wikipedia graph has been removed, I noticed that an image looked to have been misidentified. Fortunately for me, the UN had purchased the image on Shutterstock.com, where about an hour’s worth of sleuthing revealed that indeed this was not a picture from the top of the world, but rather from the bottom.

Some will say that it doesn’t matter. I think it does. The United Nations claims to be the steward of the best science on the planet. Wouldn’t one hope that it would have staff capable of differentiating between Antarctica and the Arctic? Of course, global warming alarmists, including those employed at the United Nations, have been using both polar ice caps’ supposed melt as evidence of runaway global warming for years now. Meanwhile, though, Antarctic sea ice has continued to increase in extent throughout the satellite era, and temperatures at the South Pole have slowly fallen.

Nonetheless, the fear-mongers in the media and at the United Nations strive to frighten the credulous into believing that Earth’s southernmost continent is on the verge of catastrophic melt. As for the Arctic misrepresented by the UN’s photograph, how many of the report’s editors even know that sea ice increased in 2009 in the Arctic for the second year in a row? At the United Nations Environment Program, the answer is evidently: none. A map with a list of “climate anomalies” from the last year indicates that 2009 was the second most significant melt in the Arctic. In fact, it was the third lowest melt and may very well represent a turnaround. Only time will tell. Even The New York Times has an article today addressing the seeming good news.

As for that list of “Significant Climate Anomalies from 2008/2009,” the great majority of items listed are weather, rather than climate. An example: the four passages of Tropical Storm Fay across Florida’s coastline. While interesting, Fay’s behavior does not have an apparent, or hidden, relationship to rising co2 levels according to any reputable scientist, nor does it cloak 2008’s quiet Atlantic tropical cyclone season. (For those keeping track at home, 2009’s has been quieter still.)

The recovery from 2007's record sea extent minimum in the Arctic has continued for a second straight year. Only time will tell whether it marks the beginning of a meaningful, long-term recovery.

The last mistake in the UN report that I will delve into for now features a photo of the Hawaiian Islands with a menacing caption about sea levels – trouble in paradise! Here is the text from the caption: “In Hawaii, as the ocean continues to rise, flooding occurs in low-lying regions during rains because storm sewers back up with saltwater and coastal erosion accelerates on beaches. Source: L. Carey.”

There are a few problems here. One: “L. Carey” does not exist, at least not according to the author of the caption. That would be Chip Fletcher, director of the Coastal Geography Group at the University of Hawaii. Reached for comment, Fletcher said that he was flattered that the United Nations report had found his statement in an internal department newsletter to be useful. Two: Fletcher also acknowledged that all of the flooding described by his statement takes place in areas of landfill that are subsiding.

Did Fletcher think that it might be a good thing for the United Nations to note the landfill subsidence when using a single image, and a single statement, to convey the reality of “climate change” in the islands? “Listen, the world is a big place,” Fletcher said. “I have other things to worry about than that.” Were there other locations in the islands that saw such flooding? “Parts of Waikiki have,” Fletcher said. Aren’t those parts of Waikiki also landfill, though? “Actually, they are.”

United Nations Uses Wikipedia Graph

What started as a brouhaha in the blogosophere has turned into a minor embarrassment for the United Nations in the climate debates. As first reported on ClimateAudit.org, the origin of a graph used in last week’s UN climate report, published to coincide with the summit in New York attended by President Obama and other world leaders, was not an august team of scientists working around the clock, but rather Wikipedia.

Perhaps equally surprising was the revelation that the graph’s author was not a climatologist, but instead an obscure Norwegian ecologist, Hanno Sandvik, who claimed no expertise regarding the data used in his graph. Misidentified in

The "Hanno" graph, from Wikipedia, used by the United Nations Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, published last week to coincide with the summit attended by President Barack Obama and other world leaders.

the UN report as “Hanno,” Sandvik politely distanced himself from the graph as the story unfolded. The UN report authors, meanwhile, had given a scientist they had never met or heard of the appearance of scientific legitimacy.

Was copying and pasting a Wikipedia graph drawn by a non-climatologist the best that the United Nations, with all the resources at its disposal, could do? Evidently, it was. Sandvik himself appeared surprised.

