Tag Archives: Ship of Fools

Ship of Fools III Escapes Arctic Sea Ice

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According to a comment on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog 2019 has been:

Another year with a climate change research ship stuck in the vanishing Arctic ice .The NWP barely open.

The reality? The MS Malmö isn’t a “climate change research ship” at all. According to the web site of  Arctic Wildlife Tours it is:

A homely ship of maritime historical dignity” which “has been listed as a traditional ship of cultural value since 2004:

https://arcticwildlifetours.com/ms-malmo/

However according to our old friend Paul Homewood‘s web site:

Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.

Something is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors.

Not a lot of people know that despite all that purple prose Malmö has somehow managed to emerge unscathed from the clutches of the sea ice on the other side of Svalbard from Longyearbyen:

It will come as no surprise to our regular readers that the web site of our even older friend Anthony Watts has also published the self same story, also without the happy ending.

Whilst it is reasonable to assume that Paul and Anthony are not fluent in Norwegian, it seems they are also unfamiliar with Google. If they had performed the merest modicum of due diligence and employed the services of Google translate before pressing the “publish” button they would have discovered the coverage of the “massive false information” about the Malmö’s story in the Svalbard Post, published on September 5th:

Trygve Monsen and expedition leader Tore Toppe were among the 16 who were evacuated when MS Malmö got stuck in the ice on Tuesday. They respond strongly to what they call misinformation on the right-wing website document.no

Those who were on board MS Malmö have a completely different version of events.

“First, we are not Swedish. We are a group of middle aged Norwegians following the route of the Ahlmann expedition of 1931“, says Trygve Monsen. He himself has worked for the Norwegian press for a long time, particularly Aftenposten, where he has been both digital manager and correspondent in Berlin.

Together with Expedition Chief Tore Topp, Monsen arrived at the Svalbard Post on Thursday. He had tried to contact document.no many times before that, to correct the false information. They also say that they are not climate activists.

“No way. But when you are in the Arctic, and have been here many times over several years, you can’t help but notice what is happening to the environment up here”, says Topp. This is the seventh expedition he has led in the Arctic.

The evacuation of MS Malmö on Tuesday took place without significant drama. The boat was surprised by harsh ice conditions and eventually got stuck. The captain decided to ask for evacuation, for safety. The Governor came by helicopter and after a few minutes all the passengers were evacuated. The crew on the boat remained on board, and later got help from KV “Andenes” to get out of the sea ice.

In other old news the southern route through the Northwest Passage opened on August 15th this year, although with the assistance of the icebreaker CCGS Terry Fox the MS Bremen made it through a few days earlier:

[Edit – September 11th]

MS Malmö is now back in the range of an AIS receiver, whilst apparently en route back to Norway:

[Edit – September 12th]

I ventured onto Twitter this morning, where I discovered Matt Ridley regurgitating the same nonsense about MS Malmö, plus this news from the Norwegian Coastguard:

Perhaps Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. would care to click @Jack’s helpfully provided “Translate Tweet” button?

I’ve also discovered that document.no eventually published a “correction” to their original story on September 9th. Perhaps Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. would care to follow suit?

[Edit – September 12th PM]

It seems another one of the usual suspects has been hard at work too. Here’s James Delingpole over at Breitbart UK:

Yet another greenie expedition to the Arctic to raise awareness of ‘global warming’ has been scuppered by unexpected large quantities of ice.

Furthermore James has brought my attention to the fact that my foolish numbering system is out of date. According to his reckoning MS Malmö is actually “Ship of Fools IV”. Mind you he’s also claiming that Northabout was “Ship of Fools II”, which is obviously another porkie pie of epic proportions.

James also repeats the “stuck in ice off Longyearbyen” nonsense. For Donald, James, Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. here’s the current view of all the sea ice off Longyearbyen, via Joss Stone on Twitter:

In actual fact there is of course currently less sea ice in the Arctic than in any previous year (in the satellite record) apart from 2012:

[Edit – September 13th]

Today on Twitter I’ve found myself in conversation about #MalmoGate with Ken. He doesn’t say an awful lot, but he appears to think that MS Malmö being “surprised by harsh ice conditions” is significant in some way:

One of the things that is actually significant about the 2019 melting season is quite the reverse of that. The Swedish icebreaker Oden spent a couple of weeks pootling around in the  Sherard Osborn Fjord in North Greenland without getting “stuck in the vanishing Arctic ice”:

[Edit – September 14th]

What Ken, Paul Joseph, Donald, James, Paul, Anthony, Matt et al. evidently fail to comprehend is that the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean doesn’t merely expand and contract with the seasons. It also moves. Just in case any of them do get around to doing a modicum of due diligence, take a good long look at this animation of Arctic sea ice age from the September 2015 minimum to the end of August this year:

[Edit – September 15th]

It has just come to my attention that our very old friend Tony Heller (the artist formally known as Steve Goddard) has somewhat belatedly jumped on the MalmoGate bandwagon:

The Son of the Blog of Fools Gets Arctic Sea Ice Horrifically Wrong

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Halloween is a little way away still, but nonetheless I have a horror story to tell you. Are you sitting comfortably?

