Tag Archives: NSR

The Northern Sea Route, also known as the Northeast Passage

Is The Economist Being “Economical with the Truth” About Arctic Sea Ice?

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I was idly scrolling through my Twitter feed this morning when I couldn’t help but notice that Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was calling for volunteers to research possible trends in The Economist’s attitude to “climate change” over recent decades:


 

Unable to resist temptation I immediately popped on over to The Economist online and searched for the term “Arctic”, as is my wont. Lo and behold I discovered much to my amazement that they had published an article on that very topic earlier on this very day. However after reading it I have to say I was less than impressed, and reported my findings back to @ClimateOfGavin. I also called The Economist’s “Editorial” number, and spoke to a nice lady with an American accent who told me that she was an “answering service” and assured me that she would pass on my message to an Economist editor, but they almost certainly wouldn’t look at it until Monday. Here’s how the conversation is going:

Them:

The Northern Sea Route is not living up to the hype, either. In 2013 71 ships traversed Russia’s Arctic, according to the Northern Sea Route Information Office: a large increase since 2010, when the number was just four. But 16,000 ships passed through the Suez Canal in 2013, so the northern route is not starting to compete. In 2014 traffic fell to 53 ships, only four of which sailed from Asia and docked in Europe (the rest went from one Russian port to another). The route does not yet link Europe and East Asia.

The decline in 2014 was partly caused by the weather: less sea ice melted last summer than in 2013, so the route was more dangerous.

 

Now I distinctly recall posting this image:

2014-08-23_NSR-Ice on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum on August 23rd last year. Over and above that, here’s a couple of freshly minted videos to illustrate the point more vividly. The AMSR2 Arctic sea ice concentration data displayed is courtesy of the University of Hamburg:

[Edit 02/02/15] The Economist’s “man in Tromso” asked to see 2012 as well, so here it is. AMSR2 data wasn’t available in 2012, so this one uses the SSMIS passive microwave radiometer instead:

Set the top two running in sync and then if the difference between 2013 and 2014 isn’t as plain as day to you, my name is Snow White!

[Edit 05/02/15]

In an endeavour to quantify the reduction in ice coverage in 2014 compared to 2013 that’s evident in the animations we’ve combined the regional extents for the Chukchi, East Siberian, Laptev and Kara Seas to produce this chart:

NSR-Extent-2013-14
[/Edit]
 
Hence:

Us:

Please forgive my rather brusque manner, but I arrive fresh from hauling the Mail on Sunday in front of IPSO.

Can The Economist provide some evidence for their rather vague assertion that “less [Arctic] sea ice melted last summer than in 2013”. Can you for example provide a link to an authoritative source?

 
The latest print edition of The Economist landed on my doormat this morning. I eagerly turned to the “Letters” section, but was disappointed to discover that my virtual “Letter to the editor” sent on Thursday morning must have missed their deadline. Here it is:

CC: Your “Tromso correspondent”

Sir(s),

I read with much interest the “Not so cool” article in your January 31st edition, which suggested “The hype over the Arctic recedes, along with the summer ice”.

I take the point your Tromso correspondent makes that “The Northern Sea Route is not living up to the hype, either”, but I must take issue with the hype that currently reads, in both your print and online editions:

“The decline in 2014 was partly caused by the weather: less sea ice melted last summer than in 2013, so the route was more dangerous.”

All the evidence I have seen (collected together for your edification, including maps, graphs and animations, at https://greatWhiteCon.info/2015/01/is-the-economist-being-economical-with-the-truth-about-arctic-sea-ice/) refutes that statement. The minimum Arctic sea ice area and extent in summer 2014 were both below 2013. According to assorted satellites there was significantly less sea ice bobbing about along the Northern Sea Route in 2014 than in 2013. The official August 2014 forecast published by the Northern Sea Route Information Office maintained that ice conditions would be “Easy” over the entire NSR.

I look forward to seeing this particular piece of “hype” receding in both physical and virtual print in the very near future.

Yours,

Jim Hunt

 
Them:

We’ll keep you posted!

 

Censored Arctic Shipping Update

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Our headline for today is only partially plagiarised from today’s “Arctic Shipping Update” article on “Steven Goddard’s” (un)Real Science blog. This morning Tony Heller posted the following ACNFS Arctic sea ice concentration visualisation:

icen2014082118_2014082900_039_arcticicen.001

 

Them:

Climate experts say that Northeast and Northwest Passages are open for business, but neither will open up this year.

Us:

Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 23, 2014 at 12:37 pm

At the risk of repeating myself:


 

not to mention:


Time passes….


Whilst we wait for Steve/Tony to do the decent thing, I thought I might take this opportunity to point out that currently there are 555 vessels with official “Permission for navigation on the water area of the Northern Sea Route” this year.

One of them is the Hapag-Lloyd cruise ship MS Hanseatic, which is currently wending its way through the New Siberian Islands:

2014-08-23_Hanseatic

The Hanseatic also carries a webcam. Here’s what it reveals at the moment:

Hanseatic_2014_08_230410

It’s currently pretty plain sailing on that section of the Northern Sea Route by the look of things!

Us:

By the morning of Sunday August 24th (UTC) my dissenting comment had been released from limbo, although it had remained there the previous evening.
Them:

Somebody is telling a story aren’t they? Perhaps you’d like to tell us where the ship is. On the one hand I see a ship with the name Silver Explorer stuck in the ice, and then on the other I see your picture with green ice free waters. Everybody is going to be looking for this vessel now. Anybody with a satellite phone? Maybe they will wait it out till the ice thaws, like they did at the other pole. I will be saving that pretty picture of green, just in case you told us so.

 

Us:

Are you aware of the difference between the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route, which is sometimes referred to as “the Northeast Passage”? That “pretty picture of green” is of the latter. Here’s the current position of the cruise ship MS Hanseatic in the Laptev Sea, coloured green on the map above:

 

You will note that my comment above was “stuck in Steve’s moderation queue” for many hours, which does rather spoil the flow of the conversation!

 

Them:

We’ll keep you posted!

 

Russia’s Northern Shores

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Regular readers will have realised by now that we’ve been pestering the Mail and The Telegraph with telephone calls and emails for weeks now. That’s because, as The Economist put it last weekend:

There are climate facts—and facts are stubborn things.

Both The Mail and The Telegraph have now corrected a couple of the gross inaccuracies they printed (virtually and/or physically) on September 8th, but many more remain. One of those is the identical phrase in both articles saying:

An unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

The fact of the matter is that this statement is untrue. I’ve recently received a couple of letters about this from “The Daily Telegraph” signed by “Robert Winnett, Head of News”. Here’s an extract from the first one:

Them:

Reputable evidence exists to show an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shore.  This can be seen on the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website [in the article] “A Real Hole Near the North Pole“.  The site states that the average ice extent for August 2013 was 6.09 million square kilometres, which is more than half the size of Europe.

Us:

Have I got news for you Robert!  If you’d read any of the articles on here, or watched any of the videos I linked to in my emails, that wasn’t the “fact” I was quibbling about. The fact is that the Arctic “ice sheet” was not “unbroken” and did not “stretch… to Russia’s northern shore” on September 8th 2013 and for considerable periods of time both before and after that date. Here’s an extract from The Telegraph’s second letter:

Them:

In reply to your enquiry, the Telegraph’s policy is to correct clear inaccuracies once we are alerted to them – and in appropriate cases update articles on our website.

Us:

I thought I’d already made this perfectly plain, but evidently not, so here’s yet another alert about clear inaccuracies in the “reporting” of climate science in The Telegraph: