Tag Archives: Chris Turney

Not all that cutting

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Cut and Paste is supposed to provide an ironic take on the news. A few capsule comments with the final one adding an absurdist touch. The first place I go in The Australia. So what are we to make of these from today’s paper?

China wins rare praise from environmentalists after its rescue attempt, The New York Times, Jan 4:
THE havoc created by Chris Turney’s Antarctic expedition has since increased. The Xue Long, the Chinese ship which provided the helicopter to airlift Turney and his colleagues from the Akademik Shokalskiy to the Aurora Australis, has itself now become stuck in ice. Our friend Tracy Rogers, Turney’s colleague at the University of NSW, has been commenting on her rescue. “The Chinese captain is an incredible ambassador for his country”, she said today. She is very lucky that China, which normally incurs the wrath of the climate change lobby due to its fondness for new coal-fired power stations, has chosen the path to wealth – which includes ships and helicopters able to rescue scientists in distress – rather than a path to carbon-free enlightenment. Whatever the carbon footprint of the average Chinese person, it is a long, long way short of that of Chris Turney and his colleagues.

But good news, climate change wasn’t to blame. Chris Turney, The Guardian, Jan 4:
LET’S be clear. Us becoming locked in ice was not caused by climate change. Instead it seems to have been an aftershock of the arrival of iceberg B09B, which triggered a massive reconfiguration of sea ice in the area.

So what went wrong? Turney again:
UNLUCKILY for us, there appears to have been a mass breakout of thick, multi-year sea ice on the other side of the Mertz Glacier; years after the loss of the Mertz Glacier tongue … it was soon clear that the armadas of ice that started to appear were thick and old. Captain Igor tried to beat a path to open water but the size of the sea ice overwhelmed the Shokalskiy.

And that’s the punchline, the final word, whose ironic intent completely evades me. Maybe it was this letter to the editor that was designed to provide the bite:

IS it too much to expect climate change lobbyists to understand the difference between icebergs, which calve from glaciers that are derived from snow, and ice floes, which are irregular pieces of broken pack ice derived from sea water.

The ship of fools was not trapped by icebergs as a consequence of increased snowfalls allegedly caused by global warming. It was trapped in ice floes previously blown into the area after near record amounts of pack ice formed during the winter.

If the ship was trapped among icebergs it would be now at the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic.

Rod Burston, Kiama Downs, NSW

But what worries me is that whoever puts Cut and Paste together finds the irony in setting the record straight about how the boat became ice bound by taking Chris Turney’s side. Ha ha. There’s the answer, the size of the sea ice overwhelmed the boat and all you people laughing at Turney, the laugh is really on you.

Me at Powerline

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For me it was a moment to treasure to find myself quoted by Scott Johnson at Powerline. I, of course, told everyone I know and only later realised that no one else but me amongst the people I know have even heard of Powerline never mind read it (this is Australia, after all). But for me, the four contributors are the four bloggers closest to my own way of thinking about things (although to them you’d have to add Mark Steyn, Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) and although she’s not a blogger, Ann Coulter). So a special moment for me was one that could not really be shared. Such is life. But a special moment it most certainly was.

The title was, “HITLER GETS TRAPPED IN SEA ICE”. This was the introductory text:

At Catallaxy Files Professor Steven Kates et al. have been following the Ship of Climate Fools with a gimlet eye as a local (Australian) story — in “The rest of Chris Turney’s life mapped out,” for example. Most recently, in “The spirit of Turney,” Professor Kates draws attention to Andrew Bolt’s Herald Sun Post “Something’s cracking, and it’s not the ice around the warmists’ ship” and to the video below

And this was the text of the story:

At Catallaxy Files Professor Steven Kates et al. have been following the Ship of Climate Fools with a gimlet eye as a local (Australian) story — in “The rest of Chris Turney’s life mapped out,” for example. Most recently, in “The spirit of Turney,” Professor Kates draws attention to Andrew Bolt’s Herald Sun Post “Something’s cracking, and it’s not the ice around the warmists’ ship” and to the video below contributing to the Hitler Discovers genre (rated R for language).

