Norwegian Icebreaker Heads Up the Mississippi River!

As you may have seen on the news, it's been very cold in Iowa, so cold in fact that we have borrowed a Norwegian Icebreaker from Minnesota to unclog the Mississippi starting over near Davenport and working its way north. Here is the first picture of it as it begins the hard work required to break up the ice.

ClimateGate: Roundup...

Marthinus van Schalkwyk has been nominated (by the South African government, presumably) to head the UNFCC in the wake of Yvo de Boer's resignation following the fiasco in Copenhagen.  I'd never heard of the guy before, but BigGovernment is reporting that he's a thoroughly disreputable and disgusting example of homo bureaucratis.  Lovely...

Watts Up With That? has posted a nicely-done study of electronic temperature measurement biases (including a link to the PDF of the original paper).  There are lots of interesting details for anyone into the engineering, but the conclusion is easy for anyone to understand: there are systematic errors in the three most common electronic temperature measurement systems, most of which tend to produce warmer-than-actual readings.

Also thanks to Watts Up With That?, I discovered the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) web site – chock full of darned interesting data.  For starters, here's their March 3, 2010 newsletter observing that Antarctic sea ice extent is higher than normal, Al Gore notwithstanding.  The capper for me was this animation tool, which lets you do some very interesting see-it-with-your-own-two-eyes kinds of observation.  For example, I set it up to animate the Arctic sea ice extent from 1990 to present, showing me just January.  The first surprise was how much the seat ice extent bounces around from year-to-year.  The second surprise is that the noise level far exceeds any observable signal – the kind of thing that makes any engineer or scientist suspicious about any claim of observed trends...