Global warming may leave McMurdo base cut off by ice
**Posted by Phineas
Call it Nature’s “grapefruit in the face” moment for governments that took global-warming alarmists at their word that polar ice would be vanishing. Now there aren’t enough icebreaker ships to go around:
Another little parable for our times is the story of Sweden’s refusal to lease its most powerful ice-breaker to help the United States in supplying its McMurdo base in Antarctica. The Swedes told Hillary Clinton that they need the Oden at home, after two years of unusually thick winter ice have brought shipping to a halt in the northern Baltic. The Americans have relied on the Oden’s services for five years because, as revealed by the Autonomous Mind blog, they have run down their own ice-breaker fleet, believing that global warming would render it unnecessary.
The Baltic nations, including Sweden, Russia, Finland and Estonia, now realise they need all the ice-breakers they can get, to avoid a repetition of the horror last spring when more than 100 ships were trapped in abnormally severe pack ice at both ends of Russia.
Meanwhile, the BBC – as usual at the peak of the Arctic’s summer melt – prattles on about ships that sail round the top of Russia and Canada, and the ice soon vanishing altogether. In its strange bubble, the BBC seems unaware that ships could do this 70 years ago, before “global warming”, and that the real story is the crisis created by the massive return, for two successive winters, of ice to the Gulf of Finland and the Sea of Okhotsk.
Hard to blame the US government (1), though; after all, the science was settled. There was a consensus. Apparently Nature hadn’t watched An Inconvenient Truth.
Meanwhile, be sure to read the rest of Christopher Booker’s article; the first part shows how Germany, in a fit of irrational panic over the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, may go dark even faster than has been predicted for de-carbonizing Britain.
Footnote:
(1) Actually, no it’s not. That was dumb, guys.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)