... and two to go - the biggies. The Makarov (above) has rescued the Professor Kizevetter and passed her through to the Magadan which is escorting her to a safe area. Now for theSodruzhestvo and the 13,000-ton fish carrier, Bereg Nadezhdy, probably in reverse order.
Meanwhile, the Krasin is still on its way, now expected late on 8 January (tomorrow) – earlier than first reported. She really must be piling on the coal. She must then penetrate the ice shelf – from the reports, the best I can gather is that the trapped ships are about 20 miles in, although that will vary as the shelf itself – particularly in this region – is highly mobile.
We also got confirmation from a very badly translated piece of the fate of the trawler Nimbus. It is indeed stuck in the Barents Sea (or was), with the rescue tug Murmanryba coming to its aid.
The Barents Sea is, of course, another "poster child" for the warmists, who fret constantly about the ebb and flow of the ice there. Clearly, it is more flow than ebb at the moment, if experienced trawler captains are getting stuck (and they have to be experienced to be allowed up there, some of the most dangerous waters in the world).
UPDATE: What has been described as a Russian fishing trawler, with at least 11 crew on board, is reported sunk in stormy waters west of the island of Sakhalin, according to the Interfax agency. Two Russian transport boats and an An-24 aircraft were searching for missing crew members, amid "unusually fierce storms that have seen gusts of up to 65 mph". Hopes of finding any survivors are remote due to the stormy conditions and low temperatures.
Another report suggests that this is a Cambodian-flagged ship, the Partnyor, with about a dozen Russians on board. "The ship is sinking," the Partnyor said in an SOS message read on television by a federal fisheries agency spokesman, Alexander Savelyev. "The only life raft opens with difficulty, the wrong way." The ship was about 6 nautical miles from Sakhalin Island's southwest coast when it sent the distress signal.
Back in the Okhotsk Sea, the Admiral Makarov is said to be less than 15 miles from the 13,000-ton fish carrier Bereg Nadezhdy, with rescue operations being hampered by poor weather conditions. The trapped ships are estimated to be some 24 miles into the ice pack, which suggests that there has not been any great progress.
The deputy head of Federal Fisheries Agency, Alexander Saveliyev, is nevertheless saying that all the ships will be freed by the end of the New Year holidays, which run through Monday. "It will only be possible to pull the Bereg Nadezhdy out by dinner time on Saturday," he says, "and theSodruzhestvo fishery mother ship by the end of the (Russian) New Year holidays."
The Transportation Ministry says that the Sodruzhestvo (pictured above) would be the most difficult to free because it was wider than the icebreaker. This indeed, has been the problem all along, as to how an icebreaker can extract such a large ship.
COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS THREAD
Interestingly, I did the story on the deteriorating condition of our roads on 30 December. I claim no great prescience as I was picking up on a piece in The Scotsman at the time, although what triggered the post was seeing the damage locally with my own eyes. Now, well over a week later, we get the story on the front page of The Daily Telegraph, not as well done, in my view – but there you go.
The story, though, is a classic "us and them" issue. Governments and councils between them, pour money down the drains, while neglecting routine maintenance of vital infrastructure. This, you can get away with for a few years, but then the backlog catches up with you.
So it is here. The pre-freeze backlog had reached £9.5 billion, and with the road maintenance budget having been cut, we are now getting to the point of no return. Roads have deteriorated so badly that they need replacement rather than repair – which we cannot afford. And so we reach another landmark on our journey to becoming a third world country.
COMMENT THREAD
Had serious day-jobbing yesterday, which may appear somewhere on Sunday. Exhaustion now intervenes, so I will pick up the pieces after a night's sleep. Meanwhile, a new open thread for you for the forum - anything goes. I've been really impressed with the previous ones - hope you enjoyed them as well.
UPDATE: Having emerged from the pit, suitably refreshed, one sees through the transparent plates which permit the external view of the domain, that we are afflicted once again with global warming - of a particularly heavy duty nature. This is, of course, a local phenomenon, and we do appreciate that the rest of the world is getting so much hotter.