As our regular reader(s) will be aware we have been following the fortunes of the plucky little yacht Northabout on her Arctic circumnavigation with great interest. That includes the series of reports about the voyage on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Even recent passers by may have noticed that we were none too pleased with the most recent episode in the series!

Now comes news that one of the numerous usual suspects has been blathering about both the Polar Ocean Challenge expedition and that BBC Radio 4 programme. Enter stage right James Delingpole at Breitbart. Under the catchy but erroneous headline:

Ship of Fools II Expedition Escapes Arctic Freeze by the Skin of its Teeth

James assures his faithful followers that:

The Polar Ocean Challenge expedition – aka Ship of Fools II – has escaped from the Arctic by the skin of its teeth. It was supposed to show how amazingly navigable the Arctic Circle has become now that climate change is supposedly melting the polar ice caps at a dangerous and unprecedented rate. But according to one observer who has followed their progress closely (see comments at Paul Homewood‘s place), the intrepid explorers – including a 14-year-old boy – came within just two days of calamity, after being hampered by unexpectedly large quantities of a mysterious substance apparently made of frozen water.

Regular readers will recall that not a lot of people know that Paul Homewood is the proprietor of a production line of porky pies full of horrifying Arctic anomalies. Mr. Delingpole references one batch of such Halloween howlers, wittily entitled:

Arctic Ice Growing Rapidly

and in particular a comment thereto which reads as follows:

The southern NWP route is now closed at the NE exit, with northern Prince Regent Sound blocked by 9/10 ice in freeze up mode. Exactly where they barely made it through after hours of probing on 9/12. Northabout made it through NWP with just two days to spare. Had they taken the planned 2 days resupplying in Barrow rather than 1, and the planned one day call at Cambridge Bay (meeting up with Polar Bound), they would not have made it out and would have had to turn around and overwinter at Cambridge Bay. It was that close.

Now how can I put this politely? That is pure unadulterated balderdash. If Mr. Delingpole thinks that a comment on a known “snow blind” blog constitutes evidence of anything he needs one of his heads examined. Deconstructing all the mistakes in just this one article about both Northabout and the BBC’s climate change coverage will involve a series with more episodes than BBC Radio 4s! However we have to start somewhere, so let’s examine this assertion first shall we?

Paul Homewood notes… it’s also the earliest minimum since 1997, indicating that the Arctic is currently experiencing a very cold spell.

Have I got news for you James, Paul and Ristvan? Oh no it [expletive deleted] isn’t!

meant_20160921

Some skeptical fellows over on Twitter disagreed with me about the facts of the matter. This is how that “debate” proceeded:

 

In other news Anthony Watts has today published a guest post about Arctic sea ice by one Caleb Shaw on his Watts Up With That blog. I thought I’d pose Paul and Caleb some relevant questions, but a team of Gremlins seem to have been hard at work stealing my pertinent comments before the assorted [mods] could approve them. By way of example, from Breitbart:

selection_943

From “Not a Lot of People Know that”

selection_938

and from WUWT:

caleb-wuwt-2016-09-22_1225

 

[Edit – September 23rd]

Anthony Watts has published another Arctic sea ice article today. The Gremlins have grabbed another comment of mine!

wuwt-2016-09-23_1347

We’ll keep you posted!

Shock News! The Worms Have Turned!!

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Today we bring a positive plethora of “Shock News!”. Starting with sea ice, yesterday Anthony Watts published an article on WUWT about the 2016 Arctic minimum extent. That’s not too surprising perhaps, but what’s shocking is that included one of Wipneus’ graphs of Arctic sea ice AREA that has been gracing our very own Arctic Sea Ice Graphs page since Anthony mocked us for not having such a thing. His take on this momentous event?

All of the data I’ve looked at agrees, Arctic sea ice is now on the upswing, and in a big way.

This graph from Wipneus shows the abruptness of the change.

Here it is, in all its glory:

amsr2-area-all-20160913

What’s not in the least surprising is that Anthony failed to provide a link to the source of the graph, and that our polite request for that to be corrected remains invisible took a long time to be approved over at Watts Up With That. Here it is, in all its ignominy:

selection_918

As if that isn’t enough to cope with for one day, there was even bigger shock yesterday. Tony Heller stated:

“Effective Skeptics Don’t Reject Basic Physics“

which is accompanied by a screenshot from an Independent article which reads as follows:

One of Britain’s leading climate change sceptics – former Chancellor Nigel Lawson – has admitted that humans are causing global warming.

