Great news for international shipping (not!)

We all thought the damn' Arctic Ice was melting, reducing the risk of iceberg collisions and opening up the North-West Passage.

According to the 'Weather Eye' in Wednesday's Times (not available online), research carried out for a charity called Cape Farewell, strong winds have just blown some of the Arctic Ice a few miles south and jammed it all against the eastern coast of Greenland.

The good news is that the Gulf Stream is not affected, that keeps the UK relatively warm for its latititude.

Great news for international shipping! (3)

The Times gave the story about the Northwest Passage yet another outing yesterday (not online yet, it seems).

John Sauven of Greenpeace gave a classic quote "The canary in the coal mine is singing very loudly now. At this rate we could see the end of summer ice in our lifetimes"

1. John, you knob, canaries don't sing when the air gets dangerous, they first show 'signs of distress' and then they keel over.

2. I have never seen the Arctic Ice, and I've never met anybody else who has. So I'm hardly going to miss it.

3. It seems fair to see melting ice-caps as evidence of 'global warming', but it's not global warming that anybody really cares about, it's rising sea levels that might muck things up.

4. As Arctic ice floats on water, if it melts it won't make any difference to sea levels.

5. Devil's Kitchen has linked to other studies that show that the amount of ice in the Antarctic is increasing. Now remember, that stuff is on land. If it were all to melt it could indeed get a tad damp in the Netherlands and East Anglia. But they never mention that, do they? I wonder why.

Great news for international shipping! (2)

Those BBC wankers are still at it, y'know.

Yesterday on the News At Ten they had a piece on the melting of the Arctic ice cap, saying that the Northwest Passage was now ice-free for the first time since records began*, and showed footage of two icebreakers laboriously smashing their way through 6' thick ice (which is not very thick by Arctic standards, but hey).

Seeing as this passage was navigated a hundred times in the last hundred years (per Sunday Times) I don't see what there is to get excited about.

This story was torn to pieces by Peter Risdon and DK (links here).

Maybe the Panamanians ought to get on with widening that Canal after all.

* in 1978.

"Greenland sees bright side of warming"

Following my post "Great news for international shipping!" it seems I overlooked this corker "Greenland sees bright side of warming" in which they sum up all the pro's and con's and find that, on balance, they'll be a lot better off if the ice recedes.

As a resident of the British Isles, I think that on balance global warming would be good for us as well. My problem is, there are plenty of bloggers who dig up reports saying that there is no such thing as global warming, and that global cooling is just as likely.

Bugger. I hate the cold.

Great news for international shipping!

Maybe the Panamanians don't need to bother widening their canal after all, nature has re-opened a short-cut between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific.

Update. Via Devil's Kitchen, comes this valuable bit of research from Freeborn John. Follow the links, I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise!