Great article
In the icy grip of fear that global warming is claptrapIF you are going to get yourself marooned, the Seychelles or some palm-fringed Pacific atoll would seem to be the shot. Caressed by balmy winds and encircled by golden sands, they are warm and pleasant places with bars, duty-free shops, clean sheets and room service.
Just the sort of spots, in other words, for an academic to hole up with his latest grant and contemplate the ravages of global warming.
But go to the Antarctic?
Let's just say that making the South Pole your destination implies a great disadvantage from the start.
Arrive in Kiribati, one of those islands frequently reported to be sinking beneath the waves, and local politicians will greet you at the airport with ready quotes about how it is all the fault of the industrialised West's carbon emissions.
Much easier to predict than global temperatures, the next sentence from their lips is sure to be a cup-rattling plea that large sums of UN-administered cash be transferred to the island's treasury without delay.
After those formalities the climate caper is a piece of cake.
Grab the nearest native, make sure he is wearing a fearful expression and photograph him knee-deep in global warming's ever-rising tide.
This will illustrate the climate crisis, which is always a crisis - more likely a "growing crisis" if reported by the ABC or the student newspapers that Fairfax editors have allowed their publications to become.
If you are really smart, make sure to pack some tame reporters with the luggage, then watch with approval as they take down the climate-change stenography that passes these days for "quality journalism" - that rare beast of which we hear much but see little.
All of the above explains why it is hard to sympathise with ice-bound University of NSW Professor of Climate Change Chris Turney, who did everything right while preparing for his current Antarctic jaunt - except for one vital but overlooked detail.
Gullible reporters aboard? Check! Skilful use of advance publicity? Check! Find other people to pick up the trip's cost? Check! In a film clip promoting the $1.5-million expedition, Turney even donned his arctic gear, thus demonstrating an heroic devotion to the international cause of a cleaner, greener planet.
Judging by the sub-tropical vegetation in the background he would have been far hotter than any of those unfilled predictions of climate doom - Al Gore's prophecy that the North Pole would be ice-free by 2013, for example.
Antarctica is "an extreme environment," Turney observed before departing.
"The smallest mistakes can cascade into a disaster."
Well, he was right about that. Now hopelessly jammed in an ice floe and waiting to be evacuated by helicopter with the 51 other passengers aboard the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy, which should perhaps be re-christened the Academik Stuck-a-lotski, his stated goal was to retrace the century-old footsteps of Douglas Mawson and replicate the Australian polar pioneer's scientific measurements.
That was one of Turney's objectives. The other was to chart the changes in Antarctica's environment as the planet purportedly heats, icebergs allegedly melt and grant applications are very definitely filed and processed.
As Turney is an ardent warmist, one who has been known to cite a much-disputed study that insisted parts of Antarctica are warming "five times faster than the world average", it requires little imagination to guess in which direction he thought the mercury has been heading.
His University of NSW colleagues entertain not the slightest doubt. Even as Turney remained stuck fast in that unexpected ice, they were issuing yet another dire warning - this time that global temperatures are set to rise by 4C, rather than the previously advised 2C.
"We've been hoping for the best and not planning for the worst. Now it's looking like the best is not very likely,'' Professor Steven Sherwood said.
It certainly has not been the best result for Turney, whose ship hit the ice on Christmas Eve and hasn't moved since, except to list quite a few uncomfortable degrees to one side. As three icebreakers struggled and failed to reach it, the expedition's "scientific" output has amounted to little more than tweets that - Surprise! Surprise! - Antarctica can get really, really cold.
Mind you, the Turney team also has established that the ship's beds are narrow and uncomfortable and, as one of the five reporters aboard lamented, there is not a single "banana and peanut butter milkshake" to be had within 3000 miles. If Mawson was plagued by those same woes, he stoically refrained from recording them in his journal.
Unlike Kiribati, there are no anguished locals in Antarctica to produce canned quotes about climate change, just a mob of bemused penguins that has taken up station beside the stranded ship.
One of the expedition's few fruits has been the claim that leopard seals are 10 per cent smaller than in Mawson's day, but the penguin presence surely suggests another scientific advance: penguins cannot laugh out loud, as much of the rest of the world is now doing.
Can't blame the penguins for gawking. It is not often a circus takes a full complement of clowns that far south.
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