Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
16 Global warming's glorious ship of fools
Mark Steyn
Yes, yes—just to get the obligatory 'of courses' out of the way up front: of course 'weather'
is not the same as 'climate', and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be
evidence of 'global warming', just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and twelve
degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of
'climate change'. Andofcoursetheglobal warm-mongers areentirely sincere intheir belief
that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting
of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental
Europe.
But still: you'd have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay
ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian
Antarctic Expedition (AAE) 'stuck in our own experiment', as they put it. I confess I was
hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find
themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit.
On Douglas Mawson's original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to
eat their dogs. I'm not sure there were any on this expedition, so they'd probably have to
make do with the
Guardian
reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later
recalled, 'Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.' Now there's a
man who's serious about reducing his footprint.
But alas, eating one's shipmates and watching one's extremities drop off one by one is
not a part of today's high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded
chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year sing-along of such hearty
unself-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin,
the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the
New York Times.
A mere six weeks ago,
pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that,
had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have
survived. Sadly, we'll never know—although I'll bet Captain Oates would have been doing
his 'I am going out, I may be some time' line about eight bars into that New Year number.
Unlike Scott, Amundsen, and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along
for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for
the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today's niche-market travel industry, the
Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The
year before the Akademik Shokalskiy set sail as part of Al Gore's 'Living On Thin Ice'
campaign (please, no tittering, it's so puerile—every professor of climatology knows that
the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break