“ ‘My’ graph has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal since I am not a climatologist,” he wrote in an e-mail to TalkingAboutTheWeather.com. “The graph has been drawn using data that have undergone peer-review. That means that the graph is ‘mine’ only in a very restricted sense, viz. that I have drawn it – the underlying data [are] not mine, as the source provided clearly indicates. I have no qualification to judge whether the underlying data are correct or erroneous, and have never pretended to be able to do so.”

United Nations Environment Programme Director Achim Steiner, whose staff produced the report with the Wikipedia graph, did not answer repeated requests for comment.

This is not the first graph with a hockey-stick shape to gain notoriety. The most famous example is that of Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s own hockey stick graph, prominently featured at the 2001 UN IPCC meeting and in its Third Assessment Report.

Michael Mann's famous hockey stick graph used by the United Nations for its Third Assessment Report in 2001 but abandoned by the Fourth Assessment Report of 2007.

That hockey stick has since been debunked by the United States Congress by the world-renowned statistics expert Edward Wegman.

The Wegman Report was sufficiently damning that, until now, the United Nations has distanced itself from Mann’s graph, which did not appear in the Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007. From the Congressional report led by Wegman came the following conclusion: “The [Mann] methodology puts undue emphasis on those proxies that do exhibit the hockey stick shape and this is the fundamental flaw.”

Mann has argued that it was never his intention for the flat part of the stick that he derived from proxies to be grafted onto the modern temperature record, providing the upturned blade, as though the two sets of data had the same origin. Writing on the website that he cofounded, realclimate.org, Mann wrote the following in response to earlier critiques of his methodology in 2004: “No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.”

Such a graft is precisely what Sandvik’s graph does, however, leading to the inevitable question: Is the United Nations an “industry-funded climate disinformation website”? Unlike Mann’s graph, which, with the use of color and error bars, at least suggests both the level of uncertainty associated with temperature proxies and shows that the sources for the temperature data is not the same during the past 1,000 years, the “Hanno” graph used by the United Nations has neither error bars nor different colors for the differently derived data. By intent or no, it is inherently misleading.

The storm over “Hanno 2009” is very likely just beginning.

How Is the Weather Where You Are?

I started this blog for two reasons. The first was to organize my own thinking on the subject of weather and climate. The second was to create a space in which other people who care about such things might comment about what they observe where they live. It had started to bother me that seemingly the only weather stories making it into the mainstream media had to do with unusual warmth. When the TV networks and major newspapers did cover a cold-weather story they would frequently mouth the global warming dogma that the cold was the product of climate change, and not a sign that the ocean-atmosphere system was doing what it always did (which is move warm and cold around the globe like paint on a Spyrograph).

This evening, I’m in New York City, which has had an unusually cool summer so far. Today it was 72 degrees with a light wind and unusual visibility for the time of year. Back home in Austin, meanwhile, they are sweltering. 

If you are coming to the site after seeing me on Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld — welcome. Glad to have you on the site! Take a look around, comment if you like, and come back anytime.

Open Letter to a Legal Scholar Specializing in Climate Change

The following is my response to an open letter published by the legal scholar Dan Farber on his blog. Farber’s letter says that global warming “denialists” are about as right as Neville Chamberlain was returning from Munich in 1938 and declaring “peace in our time.” 

I was disappointed by the dearth of facts in the open letter.

If we are to debate, which you say is appropriate, would not facts be a good place to start?

First of all, the prognostications of computer models are not facts.

Here are few things that are:

Global warming alarmists have struggled to explain the fact that Antarctic sea ice has steadily increased since satellite measurements have been taken.

1. Global sea ice extent is above the 1979-2000 mean as anyone can see by visiting Cryosphere Today (a site run by people who believe fervently in manmade global warming, by the way). Antarctic sea ice extent has increased at aboutthe same rate that Arctic sea ice has declined. That was most dramatically the case in 2007, the year in which maximum Arctic melting and maximum Antarctic sea ice extent were both attained within about six weeks of each other. Although carbon dioxide is known to be a well-mixed gas, it appears not to pack much of a punch in Antarctica. Here are the data: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

 

2. The Arctic has melted enough to create significant waves leaving erosion on the north coast of Greenland, most recently during the Medieval Warm Period.

