Well, supposedly they had a good time for New Year’s Eve
(Guardian) Passengers aboard a scientific research ship stuck in sea ice near the coast of Antarctica are preparing to spend another night on the vessel after plans to evacuate them by helicopter were aborted.
The rescue mission was cancelled in the early hours of Wednesday because of hazardous weather conditions. Stranded passengers began the new year with muted celebrations aboard the MV Akademik Shokalskiy.
The passengers, about 50 scientists, academics and journalists, have been trapped on the vessel in thick pack ice off the coast of Antarctica since Christmas Day.
Several attempts to evacuate the Shokalskiy using icebreakers have been thwarted by the dense sea ice, which is up to 5 metres thick in some places.
If the weather breaks, another attempt will be made to rescue them from the really bad global warming on Thursday, which, because of the time differences, would be sometime tonight (east coast time). If they’re able to be rescued, they’ll be ferried to a Chinese fossil fueled ship, then jump back on a fossil fueled helicopter to a fossil fueled Australian ice breaker. If they can’t be rescued, a fossil fueled American ice breaker is 10 days away. Either way, they’ll eventually (we hope), make it back to New Zealand (where the fossil fueled trip started…well, except for all the fossil fueled plane rides to NZ) or Australia. Then can take fossil fueled airplane trips home. All to let us know that climate change caused by fossil fuels is Bad.
Oh, and the ice is so bad that the Chinese ice breaker has been staying away and moving constantly.
Newsbusters notes that 96% of the media outlets covering the ship fail to note why the ship was there
In fact, rather than point out the mission of the scientists to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,†“trackers†and even “tourists,†with no mention of climate change or global warming. Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.â€
Interesting. The Guardian story in quoted also refers to the passengers in the same way, and doesn’t mention “climate change” as the purpose of the cruise.
Andrew Bolt is calling it The Ship Of Fools, and notes how the media and those trapped on the ship are trying to pretend that the cruise was both not about global warming and that all the ice shows global warming still occurring.
More: Andrew Revkin offers this hilarious tidbit
If you follow the discussion around #SpiritOfMawson — the Twitter hashtag for the project — you’ll also note how this misadventure has energized climate change contrarians, offering a distraction from serious research on the impact of climate change on Antarctica.
If they were serious then a) they wouldn’t be take massive fossil fueled trips and b) they wouldn’t be blaming snow and cold on “climate change”. Also, this “serious” cruise was actually meant to be a photo GOP, not science.
Ann Althouse further beats up Mr. Revkin.
