Northern Sea Route Through Arctic Becomes a Reality

Hugh Pickens writes "Andrew Revkin writes in the NY Times that since 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby led an expedition north in search of a sea passage over Russia to the Far East, mariners have dreamed of a Northern Sea Route through Russia's Arctic ocean that could cut thousands of miles compared with alternate routes. A voyage between Hamburg and Yokohama is only 6,600 nm. via the Northern Sea Route — less than 60% of the 11,400 nm. Suez route. Now in part because of warming and the retreat and thinning of Arctic sea ice in summer, this northern sea route is becoming a reality with the 12,700-ton 'Beluga Fraternity,' designed for a mix of ice and open seas, poised to make what appears to be the first such trip. The German ship picked up equipment in Ulsan, South Korea, on July 23 and arrived in Vladivostok on the 25th with a final destination at the docks in Novyy Port, a Siberian outpost. After that, if conditions permit, it will head to Antwerp or Rotterdam, marking what company officials say would be the first time a vessel has crossed from Asia to Europe through the Arctic on a commercial passage."

Comments

More discredit climate myths!

[chrb]

Climate myths: The cooling after 1940 shows CO2 does not cause warming

Climate myths: The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming

Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998

I'm surprised you didn't mention Mars and Pluto.

I wonder why these discredited myths keep getting moderated up on Slashdot time and time again - it's almost as if there's a conspiracy to make skeptics look ill-informed.

Re:More discredit climate myths!

[chrb]

people like you keep providing links to 'discredit' them that are complete BS.

Ah, yes, It's all a big conspiracy! And New Scientist is in on it!

In fact, if you had read beyond the first few paragraphs you would have answered your own question:

As a result, the planet is gaining as much heat from the sun as usual but losing less heat every year as greenhouse gas levels rise...

How do we know? Because the oceans are getting warmer.

and:

Since the 1960s, over 90% of the excess heat due to higher greenhouse gas levels has gone into the oceans, and just 3% into warming the atmosphere

Re:More discredit climate myths!

[chrb]

The global surface temperature is a part of the bigger picture - just because the oceans store the majority of heat, this does not imply that the global surface temperature is useless. As for the "Hockey Stick": Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quotes:

The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.

And:

Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.

The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:

the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.

Of course, if you believe that the US National Academy of Science is in on the conspiracy, then this is what you'd expect them to say!

Re:but but but..

[FriendlyPrimate]

This sounds like a troll, but I'll bite.

Your examples are easily refutable, yet never seem to go away on the conservative talk show circuit.

Pluto is warming up because it is on a highly-elliptical orbit, and has just recently passed the point at which it is closest to the Sun. So it is expected that it be going through a warming phase. And a little bit of logic would tell you that since Pluto is so much farther away from the Sun than the Earth, if energy output from the Sun were responsible for warming on Pluto, the effect on Earth would be many magnitudes greater (i.e. it would have to be hot enough on Earth to melt lead before you'd notice an appreciable temperature difference on Pluto).

Mars is indeed warming up slightly, but that can be explained by Milankovitch cycles, and Mars is much more susceptible to climate change because it does not have any large moons to stabilize it's rotation axis.

Conservatives jumped on the news that Jupiter was experiencing "climate change". But it only takes two minutes to find out that the climate change being talked about is a shift in temperature (warmer near the equator, colder near the poles). Jupiter is not warming overall. Of course, that little clarification doesn't seem to make it into news stories from Fox News.

And there are 5 other planets (and many many moons) in the solar system which show no signs of warming.

Sorry...but anthropomorphic global warming is likely true. Without any CO2 in the atmosphere, Earth would be entirely covered in ice. And therefore, you cannot double CO2 levels in the atmosphere (which could happen by the end of this century) without expecting some effects. And you cannot deny that increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere are not the result of human activity (we've burned approximately 1 trillion barrels of oil so far....do you really think that would have no effect?).

And even if AGW is all bunk, so what? We should be trying to reduce our oil consumption and investing in alternate energy for other reasons, like national security, and the fact that we've very likely reached, or are about to reach peak oil production, and that future oil price spikes are going to be the norm from now on.