3. Speaking of the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland for a period of 350 years during same. Had alarmists been around at the time, they would have videotaped the melting ice that made colonization possible, distributed it to news outlets around the world, and scared the pants off people (like today) who didn’t know that such cyclical warming has gone on during all of human history.

4. The Eemian interglacial before our own Holocene interglacial saw temperatures far higher than today and sea levels 4 to 6 meters than today. Again, it is a shame that the melting that led to the higher sea levels could not have been captured in high-resolution videography in order to sway the credulous.

5. Ice shelves in Antarctica have melted cyclically, most recently during the Holocene Optimum 7,000 years ago. The great bulk of the melt of the shelves (as opposed to annually melting and reforming sea ice) that has been taking place during the past couple of decades is from below (meaning relatively warm ocean currents) rather than above.

6. Henrik Svensmark’s theory that galactic cosmic rays provide cloud condensation nuclei is about to get a real-world test. The current deep solar minimum continues to increase cosmic rays to the highest levels ever recorded, as can be seen here: http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startdate=1964/05/17&starttime=00:00&enddate=2009/06/17&endtime=19:16&resolution=Automatic%20choice&picture=on
(most will need to copy and paste the full url, either that or Google Oulu Neutron Monitor)

7. The principal reason for temperatures being at all elevated in 2009 is lingering heat in the system from the string of El Niños beginning in 1982, most spectacularly the Super El Niño of 1997. However, no global warming (averaging the four major temperature providers — Hadcrut, GISS, RSS, and UAH) has taken place since 1998. The ocean is a huge heat sink, but temperatures have nonetheless started to decline in the past five years, as can be seen here: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/

8. The bitter winter in Canada and the northern tier of the United States is just a continuation of the unusually cold and snowy winter that occurred during June, July, and August of 2008 in Australia and New Zealand. Ski resorts have opened early again this year in the Southern Hemisphere. Just weather? Then why do warmists give themselves permission to set up video cameras at the scene of every flood, drought, and tropical cyclone that causes misery?

9. As for your moral high ground, you and many others in the privileged Western elite ignore the fact that getting electricity to the 1.5 billion to 2 billion people living in the cold and dark today is a human-rights issue of the highest order. Coercing the corrupt governments of weak nations to trade carbon credits to the West, so that we can continue with our fine lifestyle (Al Gore’s 20 x American average electric bill comes to mind) does not strike me as a Higher Morality. There are faith groups whose sole purpose is to oppose this kind of paternalistic — and finally colonial — nonsense.

10. We are always one volcanic eruption away from sudden, problematic cooling. That is among the reasons that NASA has spent money researching vulcanism during past solar minima (another arguably being to obfuscate the fact that the Sun largely drives Earth’s climate). Warmth has historically been good for Earth’s people. One reason that we are all here arguing about this today is that we live at what most consider to be the tail end of an interglacial. The Dark Ages were to a great degree begun by a single volcanic eruption in 535: Krakatoa.

11. Farmers in Canada and the Northern Plains of the USA are struggling due to the June frosts this year. Ice wine has been produced in Brazil for the first time this year.

12. The coldest temperature ever recorded in the state of Maine — -50 degrees Fahrenheit — was measured this year. Ask your friends in New England what winter has been like for the past two years.

13. The changeover of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its negative phase two years ago has ushered in a new climate regime. When the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation switches to its cool negative phase as well (anticipated in 2015, but it has flirted with negative values already this year), people will LAUGH about the time when so many feared global warming.

14. The game is changing, and that is the reason for the rise of alarmist claims. London’s first snow during the month of October since 1922 took place last fall. England had its snowiest winter in at least ten years. They skated on the Dutch canals this year for the first time in 12 years.

I could go on. The truth is that those of us who have been converted away from the cult of fear that is AGW need only wait. Ice-free Arctic by 2013?

Guess again.

