warming activists’ ice capades
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EZRA LEVANTGlobal warming activists’ ice capades
7:38 am, January 5th, 2014
A satellite photograph shows an iceberg blocking entry to Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica in this November 25, 2011 handout.Credits: REUTERS/NASA/Handout
EZRA LEVANT | QMI AGENCY
One hundred and one years ago, Douglas Mawson led a ship of explorers south from Australia to Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica, where they spent two years mapping the icy continent. He barely made it back alive; several of his crew didn’t.
Last month, a group of Australian global warming activists, led by a professor named Chris Turney, set out to retrace Mawson’s voyage. Their goal, according to one journalist along for the ride, was to “examine how the eastern Antarctic, one of the most pristine, remote and untouched parts of the world’s surface, has fared after a hundred years of climate changes.”
So it was a PR mission, to prove how global warming had changed Antarctica. Turney said Mawson’s original trip “provides this incredibly good baseline — we’re going to repeat the measurements and see how much has changed over the last century.”
But to call Turney’s trip a scientific mission isn’t entirely accurate. It was packed with tourists, environmental reporters, an Australian Green Party senator, and even Turney’s wife and kids.
It was a party — literally. Christmas parties, drinking parties, secret Santa parties, even some salsa dancing. Adventure tourists paid $8,000 and up to come along. 54 passengers, plus the crew. Of course Australian taxpayers covered the majority of the $1.5 million adventure.
All was going so well, with Turney blogging up a storm and doing media interviews via satellite.
And then the ship got stuck in pack ice. In the middle of the Antarctic summer.
Seventy kilometres further out to sea than the coastline where Mawson had landed.
The PR expedition to chart the disappearance of Antarctic ice became stuck in Antarctic ice. They couldn’t move. And it kept getting worse.
Ice was forming around the ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, by the hour — locking it in deeper, freezing so fast that soon the ice went all the way to the horizon.
“At the time we were initially caught by the sea ice, the Shokalskiy was just two to four nautical miles from open water,” Turney wrote. “Now the sea ice distance has become even greater with the continued winds from the east, putting our nearest point of exit at some 16 nautical miles.”
They say the definition of a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
To Turney, this ice prison was just more proof that global warming was indeed happening.
“Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up,” he explained.
Turney seemed to believe his own bafflegab. He was so confident the Antarctic ice was gone that he didn’t even charter an icebreaker for the mission. The Akademik Shokalskiy was merely “ice-hardened.”
Even though measurements all year showed that Antarctic ice extended a whopping 29% further out than normal.
A hundred years ago, Mawson made it out alive, but not the two companions with whom he had ventured inland.
One fell in a crevasse, taking food and dogs with him. The other starved, froze, went mad, bit off his own finger and then died. Mawson walked the last 160 km to the shore alone, and was so emaciated and frostbitten his crew didn’t recognize him.
Turney may have been willing to brazen it out like that, but his ship’s Russian crew had enough. They put out a distress signal. Soon French, Chinese and Australian icebreakers steamed over to help.
Even they could not penetrate the thick ice, so a Chinese helicopter had to fly back and forth, lifting Turney and his celebrity tourists to the Australian ship. Those three icebreakers had been doing important work supporting real research scientists in Antarctica, but the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea requires any nearby vessel to immediately respond to an SOS. Turney — translation: Australian taxpayers — will likely be sent the multi-million dollar rescue bills.
Funny thing, though. Before Turney got stuck in the ice, media coverage highlighted his global warming mission. But after he got stuck, according to the Media Research Center, 40 out of 41 TV news reports somehow forgot to mention that inconvenient truth.
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