Tag Archives: Andrew Cotton

Facts About the Arctic in February 2025

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This isn’t exactly “shock news”, since we (slightly hesitantly!) predicted this 5 days ago.

A GFS 2 meter temperature chart revealing greater than zero degrees Celsius at the North Pole later today:

The 2 meter temperature anomaly at the Pole is almost off the charts:

Plus the cause of these unusual numbers, a cyclone with central pressure of 959 hPa spinning north of Ellesmere Island at 18:00 UTC this evening:

All of which has led to the JAXA/Vishop Arctic sea ice extent being the lowest for the date since 1979 at least by a significant margin:

Continue reading Facts About the Arctic in February 2025 →

The Great White Con 2020 “New Einstein” Award

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Our regular reader(s) have grown to love the amazing prizes awarded to the winner of our annual Great White Con “New Einstein” Award . The jury has now finished its deliberations on the 2019 award in the traditional smoke filled igloo just outside the Great White Con Ivory Towers, not far from Santa’s secret summer swimming pool. I am pleased to be able to announce that the first prize of the loan of a polar bear suit kindly donated by the Daily Telegraph plus a battered big board from Cotty’s quiver has been awarded to the ever spiteful Spike55 at Tony Heller’s unReal Climate Science blog, with:

You’re an idiot. A LIAR. A child-minded troll. And a slimebag con-man.

Here for your viewing pleasure is the very first “New Einstein” contestant of 2020, astonishingly early since we’re still in the midst of the 2019/20 Arctic sea ice freezing season!

1) Michael Liebreich on Twitter, with:

2) Thomas Barlow, in a “Personal Message” following the introduction of a new moderation regime on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum with:

Fuck off, clique hobbit, shit-for-brains.

Arctic Basin Big Wave Surfing Contest Equipment Evaluation 3

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It’s been a long wait for the first ever Great White Con Arctic Basin Big Wave (Fantasy?) Surfing Contest to remove the ‘F’ from the overlong acronym. However currently the omens are bad for the sea ice in the Arctic Basin, which is sadly good for the GWCABBWSC. As we announced yesterday, there is already plenty of open water in the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska:

Sentinel 3's view of the Bering Strait on February 28th 2019
Sentinel 3’s view of the Bering Strait on February 28th 2019

All of which means that today we are extremely unhappy to be able to announce that the waiting period for the Great White Con Arctic Basin Big Wave Surfing Contest 2019 began on March 1st.

Earlier this week I posed a little conundrum over on Twitter. Here it is:

Nobody has called the Great White Con Ivory Towers hotline with the correct answer as yet, so today we can also reveal that the third in our series of Arctic Basin equipment evaluations took place last Wednesday on the outskirts of Newquay in North Cornwall. Here’s a slightly less obscure clue for the pub quiz fanatics amongst you:

As you can see from my neoprene encased image on Twitter, I was perhaps slightly over dressed for the weather conditions last week. I was wearing a C-Skins thermal rash vest with integrated hood inside my ancient Gul 5/4/3 winter wetsuit plus Tiki 6 mm socks and 2 mm webbed gloves. Even my fingers were more than warm enough on the day, although it’s fair to say that conditions weren’t typical for late summer in the Arctic Basin! What’s more they weren’t even typical for Newquay, since the weather on Wednesday was the tail end of a “heat wave” involving the highest February temperatures in England since the Met Office’s records began:

What with one thing and another warming wise we’re confidently(ish) anticipating that the Great White Con big wave surf team will be searching the shores of the Arctic Basin on their electric powered jetskis for potential big wave spots by early September 2019. Unfortunately the opposing “Great Green Con” team haven’t worked out how to drive a jetski yet, but hopefully we can resolve that minor problem before the Arctic refreeze begins once again?

Regular readers who also follow the surfing news may recall that Great White Con team leader Andrew Cotton broke his back during his award winning wipeout at Nazaré in Portugal back in November 2017?

I spoke to Cotty yesterday and he assured me that his back was already healed sufficiently to take on the biggest waves the Arctic might care to offer over the coming months. However the same doesn’t yet apply to his more recent knee injury:

He expects to be fully fit by the end of the Northern Hemisphere summer, but failing that Cotty’s team partner Garrett McNamara has also successfully returned from injury recently, and hasn’t yet hurt anything else!

By the end of the long contest waiting period we will also have selected the lucky winner of our 2019 “New Einstein” competition who will be able to enjoy being fitted with one of our custom polar bear suits before partnering with “Great Green Con” team leader David Rose. Here’s our artist’s impression of a forthcoming GGC team equipment evaluation session on the next big swell to hit Nazaré:

With apologies to Pedro Miranda, Andrew Cotton and polar bears worldwide.