Gavin Schmidt’s Anti-Science Exposed

Like that of all reservoirs in the American West, the water level of Lake Powell has fluctuated since the day it was dammed.

What follows is an open letter to the Salon writer Peter Dizikes, who recently published an article about a new book by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt on climate change.

Dear Mr. Dizikes:

I recently read your overview of Gavin Schmidt’s new book as well as your interview with him on Salon.

I was surprised to see that you consider the effects of manmade global warming to be “oddly invisible.” Having studied the subject for a couple of years now, while performing my own research, it has been my observation that newspapers, magazines, and television news sources show images of supposed manmade climate change on a daily basis. Such images include: floods, polar bears, glacial calving, etc. If anything, images of global warming might be said to saturate western media.

As with so many other products generated by the AGW industry, Schmidt’s book Climate Change: Picturing the Science is part of an ongoing effort to frighten the credulous. Its messages include: weather will kill you; our moment on Earth is unique; and climate did not used to change.

Had you wanted to fulfill the responsibilities of an objective and hard-hitting journalist, you might have asked Schmidt about the image of Lake Powell on his book’s cover. Now, of course, we are all told never to judge a book by its cover – but this is a visual book that demands to be judged on visual terms. There are a lot of people, unfortunately, who don’t know enough about the facts to perform this kind of analysis themselves. Failing to do so for them is a pity.

Were you aware, may I ask, of the controversial nature of the damming of the Colorado River that led to Lake Powell? Environmentalists were and are appalled by this particular dam. It has changed an important piece of the American natural landscape. But, like all manmade dams on Earth, it has changing water levels. Dammed lakes in the American west are particularly prone to fluctuating water levels, within single years, year to year, and on the decadal level. Water use varies as well, although it can be counted on to slowly increase. Using an image of lowered water level on Lake Powell, which is a reservoir, sitting in a desert, to indicate anything about climate change is perverse. I would even go to far as to call it anti-science.

The assumption that industrial production of co2 has altered precipitation patterns is exactly that, an assumption. Further, what you are going to find, in the next decade, is that global temperatures are going to remain flat (as they have since 1998) and/or start to decline. What you are also going to find is that science writers in the American media establishment are going to peel off, one by one, from the AGW orthodoxy.

Group-think has affected many societies negatively, and it has not disappeared during our own time. The fact that neither Mr. Schmidt’s editor, nor his publisher, nor you, nor the photographer, nor Mr. Schmidt himself would stop to reflect on the oddity of this cover is enough to give one pause.

Sincerely yours,

Harold Ambler

Arctic Cooling Has Begun

What follows is the first guest post on Talking About The Weather. I chose Peter Taylor’s short essay on the Arctic out of respect for Peter’s research, his calm during intense debates, and the focus he brings to the issues. As Peter makes clear, those “banking” on rapid Arctic sea ice deterioration in the decades ahead seem to know very little about climate cycles. — Harold

I hope to be around in 2020, when some have suggested those of us on the sceptics’ side should have been vindicated, but I think we will prevail much sooner. The Arctic heat-wave of 1920-1940 is of course well-known to real Arctic climate scientists. I reviewed 32 temperature data sets for Arctic stations to 2004 some with very long records. In 2006 I could find only one with higher temperatures in 2004 than in the late 1930s or early 1940s – that was on the eastern

Fear-mongering regarding Arctic sea ice is the most acute of all that brought forward by global warming doomsayers. Image courtesy of the USGS.

coast of Greenland. Since then I have reviewed dozens of papers on surface air temperature, sea surface temperatures, ice-mass, glacier speeds and sea-ice, and all show a clear cyclic pattern of roughly 70 years. Some Greenland and Alaskan temperatures peaked in 2006-2008, but the pattern looks set to repeat.

 

The latest Arctic heat wave is not identical to the last – firstly it is higher, by maybe 20% in some places, and secondly, the hot-spots are different. But one thing is clear – it is driven by two distinctive factors – a 14% increase in clouds over the North Pole and Beaufort Sea between 1980-2000, and the incursion of warm Atlantic water under the ice and into the Beaufort Gyre. The rapid summer ice loss is due to melting from above (infra red from the clouds) and below (warm Atlantic water).