But, oh dear! Two inches of well-forecast snow - and not a gritter to be seen. The roads are skating rinks, pavemements are lethal, schools are shutting early and the whole City is grinding to a halt. Yet, the idle, ill-prepared bastards will be there with their hands out for more money in April, all to keep chief executive Tony Reeves in the luxury he most certainly does not deserve, having already pulled down £182,571 of our money in salary and bonuses this year.
COMMENT: OPEN THREAD
UPDATE: Having emerged from the pit, suitably refreshed, one sees through the transparent plates which permit the external view of the domain, that we are afflicted once again with global warming - of a particularly heavy duty nature. This is, of course, a local phenomenon, and we do appreciate that the rest of the world is getting so much hotter.
But, oh dear! Two inches of well-forecast snow - and not a gritter to be seen. The roads are skating rinks, pavemements are lethal, schools are shutting early and the whole City is grinding to a halt. Yet, the idle, ill-prepared bastards will be there with their hands out for more money in April, all to keep chief executive Tony Reeves in the luxury he most certainly does not deserve, having already pulled down £182,571 of our money in salary and bonuses this year.
COMMENT: OPEN THREAD
The Met Office continues to play silly buggers. See Autonomous Mind for the details.
COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD
COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD
Instincts are proving sound on the Okhotsk Sea drama. After an ominous period of silence, we get a rush of reports, numerous but short – and not happy reading. One of these, at 11:41 Moscow time, informs us blandly that the Admiral Makarov has "cut its way to the ships stranded in the Sakhalin Gulf in the Sea of Okhotsk and is preparing to lead them out of the ice trap".
With more pictures now released of the rescue of the 1,3000-ton trawler, Mys Yelizavety (above and below), another report tells us that the Admiral Makarov was under three miles from the trapped ships. But, tucked in at the end was one terse sentence: "A third icebreaker is on its way ... ".
TASS provides more detail, giving the startling news that the Magadan has been left at the edge of the ice field "to perform, if necessary, the function of an auxiliary icebreaker". No explanation is given, but this gives some clue as to how bad the conditions must be.
Then comes yet another report which identifies the third icebreaker. This is the Krasin, sister ship to the Admiral Makarov (pictured below). She is heading for the area from the port of De Kastri in the Khabarovsk region. Even though this is on the southern edge of the Okhotsk Sea, she is not expected to arrive until 9 January, which also tends to confirm how bad conditions have become.
A Russian Transport Ministry press service official has told Itar-Tass, "In view of the heavy ice situation and for the purposes of ensuring the safety and a guaranteed release of the fishing boats from the ice-nip, the icebreaker Krasin set out from De Kastri port in the Tatar Strait late on Wednesday night in assistance to the icebreaker Admiral Makarov".
Finally, very latest report of this series emphasises, "Third icebreaker hurries to ice-trapped ships' rescue", which sets the seal on the story so far. They are in serious trouble here. It was always going to be difficult extracting the 32,000-ton Sodruzhetsvo, and the bland optimism we have been getting has always sounded unrealistic.
There is a very real chance here that things could go seriously belly-up, with the Sodruzhetsvobeing sunk or seriously damaged. In the 1983 ice crisis, the Soviets lost a freighter and others were damaged. This could happen again.
And in the storm condition forecast, with high winds, blizzards and zero visibility, there is no guarantee that a helicopter rescue could be effected. If they could get these trapped ships out now, they would. That they are not doing so, and waiting for the Krasin says they can't. And that tells its own story.
Meanwhile, an unconfirmed report from the BBC Russian Service speaks of a trawler, Nimb trapped by ice in the Barents Sea, having transmitted a distress call. More detail as and when (if) we get it.
Needless to say, reporting from western agencies continues to be dire, notably this AFP accountwhich has promoted the third icebreaker to Admiral Krasin (which he never was) and has her ploughing "through howling storms to the rescue of hundreds of fishermen ... ".