Watch this space!

The Great White Con 2016 “New Einstein” Award

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Our regular reader(s) will be already be all too familiar with the 2015 edition of our annual Great White Con 2016 “New Einstein” Award. The jury has now finished its deliberations in a smoke filled igloo just outside the Great White Con Ivory Towers. I am pleased to be able to announce that the first prize of the loan of a polar bear suit kindly donated by the Daily Telegraph plus a battered big board from Cotty’s quiver has been awarded to none other than Gail Combs with her:

Jim, How does it feel to be morally responsible for the deaths of thousands of people a year?

SurfBear

I’m not quite sure how we’ll get the good news to Gail in time for her to take part in the 2016 Great White Con Arctic Basin Big Wave (Fantasy?) Surfing Competition, since she abused us in her capacity as a regular commenter on “Steve Goddard’s” (un)RealScience blog, where imparting such messages is most certainly a non trivial task. Watch this space!

2016-02-13_1230-Goddard

You will no doubt be overjoyed to learn that we already have a couple of several candidates in the running for our 2016 award, the first of which is in similar vein to Gail’s winning 2015 entry. Here they are:

1) Gary P Jackson, who claims in his Twitter profile to be a “Texan, Palinista, Conservative Activist, DragRacer Editor & Publisher”, with:

2) Anthony Watts, who is the proprietor of what he claims is “The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change”, has of course already “blocked” the message he doesn’t care to hear:

2016-02-27_0904-WUWTwit

Without offering a single shred of evidence for his baseless assertions Anthony had this to say on the “Climate Etc.” blog of Professor Judith Curry:

You two guys are quite the pieces of work. You both operate under multiple identities. Jim Hunt has three I have been able to identify, Lawrence Martin/Martinez has two.

Both of you post off topic or disrupt threads with the sort of unsubstantiated nonsense you post above, and both demand to have these off topic comments heard and then play the “look Watts is censoring me!” game when your comments don’t meet our site comment policy and/or are abusive in nature.

Case in point- here you are making abusive off-topic comments on Dr. Curry’s site.

Plain and simple, if you comment under different identities, post off topic and/or thread disruptive comments you don’t get to participate. Mr. Hunt was warned months ago, yet he still persists in trying to get comments through under other identities such as V2G.

3) Chris Comber, who claims to be a “Mac User, ebay addict, Re-enactor & Designer” and who has of course already “blocked” the message (s)he doesn’t care to hear:

2016-02-13_1230-Comber

Chris is apparently keen on the #Brexit concept, and (s)he blasted out an extended sequence of (comparatively!) mild ad homs culminating in:

4) CatWeazle666, who is an expert emitter of ad hominem attacks on the blog of “Steve Goddard” and it now becomes apparent also on the blog of Roger Helmer MEP, the United Kingdom Independence Party’s spokesman on Energy & Industry. CatWeazle’s entry is a stream of invective which eventually culminated (for the moment at least) in:

2016-02-16_1125-CatWeazle

As you can see, there was no way I was going to take that lying down, and I in all the circumstances I felt compelled to bring the attention of Mr. Helmer and his merry minions to this link:

http://econnexus.org.uk/how-to-upset-a-global-warming-sceptic/

where many moons ago there appeared a well documented account of how “Steve Goddard” really is “the dumbest man on the internet” when it comes to analysing Arctic sea ice. Either that or he does have some idea of what he’s talking about but is nonetheless more than content to pull the wool over the eyes of his very own band of merry minions.

P.S. In response to my request for considered comment concerning 3 million deaths per annum due to outdoor air pollution CatWeazle666’s reply was:

What a sad little troll you are, Jim.

5) Ben Pile, whose Twitter profile tells us that he is a “Researcher, writer, blogger. Sceptical of environmentalism, environmental policy and the fashion for ‘evidence-based policy’. For science, against scientism”. Inevitably Ben is yet another “blocker” of scientific messages he doesn’t care to hear:

2016-03-12_1417-BenBan

Ben evidently has a high opinion of himself, and thinks he knows more about climate science than IPCC lead author Professor Richard Betts:

He concluded his avalanche of ad homs aimed at yours truly with yet another undeleted expletive:

Unfortunately Ben then departed without offering me a series of swift apologies for his barrage of abuse:

https://twitter.com/jim_hunt/status/708361665734156288

6) Gator69, who is yet another expert emitter of ad homs on the blog of Tony Heller (AKA “Steve Goddard”).