The strength of the Beaufort Gyre determines how far Atlantic water penetrates the Arctic – when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is warm and Alaskan Shelf winds are low, the gyre weakens and may reverse flow; when cold (as it has been since late 2006), the Alaskan interior cools, the winds strengthen and the gyre strengthens accordingly – there is a lag of a few years.

Thus, this domino effect from the Pacific will eventually reach the area between Greenland and Norway and summer sea-ice ought to return to the long-term norm (unless there really is a strong greenhouse element – which I can’t see it greater than the difference between this warm period and the last – ie about 20%) and unless there is an even steeper decline in global temperatures due to the quiet sun effect.

On the latter – there is a body of evidence that during quiet solar periods, the jetstream is shifted along with Arctic pressure systems that lead to blocking high pressure over Iceland – sending the jetstream further south and cooling western Europe. The eastern seaboard of the USA gets a little warmer, but the mid-West suffers late springs, dry summers, and bitter winters – not good for the breadbasket of the world!

We should get to see this play out over the next five years.

 

Cold comfort: Catlin team awaits re-supply

With adverse weather, including at least one blizzard, preventing its scheduled re-supply, the Catlin Arctic Survey expedition on the Arctic Ocean sea ice has slashed food rations by more than 80 percent. On normal sledging days, the team members consume 6,000 calories. Until a re-supply is successfully completed, they are taking in 1,000 calories a day each.

Huddled in their tent beside the makeshift landing site for the Borek Air resupply plane, the Catlin team of Pen Hadow, Martin Hartley, and Ann Daniels improved the landing site with hand tools such as they could before being forced to take cover by the conditions. 

Pen Hadow enjoys a warm beverage before a blizzard forced the Catlin team to take refuge in its tent for the past five days.

Although the re-supply was scheduled for last Saturday, the weather has not let up long enough for the trip to be attempted. The Catlin Operations Center in London has determined that today, Wednesday, is the best hope for the landing of the ski-equipped Twin Otter aircraft, although the anticipated twelve-hour window of safe flying may suddenly close down, as happens frequently in the region.

“This is a frustrating [time] for the team,” said a statement on the expedition website. If the atmosphere does not permit the trip on Wednesday, that would be bad news for the explorers indeed, as forecasters see a new storm making its way north and promising to preclude any attempts on Thursday or Friday.

Meanwhile, how long the team remains on the ice it was sent to measure remains a point of some uncertainty. Rod Macrae, Catlin director of communications, has stated that May 25 was the cut-off date agreed upon with Kenn Borek Air, the company servicing the expedition. 

Sean Loutitt, vice president of operations for Borek, said in a phone interview Tuesday that safe removal after April 30 could not be guaranteed, due to deteriorating ice conditions this time of year.

Loutitt was careful to mention that there is no risk of starvation for Hadow, Martin, and Daniels. “The bottom line is that we will do whatever is necessary to make sure that nobody starves to death,” he said. “We can airdrop food, that’s fairly easy.”

 Pen Hadow, the expedition leader, and Borek Air have prior experience with each other at the North Pole, in 2003. At the time, Borek’s pilots were none too pleased with Hadow’s choices. Borek’s Steve Penikett said then, “No one should expect to be picked up from there later than 30 April … Going to the Pole this time of the year is a bit stupid and you put a lot of people’s lives at risk.”

 This go around, Loutitt re-enforced the sense of conflicting agendas, by stating both that the final determination would be made by Borek pilots and that it would be made by Catlin. “It’s completely up to Catlin whether they remove the people or not,” he said.

 

 

Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking

By Greg Roberts - The Australian

April 18, 2009

RUSSIAN sea captain Dimitri Zinchenko has been steering ships through the pack ice of Antarctica for three decades and is waiting to see evidence of the global warming about which he has heard so much.

 

The Spirit of Enderby is shown skirting Antarctic sea ice and a pod of emperor penguins. Photo courtesy of Charter New Zealand.

Zinchenko’s vessel, the Spirit of Enderby, was commissioned in January last year to retrace the steps of the great Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, marking the century of his Nimrod expedition of 1907-09.

