yeah, I know that. I was just being snide.
it is interesting though, to read journals and books about Polar explorers and walers and how much hundred of miles of ice coverage varied over the years for causes we still do not completely understand, even with satellites and too much data mining at times.
Some of those polar fluctuation were, of course, not global change but macro-regional from fluctuations in gyri of the Gulf Stream near Greenland, or its terminus even as far north as Novaya Zemlya.
I'd like to hear if anyone can now take a wooden sailing vessel through the Northwest Passage like Roald Amundsen did. He was the first, but had to winter over partway there.
Bit of a jump from drought in California and Virginia to Polar ice caps, but I'll go for the ride.
First off, Amundsen did not sail through, he skiied the last 800 kilometers, and his adventure went on for multiple years 1903-1906 where he was iced in over for months at a time. Although polar ice coverage varies widely from year to year, his odds would be greatly improved today.
In the summer of 2000, two Canadian ships took advantage of thinning summer ice cover on the Arctic Ocean to make the crossing.
In 2006 the cruise liner MS Bremen successfully ran the Northwest Passage, helped by satellite images telling where sea ice was.
In January 2010, the ongoing reduction in the Arctic sea ice led telecoms cable specialist Kodiak-Kenai Cable to propose the laying of a fiberoptic cable connecting London and Tokyo, by way of the Northwest Passage, saying the proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Japan.
In 2013 the first large sea freighter MS Nordic Orion was able to use the passage.
Climate change is manifesting itself most noticeably in the arctic and antarctic regions, as predicted. The scientific evidence is overwhelming, but I don't think Steve wants to launch a debate on that topic so I won't start linking to dozens of peer reviewed articles on ice cores, permafrost melting, and ice shelf breakup. In the end, the scientific method will never be able to
prove that humans are causing climate change just like the scientific method can't
prove that smoking causes lung cancer. This issue has turned into a mostly party line belief in science vs an obsession to cast doubt. Doubt is easy, just look in the sky, I don't see any greenhouse gas and it was a cool day today.