Speaking to the House of Lords’ Economic Affairs Committee, Lord Lawson said he did not “question for a moment” that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas.

And he accepted there was “huge agreement” among scientists that it was having “some effect” on the atmosphere.

But the former Conservative Cabinet minister argued it would be “crazy” for the UK to try to stop burning the fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide, claiming countries like China were simply carrying on doing so.

Lord Lawson founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009 to oppose attempts to reduce the rise in temperatures and has emerged as one of Britain’s leading sceptics.

Here’s a recording of Nigel Lawson versus Adair Turner yesterday, testifying before the Economic Affairs Committee:

It seems as if the “97% consensus” on “anthropogenic global warming” is now at least 97.1%. I cannot help but wonder when Anthony Watts will reveal the news to his faithful followers? Meanwhile most of Tony’s many merry minions are unhappy bunnies this morning. 2015 “New Einstein” award winner Gail Combs complains:

The biggest problem is with that statement he just betrayed every skeptic and agreed that we are all tinfoil hat Den1ers.

It does not matter what else he added. That ‘sound bite’ is a HUGE WIN for the other side. Add the Ship of Fools ‘win’ and they will bash us into the ground.

I am sorry Tony, but it is a complete PR disaster especially right before the US elections.

As you well know this has never been about science. Our side plays by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, their side are dirty street fighters using Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and lie and cheat and browbeat at every turn. So their side wins EVERY D@MN TIME!

Mr. Heller comments:

I completely agree with [Nigel Lawson]. Do you consider me to be a “real skeptic” ?

Answers on a virtual postcard please, in the space provided below.

Could Northabout Sail to the North Pole?

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No is the obvious answer just at the moment, since the plucky little yacht is currently parked at a pontoon in Tuktoyaktuk. However actual facts aren’t sufficient to stop Tony Heller suggesting that Andrew Freedman suggested on Mashable that Mark Serreze of the NSIDC said that such a feat is feasible:

Mark “Arctic Is Screaming” Serreze says the Ship of Fools could sail to the North Pole.

Tony (AKA (m)Alice) attempts to justify his scurrilous allegation by referencing Andrew’s recent article entitled “After unusual Arctic storms, sea ice coverage in region is plummeting“. According to Andrew:

In an interview with Mashable, Serreze said sea ice coverage across the different regions of the Arctic has fallen dramatically in association with a series of unusually powerful summertime Arctic storms during August.

That much is certainly true, as we here at Great White Con have documented in detail. Mr. Heller however highlights this section of Mr. Freedman’s article:

In fact, if they want to, the Hempleman-Adams and the rest of the ship’s crew could actually sail nearly all the way to the North Pole, since sea ice cover is largely absent to about 86 degrees north, according to Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

It’s not out of the question that the North Pole will become a geographical marker in open water, rather than ice cover, sometime in the next few weeks.

Serreze called this situation “pretty darned unusual.”

Let’s examine the facts about this “pretty darned unusual” situation shall we? Here is the latest high resolution AMSR2 visualisation of Arctic sea ice concentration:

Arc_20160902_res3.125

Can you see the stretch of open water leading all the way from the East Siberian Sea, where Northabout was a couple of weeks ago, to 86 degrees north? Apparently Tony Heller and his faithful followers cannot! Not only that, but also supposedly:

A NASA image [shows that] the North Pole is indeed encased in Thick ice right now.

Here’s a (somewhat foggy) NASA image of the North Pole right now:

NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the North Pole on September 3rd 2016, derived from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite
NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the North Pole on September 3rd 2016, derived from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite

and for good measure here’s a (somewhat foggy) NASA image from 86 degrees north in the Central Arctic Basin right now:

NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the Central Arctic on September 3rd 2016, derived from the VIIRS sensor on the Suomi satellite
NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the Central Arctic on September 3rd 2016, derived from the VIIRS sensor on the Suomi satellite

Need I say more?

 

[Edit – September 4th]

Today Terra offers a glimpse of the Greenland side of the North Pole:

NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the North Pole on September 4th 2016, derived from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite
NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the North Pole on September 4th 2016, derived from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite

 

[Edit – September 5th]

Today Aqua offers us a view of what’s left of the sea ice on the Siberian side of the North Pole:

NASA Worldview “true-color” image of the North Pole on September 5th 2016, derived from the MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite
NASA Worldview “true-color” image of the North Pole on September 5th 2016, derived from the MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite

 

[Edit – September 9th]

SHOCK NEWS!!!

