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US Coast Guard Ship To Attempt Rescue of 2 Icebreakers In Antarctica
PolygamousRanchKid writes "A U.S. Coast Guard heavy icebreaker left Australia for Antarctica on Sunday to rescue more than 120 crew members aboard two icebreakers trapped in pack ice near the frozen continent's eastern edge, officials said. The 399-foot cutter, the Polar Star, is responding to a Jan. 3 request from Australia, Russia and China to assist the Russian and Chinese ships because 'there is sufficient concern that the vessels may not be able to free themselves from the ice,' the Coast Guard said in a statement. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Rescue Coordination Centre, which oversaw the rescue, said the Polar Star, the Coast Guard's only active heavy polar icebreaker, would take about seven days to reach Commonwealth Bay, depending on weather. Under international conventions observed by most countries, ships' crews are obliged to take part in such rescues and the owners carry the costs."
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah!
Along came an icebreaker and there were...
Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice. Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice, along came an icebreaker and there were...
Three blue ships, stuck upon the ice...
I could have sworn Antarctica only has a northern edge.
In one week will we be reading about how country X is sending an icebreaker to free the three stuck icebreakers?
Good thing it's summer down there. Wouldn't want to be stuck all winter. That would be a pain.
How's that global warming thing working out for you?
You mean, for us? Not so well. Chaotic weather, not even, gradual warming over the entire globe, is what we can expect for quite a number of years.
Don't say that like you're not in the same boat as the rest of us.
An Western European led research vessel gets stuck in the ice. A Chinese ice breaker comes to the rescue. The Chinese ice breaker gets stuck in the ice. A Russian ice breaker with an international crew comes to the rescue. The Russian ice breaker gets stuck in the Ice. Now we have a US Coast Guard ice breaker on the way to save the day. The moral of the story? When you subtract nasty international politics from the equation, we really can get along.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Thank you for yours.
Along came an icebreaker and there were...
Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice. Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice, along came an icebreaker and there were...
Three blue ships, stuck upon the ice...
I don't get it.
I was thinking the ice breaker was along the lines of ... "So, come to Antarctica often?"
Hell, I remember when I was in grade school in the '90s, and we were constantly told of the horrors of the hole on the ozone layer that was going to burn us to death, and the rain forests that would be 100% destroyed by 1995
They didn't happen because people took measures to mitigate them. The ozone layer was disappearing because of CFCs. Now that we don't use them in spray cans and air conditioners any more the hole is shrinking and should be gone in another 100 years.
You're like the people who scoff at the Y2K Armageddon that didn't happen. It didn't happen because a lot of folks did a lot of hard work to keep it from happening.
Had everyone shrugged and done nothing like you propose with global warming the ozone would still be disappearing and the Y2K meltdown would have been serious.
Free Martian Whores!
Umm, yes we do.
Lake Superior, for example, sometimes has 6 to 12 feet of ice, and the Coast Guard opens channels in the spring for shipping to proceed as early in the season as possible.
There can be ice around Alaska coastline as well, and Coast Guard resources are used to free stuck ships.
Here's a graph that shows how you're looking at things. It's called cherry picking your data.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
There are some complex facts that usually don't get dragged into this discussion because they make it so much larger. But some interesting facts to color the warming issue are:
1. We are currently in an ice age. The current Quaternary glaciation (i.e., the current ice age) started 2.5 million years ago.
2. Within that ice age, we are in an interglacial: a period of temporary(?) warming within the ice age. Our current interglacial is the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago.
But as long as we still have ice caps, we are still in an ice age. If the ice caps melt, we'll know the ice age is over and we're back to what is in fact more normal temperatures for Earth.
However, it can't be said that Earth's normal warm is necessarily good for humanity. After all,
3. Humans, as in the genus Homo, evolved around 2.5 million years ago. The same time as the the beginning of the current ice age. In other words, the adversity of the Earth's freezing put heavy evolutionary pressure on our ape ancestors.
