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Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey
Bert de Jong writes "The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. '[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'"
given the way the climate change deniers have been trying to rubbish oceanographers and meteorologists because of their agreement on inconvenient data
You're rewriting history there. The current reign of terror against scientists is well documented.
It's the global warming zealots that have been engaged in rubbishing all counter opinion, using extremely severe invective, accusing scientists of collusion with the fuel industries, and rejecting their publications and grant applications. Apparently all counter-opinion and counter-studies are "inconvenient" as far as global warming advocates are concerned.
Well here's some information for you: honest scientists have ceased to care what advocates have to say. Science is not about advocacy, and if you want to undermine the normal working of science by marginalizing counter-opinion, that's your loss. Time will show what's true, once this global fad is over.