"Shrinking ice" stops tanker - by Richard... Tuesday, January 10, 2012

"Shrinking ice" stops tanker - by Richard... Tuesday, January 10, 2012

It may be relatively mild in Britain, but not so in Alaska which is suffering an "exceptionally harsh" winter with snow at crisis point in some locations.

Thick ice in the Bering Sea is also giving problems. The US coastguard's only functional icebreaker, the USS Healy, in the area is failing to get to grips with ice up to 2.5 feet thick in the approach to the seaboard town of Nome, which is running out of diesel and gasoline.

After a ferocious November storm prevented the November delivery, the Russian tanker Renda has been despatched to deliver 1.3 million gallons of petroleum products.

Escorted by the icebreaker, the tanker was due to dock yesterday, but now no arrival date has been scheduled, with the ships about 165 miles away from the port.

Interestingly, Cmdr. Greg Tlapa, executive officer of the Healy, complains of the ice conditions changing constantly. When they reach heavier ice, he says, the path is closing between the two ships. In such cases, the Healy has to double back to relax the pressure from the surrounding ice.

The scale of the mission is unprecedented for the Coast Guard in the Arctic, Tlapa says, perhaps regretting that the US is not equipped with heavy icebreakers capable of close-coupled towing, of the type we saw a year ago in the Okhotsk Sea.

One does wonder about the National Snow & Ice Data Center, however, which is reporting that"Arctic sea ice continues to shrink", with ice extent "particularly low on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, most notably in the Barents and Kara Sea".

One really hates to think what the ice might have been like if there had been no global warming.

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Not a happy bunny - by Richard...

Your Freedom and Ours has a look at the "Ganley revival". Helen is not a happy bunny, even if she is highly amused by this peculiar man.

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Living history - by Richard...

I suppose, in a sense, we should be grateful, having been offered such clear evidence of the decay of the train wreck they call the media – alongside a fine illustration of the power of the narrative.

Thus do we have the Daily Wail blathering about David Cameron's "historic veto", the Independenthas Clegg calling for the EU to "bypass Cameron's veto", and the Financial Times reports him as seeing the "EU veto as 'temporary'".

Somewhat down market, the Express tells us that Clegg is plotting "to sink David Cameron EU treaty veto". Even further down the food chain, the Mirror has the Lib-dim leader mocking the veto, while The Sun has Nick Clegg the "traitor" for declaring that Britain "must back the treaty David Cameron vetoed last month".

If it wasn't so serious, it would be hilarious – but at least we do have that compensation of seeing the MSM getting it so spectacularly wrong. The media is devalued coin, not able even to report with accuracy the very basics of EU politics.

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