Antarctic

Plunging a low point of illogical desperation, a Dutch scientific study finds that the Antarctic sea ice area is actually expanding, and, spare me, tries to blame it on global warming:

McDonald’s has signed on with the Marine Stewardship Council to show that the fish it serves is caught in an environmentally responsible manner. Obviously some focus groups have told them that this matters to people.

However they have copped some flak including the certification of NZ Hoki for the New Zealand market.

Some of the council’s decisions have met with wide criticism, including the certification of a fish called the New Zealand hoki that McDonald’s serves in some Filet-O-Fish sandwiches outside the United States. The council has also certified as sustainable fisheries for which scientists say the data is so scarce that any management plan is pure guesswork, including those of the Antarctic krill and the Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish.  Read more »

Paul Watson talks the big game…but when it comes to his own skin is nothing but a big coward as he stays in international waters to avoid capture.

He should be arrested in Australia if he comes ashore and the same goes for here. Anyone who flies the jolly roger and attacks ships on the high seas is a pirate:

A DIPLOMATIC headache is developing for the federal government as ground is laid for the wanted Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson, to come ashore in Australia.

Mr Watson is wanted by Japan over his Antarctic anti-whaling campaigns, and after skipping bail in Germany has been at sea for months to avoid arrest.

No surprises that the Green taliban of Australia is sticking up for the pirate.  Read more »

An icy stab to the heart of the global warming advocates:

ANTARCTIC sea ice has expanded to cover the largest area recorded since satellite mapping began more than three decades ago, in stark contrast to this year’s record melt on the northern pole.

The expansion continues a trend of increasing Antarctic sea ice cover of about 1 per cent a decade and is at odds with predictions of climate change models that continue to forecast a long-term decline.

ᔥ University of Copenhagen

The warmists would have it that CO2 is killing us slowly…turns out Al Gore and all the other liars are wrong. Co2 increases follow temperature rises…we can now put that argument to bed:

The greatest climate change the world has seen in the last 100,000 years was the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period. New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric CO₂ follow each other closely in terms of time. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Climate of the Past.

In the warmer climate the atmospheric content of CO₂ is naturally higher. The gas CO₂ (carbon dioxide) is a green-house gas that absorbs heat radiation from the Earth and thus keeps the Earth warm. In the shift between ice ages and interglacial periods the atmospheric content of CO₂ helps to intensify the natural climate variations.

It had previously been thought that as the temperature began to rise at the end of the ice age approximately 19,000 years ago, an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere followed with a delay of up to 1,000 years.

“Our analyses of ice cores from the ice sheet in Antarctica shows that the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere follows the rise in Antarctic temperatures very closely and is staggered by a few hundred years at most,” explains Sune Olander Rasmussen, Associate Professor and centre coordinator at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

ᔥ NZ Herald

I thought Climate Change was meant to be killing things like Polar Bears, seals and penguins…turns out as usual that the warmists have been all too alarmist. Shame about Happy Feet, and Orca got him.

The first census of penguins at the South Pole has found nearly 600,000 – twice the number thought to be there.

Using state-of-the-art satellite imagery, scientists found 44 colonies of emperor penguins.
Seven colonies were previously unknown, and many of the known ones were bigger than expected.

In the past, it was notoriously difficult to estimate their numbers as they live in temperatures of -50c, and some colonies are in the most remote parts of the Antarctic sea ice.

The British Antarctic Survey hopes that having an accurate number – thought to be 595,000 compared with previous estimates of 270,000-350,000 – will help manage conservation and track climate change.

News that a Norwegian loony and others, including a Mana Party activist have sailed to the Antarctic, and planted a Mana party flag in the polar ice can only bring us joy.

The so-called accidental stowaway on a Norwegian sailor’s expedition to Antarctica is said to be a Maori political activist who has planted a Mana Party flag in the polar ice.

Adventurer Jarle Andhoy abruptly sailed his boat Nilaya out of Auckland last month, after Immigration NZ served him with a deportation notice.

Aboard was an unnamed New Zealander who was said to have been working below decks repairing the anchor when the boat departed.

But the Herald on Sunday has been told the New Zealander joined the boat trip deliberately.

He is 53-year-old South Aucklander Busby Noble, an acquaintance of one of the three men who died on Andhoy’s last Antarctic expedition.

Mana Party candidate Kereana Pene said he spoke to Noble by satellite phone this week, after the Nilaya reached Antarctica.

Noble had marked his arrival on the continent by planting a Mana Party flag he had taken with him.

Is this the first recorded case of geese migrating to the cold, rather than away from it?

Speaking of loonies on expeditions…. time for some Monty Python!

The United Nations has retracted a claim that an Israeli strike which killed more than 40 people in northern Gaza city of Jabaliya last month hit a school run by a UN agency.

Whoopsy, big porkies.

“The humanitarian coordinator would like to clarify that the shelling, and all of the fatalities, took place outside rather than inside the school,” the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its latest weekly update on the situation in Gaza.

I wonder if all these photos of blood spattered walls inside the school are in fact real? Will they be retracted?