And then there was the video, the best version of these satires I have seen. I have watched a lot of these over the years but this was the best ever. Not only did it get the politics right but the words are perfectly coordinated to the visuals. No other has made me laugh out loud and this one continually does. I only wish I knew who did do it since it is attributed to Tony Ice. My suspicion is that whoever did it is an Australian since he gets the nuances right, although I must say he spells not just “hocky” wrong but also “Abbot” which may mean he’s not an Australian. But citizenship he should be immediately granted if not here already. So once more into the breach dear friends:

Remember the Akademic Shokalskiy

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There may yet be some redemption in this Chris Turney event. I noted that there has been no mainstream news reporting on this incredible scandal of scientific malpractice but for a change this lack of reporting is being taken note of. This one is found on Drudge and others like it are showing up. The title makes very clear what it’s about, “Frozen Out: 98% of Stories Ignore That Ice-bound Ship Was On Global Warming Mission”.

A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

This is no ordinary mishap amongst climate “scientists” but a full blown clown show of the most incredible proportions. They sail into a bay and are frozen in ice where Mawson had sailed in ice free a century ago. They not only disprove what they set out to show but better still, demonstrate how completely out of touch with reality they are.

Someone has to find some kind of way to remember this along the lines of “Remember the Alamo” because this is a moment that should be remembered every time one of these global warming types takes the stage.

And to add to the piling on, there is then also this, the above-the-headline linked stories from Drudge today:

NYC WINTER WARNING…
UP TO 14″ IN BOSTON…
UPDATE…
RADAR…
1,400+ flights stopped…
Cuomo Closes Highways…
Declares state of emergency…
De Blasio: ‘Stay home tonight’…
Meteorologist: ‘Exposed skin could freeze in 15 minutes’

Not to mention this just below:

Blizzard to Reach From NYC to Boston…
CHILL MAP…
USA ushers in 2014 with record-low temps…
Chicago Sees Biggest Snowfall In 15 Years…
NFL: Bitter cold coming to Green Bay on Sunday – High of four degrees…
Winnipeg deep freeze — cold as uninhabited planet…

The last one is the most interesting because Winnipeg yesterday recorded lower temperatures than those recorded on the planet Mars.

UPDATE: Here’s another report on the media cover up, this one at Hotair:

Oddly, the CNN reports seem to be missing something fairly important to understand the reason why the researchers were out in the Antarctic seas in the first place. This a tweet from John Nolte:

CNN giving the researchers stuck in the ice a lot of play. Not hearing a lot, tho, about what they were researching.

At least the word ‘climate’ appears once in their web report, although not as an explanation. It doesn’t appear at all in the CBS report. The Associated Press report similarly avoids this key data point. Scott Johnson called this expedition the ‘ship of fools,’ and perhaps that can be applied to these reports on the denouement, too.

AND YET ANOTHER: And here is an editorial from The Washington Times, “No more dead parrots: Global-warming fans spend a frozen Christmas in Antarctica”.

A look at readily available satellite imagery would have prevented the fiasco; they show an abundance of ice in the Antarctic. ‘Climate scientists’ don’t want anything to disturb their denial. They called their voyage the ‘Spirit of Mawson’ in honor of Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, whose 1912 expedition to the South Pole ended in disaster as well. One of the 1912 survivors wrote a memoir called ‘The Worst Journey in the World.’ The journey hasn’t improved in the century since. Despite all the carbon dioxide emitted since, there still aren’t any sunny beaches or sweltering jungles in Antarctica.

Mr. Turney expected something better than a frozen wasteland, since he and Al Gore argue that man-made global warming is real and has been melting the polar ice caps. Mr. Turney insists his frozen ship is further evidence of global warming — that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. According to the professor, the field of ice that trapped his ship was created by an iceberg that broke apart three years ago because of global warming. (The dog ate the paperwork.) His employer, the University of New South Wales, is doubling down, too, with another ‘study’ concluding that the earth’s temperature will rise by 4 degrees by 2100 because man insists on electric lights and the internal-combustion engine.