Spirit of Enderby was blocked by a wall of pack ice at the entrance to the Ross Sea, about 400km short of Shackleton’s base hut at Cape Royds. Zinchenko says it was the first time in 15 years that vessels were unable to penetrate the Ross Sea in January. The experience was consistent with his impression that pack ice is expanding, not contracting, as would be expected in a rapidly warming world. “I see just more and more ice, not less ice.”

Rodney Russ, whose New Zealand company Heritage Expeditions has operated tourist expeditions to Antarctica for 20 years, agrees. He says ships regularly used to able to reach the US base of McMurdo in summer, but ice has prevented them from doing so for several years.

“Vessels are usually stopped 8km to 14km short of the base. A few years ago, that was often open water,” Russ says. “We have experienced quite severe ice conditions over the past decade. I have seen nothing in this region to suggest global warming is having an effect.”

Such observations are not in step with the popular perception of what global warming is doing to the polar icecaps. Reports last week that an ice bridge had snapped in west Antarctica, threatening the disintegration of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, generated international headlines. Environment Minister Peter Garrett insisted that although he had not received any scientific advice about the Wilkins break-up, he was in no doubt about the implications.

“It’s a big event. There are many others that have been identified in and around the Antarctic, which I think tells us unequivocally that we’re seeing climate change impacts,” Garrett said.

 

Graph of Antarctic sea ice during the era of satellite measurement that started in 1979 shows a slow upward trend. Mainstream media outlets in the United States have a funny habit of never publishing this information.

The real story about ice and Antarctica, however, is more complicated.

With Antarctica holding 80 per cent of the world’s fresh water and 90 per cent of its ice, a meltdown of the icecap would raise sea levels worldwide by a catastrophic 70m. With the depth of the icecap averaging 4km, nothing like that is on the horizon. But is there cause for concern about what is happening with the weather in Antarctica?

Climatologists say if temperatures rise by 4C to 6C by the end of the century – the upper limit predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climage Change – the melting of ice sheets in west Antarctica and Greenland would raise sea levels by up to 1.5m, enough to create problems in coastal areas.

What is less certain is whether ice shelf losses in west Antarctica, such as Wilkins, are being offset by cooling conditions and ice expansion in east Antarctica, which is four times the size of west Antarctica.

Unlike the Arctic, there has been no certainty that global warming is having an effect across Antarctica, although temperatures have risen in parts of west Antarctica, especially on the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula is geologically more an extension of the Andes of South America than part of the Antarctic continent. The crucial distinction between west Antarctica and the much larger east Antarctica is rarely mentioned in media reports of ice shelf break-ups.

For the complete Australian story, click here.

Catlin Arctic Team in Peril?

 

Pen Hadow and Martin Hartley of the Catlin Arctic Survey battle the elements in the name of science, and their own survival.

The three-person team of British explorers on the Arctic ice cap may or may not be in danger, depending upon which of the team’s representatives back at headquarters in London is doing the talking.

Martin Hartley, Pen Hadow, and Ann Daniels have been on a “scientific” mission to measure sea ice thickness that is routinely measured by satellite and buoys. Unfortunately, just about all of their equipment failed as soon as the team got onto the ice, due to what the BBC has reported as unexpected wind chill values as low as minus 70 degrees Celsius.

On the health front, according to Catlin Arctic Survey medical adviser Doctor Martin Rhodes, the team are battling chronic hypothermia. Additionally, Martin Hartley has frostbite on one foot, photographs of which are on the mission website, with a disclaimer for the faint of heart.

On the other hand, according to Catlin communications director Rod Macrae, all is well. “They’re fine,” he said, in a phone interview Thursday. “There is no hypothermia.” Macrae maintained that people with agendas that he didn’t even want to speculate about were looking to criticize the team, when, actually everything is going very well indeed. “Pen [the team leader] has said, ‘Were stuck in the tent, and we’re unable to take any measurements.’ And people have rushed to all sorts of hasty conclusions about their situation being dire or something.”