Tony Heller has just posted an accurate image of the state of the sea ice near the North Pole! Here it is:

unreal-pole-20160908

The accompanying text is nonsense of course:

The Ship Of Fools is facing a -10C weather forecast in five days, which would be impassable. They better put their fossil fuel powered pedal to the metal and get out of there fast, so that they can go back to Bristol and lie about the ice.

Meanwhile, professional fraudster Mark Serreze said last week they could sail to the North Pole

Needless to say Tony doesn’t provide a link to his source. Try this one and then have a good look around on NASA Worldview.

 

[Edit – September 10th]

Lord Soth on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog mentions this image of the 2016 version of Santa’s secret summer swimming pool:

Is the Polar Ocean Challenge About to End in Disaster?

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It is if you believe Tony Heller, which I humbly suggest is not a particularly wise course of action at the best of times. In his umpteenth article on Northabout’s Great Adventure over the last four days he dares to take your humble scribe’s name in vain as he loudly proclaims:

“Jim Hunt Egging The Ship Of Fools On To Disaster”

I cannot help but think that sorting the wheat from the unReal Scientific chaff will be required as the “debate” proceeds, and so:

Them

Jim Hunt (and Blowtorch Reggie) are egging the ship of fools on to disaster, telling them that the ice is receding. And the intrepid fools are listening to them.

It has been persistently cloudy in the Northeast Passage, and the ice is not melting.

[Cloudy image redacted]

The ice edge has pushed back slightly due to winds.

unReal-Delta-20160723

The animation below shows how the wind has shifted the ice over the last couple of days, and how the route is blocked with hundreds of miles of 1-2 meter thick ice.

Reggie also egged the 2013 Arctic rowers on to near disaster, before they had to abandon their boat.

Sea ice, winds end rowers’ Northwest Passage bid early – British Columbia – CBC News

2016-07-24_CBC_ArcticJoule

Not too surprising that Jim Hunt’s web site is titled “GreatWhiteCon”

Us

Thanks for the heads up on Twitter Tony. However for some strange reason I seem to be unable to post a witty riposte 🙁

2016-07-24_1409_Toto

I explained about the winds to all and sundry two days ago. In case you missed it see:

https://greatWhiteCon.info/2016/07/northabouts-great-adventure/#Jul-22

Now please explain to me precisely how “Snow White” is “egging on” anybody by posting the satellite visualisation that you have kindly reproduced above?

It does after all reveal that the ice edge at the Kara Sea end of the Vilkitsky Strait has recently receded, as predicted.

Them

They aren’t going anywhere without an icebreaker. Why are you giving them false hope?

Us

I’m not “giving them false hope”. I’m reporting on some interesting (IMHO) Arctic facts, as per usual. In this instance it seems a few other people find them interesting also.

It seems we’re all agreed that “The ice edge has pushed back slightly due to winds” since your map above shows that too, albeit with reduced resolution?

FYI “Snow White” is sobbing uncontrollably into her snow white hanky as we speak. She’s still blocked by “Steve Goddard”

Them

I don’t think you are blocked any more.

Us

Us Again

My “cowardly cross dressing” alter ego is definitely still blocked Tony.

Whilst we’re on the subject, I thought you were of the view that those who block polite enquirers on Twitter are “probably attempting to pull off a Michael Mann sized fraud on the public.”?

http://realclimatescience.com/2016/07/arctic-fraud-in-the-works/

Have I inadvertently misunderstood your point?

Us Again

Another day has dawned and still no answer, so at the risk of repeating myself:

Please explain to me precisely how “Snow White” is “egging on” anybody by posting the satellite visualisation that you have kindly reproduced above?

Perhaps you prefer the wording of today’s update?

Apart from another AMSR2 image there’s a nice little video of dolphins playing around in the sea ice free Barents Sea!

Us Again

Another day has dawned, and still no answer.

At least the crew of “The Ship of Fools” appreciate “Snow White’s” cool humour:

Us Again

The sun is going down (UTC), and still no answer. At the risk of repeating myself, repeating myself:

“Please explain to me precisely how “Snow White” is “egging on” anybody by posting the satellite visualisation that you have kindly reproduced above?”

Or in today’s update for that matter.

Us Again

Another day has dawned, and still no answer.

To summarise the “Real Science” Arctic article template:

1) Write a snappy (if inaccurate) headline

2) Under that put one or more images which have little or no bearing on the headline

3) Under the image(s) put some text that also has little or no bearing on the headline

4) When called upon to justify 1-3 say nothing whatsoever of substance

5) Not too surprising that Jim Hunt’s web site is titled “GreatWhiteCon”?

Them

“Steve” remains strangely silent, but my old mate AndyG cannot resist the temptation to chip in with:

YAWN

What a pointless , worthless post.

Sort of like his CON of a web-site

DECEIT from the very first page.

Us

Nothing whatsoever of substance Andy. Par for the course.

Them

We’ll keep you posted!