Professor Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales organized and led an expedition to Antarctica that was intended to duplicate a 1913 expedition of Sir Douglas Mawson, who successfully sailed ice-free seas from Australian waters to Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica.
On board a chartered Russian ship were “climate scientists,” warmist reporters, and paying tourists. Although they sailed in the Antarctic summer, the ship became trapped in ice. Two ice-breakers attempted rescue but had to turn back because the ice was impenetrable. As of this writing, the passengers have been airlifted off the Russian ship, and an American icebreaker is en route to try to free the ships.
The good professor, Turney, wanted to show how global warming was affecting the planet. He apparently had visions of clear sailing, but he picked a year in which Antarctic sea ice reached one of the highest expanses ever recorded. Turney also apparently did not check the weather report which showed that winds were piling up ice along the expedition route. Only after being trapped in the ice did they request some expert weather advice.
Some details of the expedition have been reported by Anthony Watts on his Watts Up With That blog here. Another interesting take on this fiasco is given by Pierre Gosselin (a graduate of the University of Arizona) when he asks “Expedition On The Cheap? Did Organizers Recklessly, Negligently Put Lives And Property At Risk? (This article is well-worth the read.)
Gosselin writes that “the expedition was designed to generate lots of publicity.” And it has, just not the kind the expedition leaders had in mind. Why the vessel got trapped in the first place may be because the expedition leader never bothered to look at sea ice charts, which showed near record high levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica. In their adherence to a global warming cult, the expedition leaders probably expected to find less ice than in the 1913 expedition and did not consult competent weather forecasting services. That failure put people in danger for a publicity stunt.
Watts asks some tough questions about the expedition, such as “who pays for the rescue” while Gosselin advises that Turney get a good lawyer fast.
In essence, this expedition was trapped by a preconceived, but false, perception of global warming. The expedition also experienced the irony of an extreme manifestation of the “Gore Effect,” a tongue-in-cheek correlation between global warming conferences and stunts and unusually cold weather.
This “ship of fools” got much more than they bargained for.