Global Warming Scientists trapped in Antarctic Denial

This expedition to Antarctica is led by global warming scientist Chris Turney, whose company, Carbonscape, sells carbon indulgences. If you sin by emitting carbon, Chris Turner will, for a suitable payment, offset your sin with his carbon offset credits.

In the course of this expedition, they have repeatedly smacked up hard against ice that their ideology said could not possibly be there, and then proceeded to act as if the ice was not there.  And then their ship got stuck.

The Global Warming research expedition, the Spirit of Mawson, aboard the Akademik Shokalskiy, has become stuck in something resembling ice, in high summer of the Antarctic.  The leader of the expedition, however, assures us that the Antarctic ice is melting, so I suppose the material that it is stuck in is denial that has taken the form of white crystals.

Three icebreakers have been sent to rescue them, but were defeated by the thickness of the ice, notwithstanding highly scientific measurements proving that antarctic ice is becoming thinner.  Doubtless Chris Turner is going to offset all that carbon expended by the icebreakers.

The purpose of the expedition was to retrace the Mawson expedition of a hundred years ago, and compare their measurements of the ice and penguins with modern observation.

There is an interesting expedition blog post, return to Mawson’s hut, which dances around the fact that one hundred years ago, when Mawson’s expedition built their base, the base area (Commonwealth Bay) was completely ice free in summer, while now the sea is covered in thick impenetrable ice that looks that it has been there a very long time.  “It felt like we were in the interior of the continent, not at its edge.”  But in Mawson’s day, the hut was at the edge.

It seems that the expedition planned to break their way through the ice to the shore, and blog that they were doing what Mawson did a hundred years ago – a plan that was quite obviously insane.

Reading between the lines of the blog posts, the original plan, of retracing Mawson’s expedition, has proven impossible, because the Antarctic icecap has grown since then, covering the seas that Mawson sailed with permanent ice impenetrable to icebreakers.

But this should have been obvious as soon as they thought to retrace Mawson’s expedition.  They could have figured out it could not be done before they did it. The project was, like most modern science, ideology over eyesight, power speaking to truth.

They just kept recklessly driving the Akademik Shokalskiy into thicker and thicker ice, as if it was an icebreaker.  It is an ice strengthened ship, which is a lightweight icebreaker.  And eventually, could go no further, which had happened before, as in the visit to Mawson’s hut, but one day, found they could not only go no further, but could not turn around and go back either.

They got stuck in the ice because they refused to acknowledge the glaringly obvious fact that Mawson’s route has long been covered by a growing antarctic ice cap, even when the ice was right in their faces, and even when the ship was making terrifying sounds as it unsuccessfully attempted to bust the ice.