So, cold = good? Well, remember the current interglacial started 11,700 years ago. Now that's interesting. The Old Stone Age begins with the first humans, that ~2.5 million years ago. But...
4. The Middle Stone Age started right around when the interglacial started. That's when humans first began to make more advanced tools, create advanced art, develop spirituality, etc. In other words, when things warmed up a bit, humanity began to flourish.
So what's good? Warm, cold, in-between? What's "natural?" 'Cause that seems to be extremely warm... unless you're talking about humans, then it's extremely cold. Or moderate.
Complex, eh?
Now, apart from global warming, the related issue that always gets short shrift is ocean acidification, which is also caused by an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere, and which appears to be a huge threat to life on Earth. But it's harder to understand than warming, so let's not talk about it.
go and look at Ozone depletion and see that the alarmism was worth it because the world did ban CFCs and the charts show the improvement since. What we need is global coordinated action on the issues of today
Icebreakers being stuck in ice doesn't say much about climate change - incidents of such icebreakers stuck in ice over many decades may say something. Don't confuse an incident with a trend
I am sure there are many stupid Americans in New England seeing how amazingly cold it is this week and mocking Climate Change. (I live in Central Europe and we have at the moment one of the hottest Januaries on record). Climate Change predicts weather extremes because there is more energy available in weather systems to push to hotter and colder extremes.
That thick ice in Antarctica could be an example of climate change if, for example, more ice is rolling off the land faster, or climate change has changed currents to push more ice into that bay. Only objective longterm observations can help here.
There are problems with Alarmism, but it was right with Acid Rain in the 1970s, leaded petrol and Ozone in the 80's - those problems were reversed - and the scientific community is in consensus that CO2 today is a far more serious issue and we need alarmism before we reach tipping points.
I would rather take action with alarmism, then do nothing out of cynicism while species go extinct and Africans and Bangladeshis try to emigrate in their millions.
But if you zoom that graph way out you'll see that we're cooling. It's called cherry picking your data. Looking at the data in 5-year increments tells a different story then looking at it in 50 year increments tells a different story then looking at it in 500 year increments, tells a different story then looking at it in 5000 year increments and on and on and on.
We are too dumb to understand climate. Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar, unless they put it in the context of being relative to the rest of mankind. That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science. We've seen that the climate scientists are afraid of being wrong. This is an area where our system of academia is a weakness not a strength. People are too invested in not being wrong and finding new truths. In the climate sciences it should be about being wrong and being able to better understand that. Bad predictions should be more celebrated then correct ones, because it's easier to learn from something that went wrong.
skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness. There is learning to be done, and a future that is uncertain. Those are things we should be concentrating on.
Three! Three stuck icebreakers!
Muahhhaaaahhaaaahhaaahhaaahhh!
I *love* to COUNT! That's why they call me the COUNT!
Muahhhaaaahhaaaahhaaahhaaahhh!
Why would the US Coast Guard own any icebreakers?
According to a Wikipedia article:
Polar Star has a variety of missions while operating in polar regions. During Antarctic deployments, the primary missions include breaking a channel through the sea ice to resupply the McMurdo Research Station in the Ross Sea. Resupply ships use the channel to bring food, fuel, and other goods to make it through another winter. In addition to these duties, Polar Star also serves as a scientific research platform with five laboratories and accommodations for up to 20 scientists. The "J"-shaped cranes and work areas near the stern and port side of ship give scientists the capability to do at-sea studies in the fields of geology, vulcanology, oceanography, sea-ice physics and other disciplines.
Why simply err on the side of caution, when you can scuttle the entire world economy with superstitious ignorance?
At least in principle. The exact details of *weather* are always complex.