Over at (un)Real Climate Science I humbly suggested under an article alleging “More Arctic Fraud From Mark Serreze And NSIDC” that it is difficult to prove that Amundsen “could have gone through [the Northwest Passage] in a few weeks”. Gator’s response?

Jim “could have” helped save 21,000 innocent humans yesterday, but he didn’t did he?

Jim thinks that snuffing out 21,000 innocent humans every day for his agenda is ethical and laudable.

“Could have” is an interesting phrase. How do you intend to justify this genocide Jim?

Please feel free to provide feedback to our 2016 jury in the space provided below.

Arctic Basin Big Wave Surfing Contest Equipment Evaluation 1

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Great White Con fantasy big wave team rider Andrew Cotton was interviewed on BBC Radio Devon last week by none other than Simon Bates! Cotty was on a trip to Hawaii at the time and pointed out to Simon that:

The thing with surf… is it’s the tides, the waves, the wind. The surf tells you when to surf. It’s not around chores or work, you have to have surf that looks good.

As luck would have it all that came together for North Devon surfers at Putsborough Sands on Saturday. Things looked promising to us a couple of days beforehand, and plans were hatched on Twitter for our first equipment evaluation expedition of 2015:

 

We took the heaven sent opportunity to test out our thickest winter wetsuit in the following conditions:

MSW-SST-UK-2015-03-01
 
According to Magic Seaweed sea surface temperatures are currently around 8 °C off the coast of North Devon, and it doesn’t get much colder than that in this neck of the woods, which may have had something to do with at least one “no show” on Saturday. Simon had “volunteered” Richard Green for a “cold and dangerous” surf trip:

but Richard had a good excuse for being unable to make it since he was broadcasting on Radio Devon, and chatting to Pete Waterman amongst other things, that afternoon. We did invite Simon Bates along too, but it seems he had a previous engagement in London:

Prior to setting off for the north coast I got in touch with Trev Lumley, who is the proprietor of the Eyeball Surfcheck web site where we had discovered this enticing looking image on the Putsborough surfcam earlier that morning:

Eyeball-puts-20150228-2

Trev told me he would be elsewhere by the time we arrived at “Spot P”, so I quickly tested out my little quiz for the day on him. He claimed never to have heard of Richard Green, whilst Simon Bates did ring a bell and the name Andrew Cotton was very familiar. When I explained the reason for my call Trev told me that he had actually heard Andrew being interviewed by Simon on BBC Radio Devon a few days previously. When pressed to decide who amongst the three names I had mentioned was most famous Trev told me that as far as he was concerned Cotty was the man, since he had known him since he was a boy. However Trev thought that Simon’s name would probably be more familiar to the average Devonian.

When we eventually arrived at the car park above the beach some heavy showers had already set in. However before plunging into the chilly North Atlantic, I took advantage of a break between the downpours and wandered around the car park at Putsborough with a cameraman in tow to discover the reaction of some of the locals to my Tiki Prodigy 6/5/4 suit, whilst also killing two birds with one stone by doing some research into the nature of fame and celebrity in the 21st century. Here’s my first interview, with a local lifeguard:

As you can see, our first interviewee thought the Tiki Prodigy “Looks warm”, which was comforting in all the circumstances. In addition out of our list of six celebrities Andrew Cotton was overwhelmingly the most famous. DJs Simon Bates and Richard Green, and journalists Andrew Neil, Christopher Booker and David Rose failed to achieve even the merest flicker of recognition.
 
More videos are on the way, but are currently still stuck in the editing suite here in the basement of the Great White Con Ivory Towers. In the meantime here are my own findings after a couple of hours at sea on my yellow sponge performing our first Arctic equipment evaluation test:

Apart from my Prodigy I was also wearing Tiki 5mm socks and 2mm bodyboarding gloves. I suffered none of the “brain freeze” reported by my even more intrepid companion, who entered the water hoodless beside me:

vlcsnap-2015-03-02-18h07m00s170

Because I didn’t want to lose my contact lenses I did very little duck diving. On only one occasion did I experience the thrill of cold water flushing down my back. My fingers started to feel a bit chilly as I was bobbing about out the back after my initial paddle out, but once I got into the swing of things even they were toasty for the duration. Whilst I do wonder if Tiki could be persuaded to produce some thicker gloves with webs between the fingers, my biggest problem proved to be extracting myself from my soggy suit in the pouring rain that had set in by the time I arrived back in the car park as the light was fading. To give you an idea of the problem I faced here is Andrew Cotton explaining the virtues of the chest zip version of the Zepha, which has replaced the Prodigy in Tiki’s range of cold water winter wetsuits:

Watch this space!

