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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| The Arctic Could See Ice-Free Summers By 2035, Reshaping Global Shipping Routes |
| 2022-02-16 |
| And monkeys will fly outta my butt! Al Gore famously predicted this years ago, and came up 100% wrong. Let's go for two! [CNBC] - Sick of shipping delays? There might be a faster way to ship supplies around the world in the not too distant future. With melting sea ice in the Arctic, Russia and China are expanding their shipping infrastructure over the Eurasian continent. Last year’s Suez Canal incident, when a ship got stuck and blocked global traffic for several days, was seen as just the argument to entice businesses to explore using Arctic shipping routes. "Many Russian officials are very quick to jump on the fact that Arctic sea routes are potentially much more useful for avoiding the kind of bottlenecks that one would see in either Panama or Suez Canal," said Marc Lanteigne, associate professor of political science at the Arctic University of Norway. China claims using the Northern Sea Route would shave almost 20 days off the shipping time now spent traveling through the Suez Canal. But Arctic transit is no small feat and is still highly unpredictable. Captain Kenneth Boda took the U.S. Coast Guard cutter HEALY through the Arctic over Alaska and Canada this past summer. |
| Posted by:Raj |
| #16 Another 10 - 20 climate doom prediction |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2022-02-16 20:51 |
| #15 And every year we'll get to read about a ship full of Greens protesting the shrinking ice needing to be rescued because there was too much ice for their ship to handle. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2022-02-16 18:10 |
| #14 Interesting coincidence in the date. A 1999 Russian study on the hydrology of glacier runoff in the Himalayans said if warming continued unabated, 'glaciers might remain in compact areas by 2350." Not good enough for the IPCC, who cited it in their 2009 (?) report as Himalayan glaciers 'completely disappeared by 2035' - a 315 year 'advancement' of the 'science'. As long-ago Rantburger Seafarious said, "What's wrong with a little lysdexia?" |
| Posted by: Bobby 2022-02-16 15:49 |
| #13 Not holding my breath. |
| Posted by: Angstrom 2022-02-16 14:33 |
| #12 Seem to remember hearing this in High School, about 2020. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2022-02-16 14:31 |
| #11 #8 I'm pretty sure artic ice is not a surface you can operate a hover craft. |
| Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed 2022-02-16 14:09 |
| #10 I don't know much about hovercraft but the physics of lifting 200,000 tons seems, well, difficult. As for a combo cargo/ice breakers, that is certainly possible but the problem is that going through ice slows the vessel down a lot. The Russians have some of the best ice breakers and they rarely go more than 7 mph in ice. |
| Posted by: Lord Garth 2022-02-16 14:07 |
| #9 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2022-02-16 13:36 |
| #8 Could you build a hovercraft capable of carrying large amounts of cargo? Could such a beast travel safely over arctic ice? Could you economically construct a container ship the same way they construct ice-breakers? If the area is so valuable for shipping how come nobody is talking about alternatives? |
| Posted by: ruprecht 2022-02-16 13:28 |
| #7 Russian leaders have always dreamed of a warm water sea port. Wouldn't hold my breath though. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2022-02-16 12:03 |
| #6 I love it. Al Gore would be proud. The world is gonna end in 12 years. Reset. |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2022-02-16 11:56 |
| #5 the arctic doesn't need to be free of ice to allow late summer, early fall transit from the N Atlantic to the N Pacific it just needs the thicker ice to stay about 30 miles or so from the continent we've already had a few summers in which this occurred |
| Posted by: Lord Garth 2022-02-16 11:50 |
| #4 "Many Russian officials are very quick to jump on the fact that Arctic sea routes are potentially much more useful for avoiding the kind of bottlenecks that one would see in either Panama or Suez Canal," said Marc Lanteigne, associate professor of political science at the Arctic University of Norway. ...My concern there is that if the Russians bet on this happening - and it doesn't - they're going to be pi$$ed enough to try and make it happen anyways. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2022-02-16 11:39 |
| #3 13 more years? Ah'm not gonna worry. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2022-02-16 11:35 |
| #2 Aaaaaand now the pivot from the failed and dying COVIDiocy hysteria back to the gerbil worming hysteria. "Science!" |
| Posted by: Merrick Ferret 2022-02-16 11:09 |
| #1 Don't worry. As 2035 approaches and there is still lots of ice, they'll push back the date. They always do. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2022-02-16 11:06 |