Clarice Feldman provides some commentary on Turney, and the stranded Ice Cruise.
I appears Turney is a Carbon entrepreneur in addition to a “climate expert.”
To quote Ms. Feldman’s essay from today:
Professor Turney, like many climate hucksters, has a financial stake in proving carbon fuels are frying the globe. As he describes himself:
“Professor of Climate Change at the University of University of New South Wales where my team and I are focusing our efforts on using the past to better understand the changes we are seeing today. To do something positive about climate change, I helped set up a carbon refining company called Carbonscape which has developed technology to fix carbon from the atmosphere and make a host of green bi-products, helping reduce greenhouse gas levels.”
Unfortunately for Turney, his family, two BBC reporters and a host of tourists who paid 8 grand each for the adventure, the icecap in the Antarctic is growing, not shrinking, and the Russian ship they chartered, the Akademik Shokalskiy, got stuck in it:
GRAINY film footage from Douglas Mawson’s epic Antarctic survey and expedition provides lasting proof that when the adventurer’s team reached Commonwealth Bay exactly 100 years ago, it was free of sea ice.
and
Newsbusters notes that 98 percent of media stories simply ignored the fact that the ship was in the Antarctic to prove Turney’s point that the Antarctic ice was melting.
And I found only one article, from National Review Online, by Greg Pollowitz cited above, that even mentioned Turney had an entrepreneurial interest in proving the Antarctic ice was melting.
Aside from the loss of face and perhaps future business, the crew had to make a humiliating appeal to climate warming sceptic Anthony Watts for more up-to-date weather data to aid the rescuers.
The truth is Turney and his pals could have saved a lot of time, money and embarrassment if they had acknowledged the truth ahead of this disaster.
“Basically, according to Turner et al. (2013), the current generation of climate models cannot simulate the annual seasonal cycle in Antarctic sea ice extent, and the climate models show a decrease in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, while satellite-based observations show an increase in sea ice extent there.
The closing clause of Turner et al. (2013) is worth repeating and expanding: “…the processes responsible for the observed increase [in Antarctic sea ice extent] over the last 30 years are not being simulated correctly [by the current generation of climate models].”
Obviously, all of the model-based predictions of gloom and doom about sea ice have no basis in the real world.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/2014_lets_change_the_climate.html
Yes indeed I remember that little fiasco.
The unteachables?
This is nothing new. Two or three years ago an expedition headed to the North Pole to “study the effects of global warming”. They were forced to turn back about halfway there because of extreme cold and severe weather.
Good points. When rescues are made, bill become due.
Right now he’s facing a much more realistic possibility of being charged for negligent endangerment as more and more people realize just how woefully unprepared they were to make this very dangerous voyage he talked a bunch of tourist and PHD candidates into funding for him. Ultimately the ship’s Captain bears the burden of responsibility for taking his ship into waters it wasn’t meant to be in, but once the bill for that rescue comes in, lawyers are going to be slinging blame all over the place. I’ll be surprised if the “scientific expert” that told the captain it was safe comes away clean.
The name calling is because it was pleasure cruise masquerading as science. The passengers were eco-adventurers and rich-kid PHD candidates. The goal was to drum up publicity and make a name for Professor Turney. A quick phone call to any number of real Antarctic researchers could have clued him in to just how bad an idea this was. The ship chartered isn’t even designed to handle the trip. The hull may be breached at any time. The ice breakers they diverted were carrying supplies to actual scientists that need them. If those supplies can’t get through due to the delay, multi-year research projects may have to be cancelled. I think they’re all suppressing just how close this was to being a true disaster. At best Professor Turney is guilty of negligent endangerment.
“It’s a machine, Skroeder. It doesn’t get pissed off. It doesn’t get happy, it doesn’t get sad, it doesn’t laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs.” — Doctor Newton Crosby
They did not pay for their trip and they would never pay for tree planting. What these highly unpleasant people are saying is that as a taxpayer I should pay the cost of planting trees to even up the carbon emitted by the pointless useless joke of a non-scientific marketing ploy that I as a taxpayer was forced to pay for. I do not believe that the extent of ice in the places Mawson went are not already available from satellite photos. These highly unpleasant people urinate away my tax dollars on a stupid jaunt, taking along their families and leftist media, merely as a stupid stunt designed to improve the “credibility” of the AGW nonsense. Now I wonder who would have benefitted had the stunt not ended in clownish stupidity. Certainly not the taxpayer.
