By now most of you have heard about the stuck ship in Antarctica. Stuck for a week now, with two other ships also prevented from carrying out a rescue, the situation has captured world attention. Four failed attempts at a rescue have already been undertaken, and more tries are expected.
The Russian ship with 22 crew and 52 passengers has been stuck tight in the ice and cannot budge. But the whole affair has been a really good laugh. That is because of what most media outlets are not telling you about all this. The Russian ship has a group of global warming scientists on board who went to document climate change at the South Pole.
As one news report says, “It began as a journey to ‘investigate the impact of changing climate’ and to ‘use the subantarctic islands as thermometers of climatic change’ but more than 70 global warming activists, journalists and crew, led by University of NSW professor of climate change Chris Turney, are now trapped by millions of tonnes of ice after their ship was caught in freezing conditions off the Antarctic coast.
“Attempts by two ice breakers to reach the Russian-registered ship, stranded since Christmas Day, have been abandoned due to bad weather and the volume of ice surrounding the vessel. Yesterday plans were under way for a helicopter rescue as some on board hinted at growing tensions. ‘The mood is getting more frustrated by the day,’ photographer Andrew Peacock said in an email….
“In some quarters, sympathy for the trapped activists is running low. ‘You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the spectacle of global warming fanatics trapped in the ice on their way to Antarctica, where they planned to make a big deal about the relative shortage of ice,’ wrote US journalist John Hayward as the ordeal entered its sixth day. ‘It’s even funnier because the highly sympathetic mainstream media so clearly understands how utterly embarrassing this is.’
“Before the $1.5 million expedition, the ABC reported Professor Turney and his team would ‘try to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might be already shifting weather patterns in Australia.’ Subsequent ABC reports make little mention of the expedition’s climate aims. A headline in the Sydney Morning Herald described the trapped vessel as an ‘Antarctic tourist ship’.”
So let’s get this straight: these climate scientists went to Antarctica to prove to the world how bad global warming is getting, and how the polar ice caps are melting, only to get stuck in ever increasing ice fields. OK. And of course all the true believers in the MSM are engaged in a big cover-up here.
As Andrew Bolt reports, “our” ABC did everything it could to play down the truth of this situation: “The ABC’s 7.30 last night filed an astonishing report on the ship load of warmist scientists and journalists trapped by ice as they tried to prove global warming was melting Antarctica.
“What was astonishing was that not once in that report did the ABC mention ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or even ‘climate scientists’. It did everything humanly possible to cover up the most embarrassing PR disaster in years for the global warming movement. How different it was last November, when the ABC in a two-part report eagerly presented Professor Chris Turney’s Antarctic expedition as a serious scientific quest to prove how global warming was damaging Antarctica.”
After posting that earlier interview, he continued, “But last night – with Turney’s ship of warmist scientists and journalists embarrassingly stuck in ice for more than a week – the ABC’s 7.30 filed a report which no longer sold Turney’s team as ‘one of the largest Australian science expeditions to Antarctic’ on a mission to ‘answer questions about … climate change’.
“This time it sold them as merely ‘tourists’ and a few unspecified scientists. This time it did not mention ‘climate change’ once. Indeed, Turney, who the ABC in November identified as a professor from the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of NSW, was this time identified merely as ‘expedition leader’. Not once did 7.30 last night report the real story and the real joke – that a ship carrying warmist scientists and journalists, plus a Greens politician, was trapped in thick ice that those on board had insisted was melting away.”
Hmmm – why are we not surprised? The politically correct ABC which has long shrilled the global warming hype just cannot actually resort to honest reporting on this issue, but must always instead push agendas and play fast and loose with the facts.
But this makes sense, since the warmists and their media stooges really have embraced a new religion here. The religion of climate change requires as much faith – if not more – than most other religions. It is an article of faith to believe the warming hysteria, and anyone who dares to question it is branded a heretic and an apostate.
As Christopher Booker notes, these folks are on a religious crusade, and they have just become another pressure group dedicated to their cause. Consider what he has to say about the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC):
“Some years back, when I was researching a detailed history of the alarm over global warming, few things surprised me more than to discover just how wildly misleading was the picture given to the world of the IPCC as a genuinely scientific body, dispassionately assessing current knowledge of all the factors shaping our climate.
“The IPCC was set up in 1988 by a small group of scientists who were already wholly convinced that rising CO2 levels were the prime factor in causing global temperatures to rise. They were led by Prof Bert Bolin, appointed as the IPCC’s first chairman, and Dr John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office, who, for 14 years, remained head of its key Working Group 1, responsible for reporting on climate science.
“Since then the IPCC and its five major reports have essentially been shaped by a surprisingly small, close-knit group of scientists, all similarly dedicated to the cause. They have been determined not just to assemble all the evidence they could find to support their theory, however dubious it might be (as in the case of that notorious ‘hockey stick’ graph); but, as we saw from the Climategate emails, to deride or ignore any that contradicted it.
“In years to come this will be looked back on as the most astonishing example in history of how the prestige of ‘science’ can be used to promote a particular belief system, in this case with the aid of those skewed computer models that can be seen ever more clearly not to accord with the observed evidence.
“All this would not be so serious if the IPCC had not been so successfully sold to the world as an objective scientific body rather than as just a political pressure group, because this has taken in no one more damagingly than all those credulous politicians who use the IPCC’s bogus prestige to justify landing us with some of the most disastrously misconceived policies the world has ever seen.”
The joke taking place to our south right now is just a good example of why we should treat the climate alarmists with a very big grain of salt. Indeed, many large grains of salt sound like just what they need to get unstuck.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/global-warming-activists-still-trapped-by-inconvenient-ice/story-fni0cx12-1226792726099
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2531159/Antarctic-crew-build-ice-helipad-help-rescuers.html
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/abc_whitewash_dont_mention_warmists_are_on_board_the_ice_bound_ship/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10356276/Climate-change-scientists-are-just-another-pressure-group.html
[1240 words]