Ship of Fools

Media cover-up: warmist scientists trapped by ice are just “tourists”

Andrew Bolt –, Tuesday, December, 31, 2013, (9:12am)
Global warming - dud predictions, Global warming - propaganda

The farce: warmist scientists and reporters sail to Antarctica to find signs of the global warming they claim has changed that continent since Douglas Mawson explored it a century ago. Instead, they find sea ice when Mawson didn’t and their ship is locked in.
Be clear about the joke here. This Australasian Antarctica Expedition was meant to scare us about global warming changing Antarctica, causing melting instead of all this damn ice. As the expedition leaders said on their website:

… there is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming… We are going south to ... determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.

Now to the media cover-up.
Note the Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage this morning. It has a reporter on the third ice-breaker to go to the expedition’s help, only to be driven back by thick ice. There is no mention in her stories of global warming, the trapped mission’s quixotic quest or how stupid those warmists now look. There is no mention that sea ice around Antarctica has steadily increased over the past three decades, contrary to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits its climate models predicted.
Instead, the SMH republishes a tweet from the trapped expedition’s leader, Professor Chris Turney, still insisting he’s unnaturally warm despite being packed in by ice:

Turney is now the Black Knight of global warming:

In fact, it does indeed rain in Antarctica in summer, as the Mawson’s Huts Foundation demonstrates.
Then there’s this:

Jo Nova is astonished by a media cover-up that has changed what was a ship of climate scientists into a ship of mere “tourists”:

A month ago the mission of the $1.5m expedition was “to answer questions about climate change”. Now the ABC describes the Australasian expedition as “a Russian ship stuck in sea ice in Antarctica.” ...
Let there be no doubt, the mission was to document and record scientific changes in Antarctica and to broadcast that to the world. Most scientific missions don’t have a dedicated media team, but this one named a staff of five journalists. There is a journalist and a documentary maker from the Guardian as well as a senior producer from the Science Unit at the BBC world service. (See the media list.) If they’d discovered less sea ice, fewer penguins, or big cracks, we know the images would be all over the mass media and it would be evidence for “climate change”.
But with the MV Akademik Shokalskiy trapped by thick sea ice, the mission apparently is to call it a tourist boat. The BBC now tell us the mission was “to follow the route explorer Douglas Mawson travelled a century ago”. Don’t mention the climate…
The spin is that team has “met heavy ice”. Not “been trapped by unprecedentedly thick sea ice, unlike anything Mawson ever saw, and in record levels”. If they had met thin sea ice, would it have been described as a dangerously thin layer, a risk for penguins, and a stark reminder of how much the climate is changing? Would it have been an undeniable factoid?
It’s not what the ABC says, it’s what they don’t say (a.k.a. “lying by omission"). The headlines could read “Global warming scientists trapped in Antarctica by record sea ice they didn’t predict”. As if. That would be against the religion.

Instead, there are reports from the ABC like this, with no mention of climate change or what the “passengers” on the “cruise ship” were actually up to:

TONY EASTLEY: The Australian operation to rescue passengers from a Russian cruise ship stuck in thick Antarctic sea ice, is continuing this morning, but it’s slow going.

The Aurora Australis ice-breaker is the third vessel to try to help the stricken expedition ship, which has been trapped since Christmas Eve.
Authorities say the scientists and tourist on board the Russian vessel are packed and ready to go.
But deteriorating conditions mean any rescue is unlikely any time soon.

Another ABC report that fails to mention the scientists and journalists were actually trying to prove global warming was changing Antarctica:

An Australian icebreaker has abandoned its attempt to rescue a Russian-flagged ship stuck in sea ice in Antarctica due to adverse weather conditions…
The Akademik Shokalskiy had been retracing Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition and conducting scientific research when sea ice closed in about 1,500 nautical miles south of Hobart.
The 74 people on board, including scientists, crew members and paying passengers, have been stranded since Christmas Eve.

More from Watts Up With That.
By the way, how much is the rescue of these warmists costing - in money and emissions