“To do something positive about climate change, I helped set up a carbon refining company called Carbonscape which has developed technology to fix carbon from the atmosphere and make a host of green bi-products, helping reduce greenhouse gas levels.”
In many places the crime labeled “attempted murder” is distinguished from the crime of “murder” by a lack of success in the attempt. Professor Turney should be more careful of what he puts out in the general press; an attempt (however pitifully made) at terraforming the Earth into a planet free of necessary trace gasses – and therefore, free of LIFE, – is an attempt at genocide, not to say ‘eco-cide’.
In any case, way past mass murder and out the other -cide.
The only thing keeping him free of arrest and trial that I can come up with, legally speaking, is that his technologies are at this point still physically incapable of making the changes he asserts. Still, that’s a narrow branch to stand on.
Exactly right, kuhnkat. Even now the people involved are discussing how many trees they need to plant to “offset the carbon footprint of the rescue,” to help mitigate future warming. Still can’t stop laughing at that one….
Scott, problem is that even now Professor Tunney is effectively DENYING the results!!
Sounds like an excellent and scientific thing to do. Follow in the footsteps of a voyage conducted 100 years ago, take notes, and compare to the notes from 100 years ago. Just because the results don’t turn out as expected is no reason to call people names. Take the results and run with them. That’s the good thing about science, the results are the results. What the experimenter expected is besides the point!
Quote: “.. the crew had to make a humiliating appeal to climate warming sceptic Anthony Watts for more up-to-date weather data to aid the rescuers.”
Actually that’s not quite the way it happened. There was an indirect route, as described in the WUWT blog on Dec 31 :-
“What had happened was that the US Coast Guard had received a message from the ship, requesting weather and wind information for Antarctica. That got relayed to someone at the Scripps oceanographic Institute in San Diego, and it went to John [Coleman’s] weekend KUSI meteorologist Dave Scott. Dave had worked with a scientist who is now on the US Coast Guard IceBreaker Polar Star, and they had logged the request for weather for forecast data from Akademik Shokalskiy.” .. “The message was that they needed better weather information on the ship than they had, specifically about wind and how it might affect the breakup of sea ice. John asked me to gather everything I had on the area and send it …”.
***Note that they .. “were dealing with a Russian ship, not a military ship, but a charter vessel and they likely didn’t have all the tools that American meteorologists had and may not even know where to look for better data. I also pointed out that the Australian scientists on-board were climatologists, and not operational weather forecasters, and finding this sort of weather data probably wasn’t in their skill set.”
Agreed Carl, and all the others.
I know the arguments for models being inadequate are compelling and I have learned about the science from the big boys.
I am on the list of 31,000. Even have met Dr. Robinson. I have lectured at the Heartland Climate meets about the medical arguments that any warming would be just fine, good for humans.
Net effect for humans and living things–warmer, good, cooler, bad. Present, is what we got. No ideal temp, but I could do with some increase from the average of 57 F.
“When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn!”
When are people going to realize that computers are not scientists,nor are they historians, psychics,or clairvoyants? Computers are not even smart; they are very fast, very dumb machines which can only do what the programmer tells it to do. So, the Warmists can write a program to tell what global cataclysm awaits in response to the data being input, and guess what? The computer model tells them what cataclysm is coming! I am always lost when I read “computer model.”
You are right about the global warming scare scam. And you have excellent company.
Over 31,000 scientists have signed a petition that states that any effect of
human-produced greenhouse gases on the world temperature has been next to
NOTHING, and that warming of the earth a little may be beneficial. It certainly
has not and will not result in sea-rise of ten or twenty feet, as the alarmists
claim. So far it is hardly measurable.
http://www.petitionproject.org Edward Teller is the No. 1 signer.
Best regards,
Carl Olson
P. O. Box 6102
Woodland Hills, CA 91365
818-223-8080