Here's a link to an article explaining where the ice in question comes from:
“There's a misconception here – we are not trapped in new ice that's been created because its cold,” said Turney. “This is very old, thick ice that's been re-mobilised. It was attached to another part of the continent and has broken out and, with the south-easterly winds we've had, has pushed it up against the coast and pinned us in.”
The austral sea ice situation is complicated by the fact there's a continent down there and it's not perfectly round. It sticks out into the sea in irregular ways. This means that the extent of sea ice (which is present year round) is dependent on the wind, which in turn is stronger with a more energetic (warmer) atmosphere.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Stop making things up. It may make you feel smart, but you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yeah, the climate is really complicated. So is the human body, but we can now 3D print working organs and implant them into patients. So is rocket science, but we now have robotic rovers driving around on Mars. If a problem is hard, that doesn't mean we can't solve it. That just means we have to work really hard. And we've been working really hard at understanding the climate for half a century. You have no clue what amazing progress has been made and how deep an understanding we now have of some really complex processes.
So if you want to know what's going on with the climate, what do you do?
1. Learn all about it, recognizing that's a big task and it will take you years of study if you really want to become an expert.
2. Listen to the people who have spent years studying it and are experts on it.
3. Don't do either of the above. Just say, "No one understands this because it's too complicated." After all, if you don't understand it then obviously no one else does either.
Yeah. That's what I thought.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
What did I make up? That if you zoom out far enough the climate is cooler now then the average. Nope I'm pretty sure that's agreed upon by most. The implicit fact that that makes the prior argument invalid? Nope that's just logic. (It should be noted the an argument being logically invalid does not negate or affirm it's conclusion). That we are naive when it comes to climate science? Again, this one I'm pretty sure of, I've heard many climate experts say that mankind is the species that has impacted the environment the most, but I'm pretty sure that that distinction goes to the species of bacteria that evolved into chloroplasts.
You seem to have refuted my point about how well we understand the environment, with a couple of examples of similarly complicated systems that we are making great strides with. First of all there is the logical fallacy that progress in some complex systems implies progress in others. That's just not a sound way to refute the point. I'm considered an expert in somethings but that doesn't mean I'm an expert in everything. Then there are the examples of complex things that we have "mastered". Let's start at the Human body. Drug companies, who tend to hire some of the people that know the most about the human body end up with a lot of failed attempts at new drugs. Some of the time it happens because of unintended consequences, but a lot of the time it's because a correlation that was thought to be causal turned out not to be. ( Here's a wired article about the phenomena http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 ). The other is space. Sure we have some successes but we also have a number of failures. In late 2011 we were looking at abandoning the ISS because of a string of Souyez rocket malfunctions. Also of the 3 mars missions launched during the 2011 launch window, only 1 (that's 33%) reached mars, so while Curiosity is cool, it's the exception not the rule. So to say that we've mastered either field is also not logically valid. Of course in both of those fields we can perform somewhat rigorous experiments so our progress is also faster.
That's not to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with naive science. Our understanding of gravity is still undergoing refinement, but it's force has been part of our engineering for quite some time. But having a naivety of gravity employed in a lot of the engineering hasn't been a downfall. I would say that the goal should be to know when you are doing naive science and respond accordingly perhaps by leaving terms in generic equations abstract, so that they are more readily adjusted if need be or can have more complex expressions plugged in as appropriate (for example gravitational attraction to the earth).
But on the whole your comment as an attempt to refute mine was trash. You start off with an attack, which is not a logically valid method of refutation, and justify the attack with a logically invalid argument that was based on logically invalid arguments. Then you go on talking about climate experts (which I denied the current existence of and you failed to validly refute), which you then use to declare your attempt to refute my comment successful, which does not logically make it so.
My comments were about logical validity, the absolute level of our understanding of the climate, and how the nature of our academic system interacts with fields like the climate that are very hard to study. I'm happy to go off on tangents relative to discussing those topics, but if what you're really trying to do is show me to the curb because you think I'm denying climate change, then you can rest assured that that is not my goal at all.