UPDATE: The Admiral Makarov is reported to have reached the first of the remaining trapped ships, the smallest of the trio, the 2,500-ton Professor Kizivetter fisheries research vessel. She is being towed, "through a blinding winter storm" to ice-free waters. The plan, according to theInterfax news agency, is then to return for the other two ships. No timescale is being given, and one presumes that the Sodruzhetsvo will be left to last, when the Krasin might have arrived.
COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS
The online journal The Daily Climate is getting upset about the lack of media coverage of climate change. According to this source, in 2010, journalists published 23,156 climate-related stories in English last year - a 30 percent drop from '09's tally. This brings them back to 2005 levels, after spiking in the run-up to the much-hyped climate talks in Copenhagen and during the Climategate scandal.
Interestingly, of individual journalists, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times delivered the highest output, at 146, but it was our very own Louise Gray of The Daily Telegraph who came third, with 119. She beat even the lead Guardian journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg, who trailed in at sixth place with a mere 81 stories.
However, if the print (and online) volume is down drastically, US network news has shown an almost precipitous decline. Drexel University professor Robert Brulle has analyzed nightly network news since the 1980s. Last year's climate coverage was so miniscule, he says, that he's doubting his data.
"I can't believe it's this little. In the US, it's just gone off the map," he complains. "It's pretty clear we're back to 2004, 2005 levels." Coverage of Cancun is Exhibit A: Total meeting coverage by the networks consisted of one 10-second clip. By contrast, 2009's Copenhagen talks generated 32 stories totalling 98 minutes of airtime. "It's so little, it's stunning," Brulle says.
And this The Daily Climate piece is but one of a whole raft of articles drawing attention to the changed media environment for the warmists. Only a few days ago, we had a long piece in Der Spiegel which noted that "the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere keeps going up and up, but public interest in climate change is sinking".
Nature also offers a not-dissimilar whingeing piece, headed: "Why dire climate warnings boost scepticism". It tells us that: "Undermining belief in a fair world may mean that climate warnings go unheeded," then going on to tell us that, "although scientific evidence that anthropogenic activities are behind global warming continues to mount, belief in the phenomenon has stagnated in recent years".
We also get Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute, a Californian think-tank for energy and climate issues. He remarks that, "When I was a pollster, I was detecting that many dire messages seemed to be counterproductive, we really needed someone to determine why," the dissertation then evaluating why the greenie message appears to be failing.
The real reason, of course, is that you can only offer messages of impending doom for so long before they lose their effect, so you keep having to up the ante. In time, the messages become so dire and so extreme that they lose all vestiges of credibility, and people simple switch off.
What particularly has done for the warmists this year, of course, is that white stuff that falls from the sky. Thus we have Spiked telling us that the snow crisis of December 2010 has become a striking snapshot of the chasm that separates the warming-obsessed elite from the rest of us.
Nevertheless, we have the High Priests delivering the booster messages, in particular Suzanne Jeffery in International Socialism, who writes under the heading: "Why we should be sceptical of climate sceptics". Every point she raises I have seen repeated – sometimes many times – in the Booker column comments, raised by the infestation of warmists, presented as if they were original ideas.
Much the same comes from Planet Save, with not a new idea to offer, other than to slag off "deniers" with their "BS of the year" awards.
The sheer volume of introspective and pessimistic coverage from the warmists points to a failing movement that has lost confidence in itself and its message, becoming strident and aggressive to boot. They cannot even agree amongst themselves as to the way forward.
But another failing of the warmists is their focus on the traditional media. While the MSM coverage may be falling, the internet has "exploded" – on the blogosphere and on forums and article comments. That is where the debate is being fought and, by and large, lost by the warmists. This very modern scare fails to understand the dynamics of the modern media.
Their only saviour, for the moment, is the inertia of the politicians who, having put measures in place, are not about to change them in a hurry. But the warmists are greedy and ambitious – they always want more, and the high water mark has been reached. They have nowhere to go but down – and it looks as if they know it.
COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD
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