On Monday (23 December 2013), the crew of the Russian motor vessel Akadyemik Shokolskiy sent an urgent radio message. Ice from the Antarctic had trapped the vessel. That vessel has seventy-four souls aboard, counting officers, crew and passengers. Soon the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long (Snow Dragon) answered the call. But today Snow Dragon ran into a thick ice floe it could not break through. Early reports said Snow Dragon could not back out; the Chinese dispute this. But what no one mentioned, even on Fox News Channel, was what kind of expedition Akadyemik Shokolskiy was on. In fact, she was on a global warming expedition.

Global warming narrative in peril

The global warming skeptic group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (C-FACT) has the embarrassing details. Readers can also follow the story at the Climate Depot.

Chris Turney, professor of climate science at the University of New South Wales (Australia), leads the group. The Russian vessel set out on November 27 to measure the thickness of the ice. She set out again on December  8. Two weeks later she send the call for help, after the ice trapped her.

Mainstream media reports on the trapped ship and frustrated rescue plan abound. Yet not one mentions what Dr. Turney or the Akadyemik Shokolskiy were doing off Antarctica to begin with. This report from a Seattle, Washington TV station sheepishly mentions “climate change.” They do not mention the phrase “global warming.”

The Hubert Lamb Building, headquarters of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK. Photo: User ChrisO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported License.

Since the 1990s, global warming alarmists have never found any rise in temperatures wherever they have looked. This should surprise no one. Four years ago this correspondent filed this report after reading a copy of the infamous FOI2009.ZIP archive from the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, United Kingdom. That archive held three thousand e-mails, plus program code files and other documents. Of all the text in all the e-mails, this text became most infamous:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

So said Phil Jones, Director of the CRU. (The “Keith” of the 1961 series is his colleague Keith Briffa “Mike” is Michael Mann, of “Hockey Stick” fame, then of the University of Virginia.) Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth, said something more to the point today:

We cannot show a warming trend, and it is a travesty that we can’t.

This “Climate-gate” scandal broke while everyone was going to the Fifteenth Conference Of Parties held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December of 2009. Incredibly, Al Gore told COP-15 that he expected all the ice in the Arctic Ocean to melt in five to seven years. But in 2013, the Arctic ice increased by half.

The Akadyemik Shokolskiy expedition seems yet another try to deny reality. The Seattle report says little on what Prof. Turney was doing off the Antarctic coast. But C-FACT does say several expeditions, professional and amateur, tried to “Sail the Northwest Passage” north of Canada. The ice blocked the way every time.

A French icebreaker turned back. The Australians have sent another. One can reasonably expect that icebreaker to get through.

But the most remarkable part of the story is: a global warming expedition stopped when ice trapped the ship. If global warming were at all real, that ship should be free to make port on its own. And the mainstream media never said a word about what that implies.

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