Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
offtheHimalayasandarecarriedbyElNinjadowntheGoreStreampasttheCapeofGood
Hornwheretheymergeintothemeltingicesheet,namedaftertheawareness-raisingrapper
Ice Sheet …).
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Anyway, as part of his 'Living On Thin Ice' campaign, Al
Gore's own luxury Antarctic vessel boasted a line-up of celebrity cruisers unseen since
the 1979 season finale of
The Love Boat
— among them the actor Tommy Lee Jones, the
pop star Jason Mraz, the airline entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, the director of
Titanic
James Cameron, and the Bangladeshi minister of forests Somebody Wossname. If Voyage
of the Gored had been a conventional disaster movie like
The Poseidon Adventure
, the
Bangladeshi guy would have been the first to drown, leaving only the Nobel-winning
climatologist (Miley Cyrus) and the maverick tree-ring researcher (Ben Affleck) to twerk
theirwaythroughtheicetosafety.Instead,andveryregrettably,theSSGoremadeitsafely
home, and it fell to Professor Turney's ship to play the role of our generation's Titanic.
Unlike the original, this time round the chaps in the first-class staterooms were rooting
for the iceberg: as the expedition's marine ecologist Tracy Rogers told the BBC, 'I love it
when the ice wins and we don't.' Up to a point. Like James Cameron's Titanic toffs, the
warm-mongersstampededforthefirstfossil-fuelledchoppersofftheice,whiletheRussian
crew were left to go down with the ship, or at any rate sit around playing cards in the hold
for another month or two.
But unlike you flying off to visit your Auntie Mabel for a week, it's all absolutely
vital and necessary. In the interests of saving the planet, IPCC honcho Rajendra Pachauri
demandstheintroductionofpunitiveaviationtaxesandhotelelectricityallowancestodeter
the masses from travelling, while he flies 300,000 miles a year on official 'business' and
research for his recent warmographic novel, in which a climate activist travels the world
bedding big-breasted women who are amazed by his sustainable growth. (Seriously: 'He
removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni's body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.'
But don't worry; every sex scene is peer-reviewed.) No doubt his next one will boast an
Antarctic scene: is that an ice core in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
The AAE is right: the warm-mongers were indeed 'stuck in our own experiment'.
Frozen to their doomsday narrative like Jeff Daniels with his tongue stuck to the ski lift
in
Dumb and Dumber
, the Big Climate enforcers will still not brook anyone rocking their
boat. In December 2008 Al Gore predicted the 'entire North Polar ice cap will be gone
in five years'. That would be December last year. Oh, sure, it's still here, but he got the
general trend-line correct, didn't he? Arctic sea ice December 2008: 12.5 million square
kilometres; Arctic sea ice December 2013: 12.5 million square kilometres.
Big Climate is slowly being crushed by a hard, icy reality: if you're heading off
to university this year, there has been no global warming since before you were in
kindergarten. That's to say, the story of the early twenty-first century is that the climate
declined to follow the climate 'models'. (Full disclosure: I'm currently being sued by Dr