The Arctic Surf Forecast For Late August 2014

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Regular readers adept at reading between lines may already have concluded that here in the Great White Con Ivory Towers we have been surreptitiously organising the world’s first ever Arctic Basin Big Wave Fantasy Surfing Contest (or GWCABBWFSC for short). Today we are proud to announce that the long waiting period may now be almost over!

Here is the long range Arctic weather forecast from GFS 192 hours from now (courtesy of MeteoCiel):

gfsnh-0-192-20140819

and here is the ECMWF equivalent:

ECH1-192-20140819

There looks to be a certain amount of agreement there, so now let’s take a look at ECMWF for T+240h:

ECH1-240-20140819

If the forecast pans out (a very big IF this far out!) there’s an Arctic storm brewing with the isobars packed tight over all the open water in the Laptev Sea, pushing the potential swell through the East Siberian Sea and on into the Beaufort Sea before it crashes against the northernmost shores of North America.

We fondly imagine a Great White Con team containing the likes of Andrew Cotton:

Garrett McNamara:

and Maya Gabeira:

taking on the biggest waves ever recorded on camera off Alaska’s North Slope, each clad in their respective sponsors’ thickest, finest neoprene.

The opposing “Great Green Con” team will be composed of volunteers from amongst the serried ranks of fiddlers with the facts on Fleet Street such as Andrew Neil, David Rose and Christopher Booker, all clad in matching Polar Bear suits to keep the cold Arctic waters at bay:

SurfBearTo coin a phrase oft used in this particular portion of the blogosphere:

We’ll keep you posted!

The World’s Leading Arctic Surfing Expert

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I left the “Self styled” bit out of today’s title, which would have otherwise have been too long for comfort! With all due modesty I do in fact have lots of hard evidence to back my claim. By way of example, here’s a copy of a recent conversation over at “Steve Goddard’s” (un)Real Science blog, but with all the expletives and (most of the) ad homs deleted:

Them:

SurfBearCould global warming bring surfing to the Arctic? – Telegraph Blogs

I’m afraid this by now iconic “photoshopped” image of a surfing polar bear culled from Geoffrey Lean’s blog at the Daily Telegraph strikes all Arctic surfing experts,  yours truly included, as nothing more that a piss poor piss take (or PPPT for short)!

 

Us:

As the current “silver” surfer in residence here, perhaps I should point out that this subject is very dear to my heart. The surfing not the bears!

For a photoshopless video of things to come see Red Bull’s “Surfing in Alaska”:

 

Them:

Hats off to you guys (and beautiful girl)! I got cold just watching it!

 

Us:

Hats off to Maya certainly. Far more balls than most men, and (conventionally) beautiful with it.

http://stabmag.com/an-interview-with-maya-gabeira-about-drowning-at-nazare/

 

Them:

Numpty alert! [Etymology: Numpty first surfaced on the terraces of west of Scotland football grounds, many, many years ago. A player who couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a shovel would be a f***ing numpty. “Awww Jimmy you f************ing numpty!! You couldnae score wi’ ma’ sister!”]

Three numpties on one thread; is this a record? Could it be due to global warming?

 

Us:

Cotty tames the waves that almost killed Maya. Paxo interviews him about the experience!

Numpty alert?

Time passes…..

Another surf vid. This one is much more low key. It captures the mellow vibe of a midwinter session somewhere on the North Devon coast:

The Beach – Episode 1 from Jim L. Hunt on Vimeo.

http://econnexus.org – In which Ralph Freeman, bassist for the Universe Inspectors and British big wave surfer extraordinaire, catches a short ride at Putsborough Beach 18 months after suffering a broken neck whilst surfing low tide Croyde.

It’s great to see a local legend apparently back to full fitness after his injuries.

That was the first time I ever saw Ralph Freeman in action on his trademark bright yellow board, but it wasn’t the last!

Finally, for today at least, here’s a video that Tony Heller and his band of merry (mostly) men have not thus far been privy too. The Red Bull record of the day Maya Gabeira drowned and then Carlos Burle brought her back to life:

 

P.S.

Time passes…..

In conclusion, here’s the conclusion of the University of Washington paper, that for some strange reason neither Tony or Geoffrey mentioned:

“It is possible that the increased wave activity will be the feedback mechanism which drives the Arctic system toward an ice-free summer. This would be a remarkable departure from historical conditions in the Arctic, with potentially wide-ranging implications for the air-water-ice system and the humans attempting to operate there.”

 

Them:

Translation…

Surfs up!

 

Us:

Quite so! Some associated technology testing:


 

Them:

We’ll keep you posted!