And yet, according to a blog entry on the Catlin website by support team member Gaby Dean, the team members do not sound normal when they phone in each day, their words slurred and muddled. Macrae was surprised to learn that the team’s “live” biotelemetry (heart rate, breaths per minute, core temperature, and skin temperature) had been repeating for upwards of a week (closer to a month, it turned out). Hadow’s core temperature reading of 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit), day after day, had given plenty of the people following the mission pause, if not a sense of foreboding. As for the slurred speech, Macrae explained that when the facial muscles get cold, they do not perform normally.

“All clothing can do is slow down the process of losing heat,” Doctor Rhodes said. “The only way they can keep the hypothermia at bay is to keep moving and to keep eating.”

Although the team is equipped with the highest-tech cold-weather gear that money can buy, many have questioned the decision not to use traditional seal and animal fur gear, considered by some experts to be superior in the extreme environment.

As of the end of the day on Thursday, which was a rest day, the team had progressed 245 kilometers. Their goal is to take ice measurements all the way to the north pole, but with only 40 days left before they will be removed from the ice, their pace will have to quicken in order for them to attain their goal. They have 678 kilometers still to travel.

The pilots who have brought the team two resupplies are the same ones who will pick them up at the end of the expedition, and they have stated that they are unwilling to risk their aircraft and personal safety on the increasingly questionable ice after May 25, according to Macrae.

“To be honest, reaching the pole is entirely secondary to capturing the scientific data,” Macrae said. When asked whether any sea ice data (live streaming data had been promised prior to the expedition) could be made available, Macrae explained that Catlin had decided to hold off on that for the time being. “We will be putting some data up onto the website, when we think it’s substantial enough to provide something of interest.”

He was pointed in denying that any discussion of removing the team from the ice had taken place. “No, never,” he said. “I think there has been a fairly serious misinterpretation of the situation.”

When informed later in the day that the team’s own medical adviser had diagnosed them, albeit remotely, with chronic hypothermia, Macrae responded with an e-mail: “What has been said and is, as you I am sure aware pretty obvious, they are constantly battling hypothermia.”

Sea level essentially unchanged … yawn

When it comes to sea levels, I will say again: Individuals should feel free to use their own eyes. 



For those who live near enough the ocean to visit, do so. Look around. Do you see homes being claimed by the waves? Do you see flooding? Anything unusual at all? 



I’m a surfer, and I have visited a lot of coastlines, many of them “precarious.” Chief among these is the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (Left by the last Ice Age, by the way.) Has everyone noticed how the Outer Banks, average elevation about 10 feet, have been completely evacuated and all construction stopped? But, wait a second, I thought …



How about Venice, Italy? It has been completely submerged by the melting ice caps, right? No? Wait …



No amount of grandstanding by James Hansen or Al Gore can change the fact that Venice remains a safe place to live and visit.

How about all of the ports in all of the countries of the world? They have had to be re-engineered and rebuilt to deal with the rising water, right? No? 



If you want to know what is happening with the world’s oceans, then ask some plain regular people, I say. While living in Rhode 

Although hurricanes routinely cause serious coastal erosion on the Outer Banks, the strip of sand off the coast of North Carolina remains a pleasant place to live, visit, and, above all, enjoy nature.

Island, I was friends with the fishermen there. They were all talking nonstop about the rising sea water, right? No, they weren’t. 



What about the world’s surfers (who typically know a great deal about meteorology and the oceans)? They can’t stop talking about the disappearance of their breaks to rising waters, right? No? What about the North Shore of Oahu where some of the largest surf on Earth regularly assaults the coast. It’s being eaten away at a steady clip by the rising water, right? No? Wait a minute …



What about New York City, shown in Al Gore’s “documentary” to be at risk for sudden irremediable flooding? The waterfront shows a steady rise of water to dangerous levels, right? No? No discernible change? Wait a minute …



What about all the low-lying islands on Earth? They’ve pretty much all been wiped out, right? No? Only one or two have been encroached upon, and those have had their groundwater overtapped and are subsiding? But I thought…



Seriously – seriously! – how can so many people be so skillfully manipulated? 



Maybe you can fool all of the people all of the time. 



Maybe …