AlGore Rushed to Hospital -- Mugged by Reality

Cut and paste from the Wizbang blog:

News Flash: Polar Ice Caps Not Melting

Posted by Kim Priestap
Published: May 16, 2009 - 9:04 PM

James Delingpole brings us the news that a team of global warming explorers headed up to the North Pole to bring attention to all the damage global warming is wreaking on the polar ice caps. Sadly, they ran into a variety of problems that subfreezing temperatures tend to cause, one of which was they found that the ice caps are not melting but - shock!- are freezing.

They set out to the high arctic 73 days ago full of high hopes. They were going to tramp all the way to the North Pole. (But were frustrated by the unseasonal cold.) They were going to march 1000 km (they managed 434). Above all, they were going to raise awareness of "climate change" by drilling lots of holes in the polar ice cap so as to show how worryingly thin it is, and in how imminent danger of doom. (But their equipment broke in the freezing temperatures and anyway, as Christopher Booker reported the other day, there are US Army buoys which already do this job perfectly well and have found that since last March the ice has thickened by "at least half a metre").

And now to cap it all (ho ho), comes the still more tragic news that the Arctic isn't warming up dramatically after all. According to figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute - as posted by Steven Goddard on the inestimable Watts Up With That site - Arctic mean temperatures have barely changed since the start of their records in 1958. The Arctic was in fact warmer in the 1940s than it is now, but cooled between 1940 and 1980.

This is not the first time global warming explorers conducted farces like this one and ended up looking foolish.