Faking snow in Fortitude: how global warming affected a television thriller

I've been watching the new television show, Fortitude and was keen to know where it was filmed. The scenery is magnificent. Cold snow and ice and Arctic. It turns out it was filmed partly on the east coast of Iceland and partly on sets in London.

My search for the filming location took me to this article in The Guardian and a curious piece of global warming trivia:

Although they believed they had found the perfect isolated Icelandic location to double for Fortitude, for the first time since records began there was no snow on the ground during the six weeks of scheduled winter filming. The production company had to bring in fake snow to cover the landscape. 

BTW, if you enjoy a good thriller, watch out for this one. It not only has great actors and terrific music score, the setting is fabulous, and it throws in some science as an extra treat :)

Holey Moley Arctic

Anthony Watts has another post up at WUWT protesting the declining ice in the Arctic by pretending that it's not unusual.  At least this time he left off the photo that was proven to be not of a submarine at the north pole in 1959.  He's jumped ahead nearly 30 years to 1987.

Holey Moley - From Neven:

Watts seems to have a renewed interest in the Arctic, now that we won't be seeing back-to-back records after last year's insane record smashing melting season. I prefer to ignore his sh*t, but his timing was so impeccable this time that I had to react: Hole.

If you've not been keeping up with Neven's excellent Arctic Sea Ice blog (eg on the grounds that this year may not be another record low), you're missing out.  As John Abraham wrote in the Guardian recently (my bold italics):

Neven, like many other armchair scientists has little formal training. But, he makes up for that with a doggedness that would impress anyone. While he describes his blog as basically weather reports, many publishing researchers turn to him for a comprehensive view of current conditions. Do you want to know what the short term ice conditions will likely be? Ask Neven. Interested in learning about impacts of current conditions on the atmosphere? Ask Neven.

Not only is he a great resource, but the commenters provide insightful thoughts as well. And very often, they are not in agreement with each other. It is refreshing to see people engage in polite yet candid discussions of various views of our Arctic.

Neven is fact-full and normally doesn't say much about disinformation from deniers, preferring to explore what is happening to Arctic sea ice.  But he is not unaware of Anthony Watts and others like him who are in the climate science denial business.

Go read his latest article.  While Anthony Watts is posting unconvincing BS with his "the holes now are no different", it looks as if there are real holes in the ice opening up near the north pole.  The holes will be considerably bigger (kilometers wide) than the little cracks shown in Anthony's August 1987 photo, which look as if they aren't much more than about 100 m or so in diameter from the photo. (The length of the longest sub in the picture, USS Billfish is 95.02 metres).

Here is Anthony's "evidence":

Credit: Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet

The above photo, taken in 1987, is described as:

USS BILLFISH (SSN 676), CDR F. Terry Jones (Jeffrey Gossett), USS SEA DEVIL (SSN 664), CDR Dennis A. Napior (Douglas Shaefer), and HMS SUPERB (S 109), CDR James Collins (Don Stephens), conducted the first multi-national 3-ship rendezvous at the North Pole

North Pole not so trivial trivia

Incidentally, 1987 was the year that Australian Dick Smith became the first person to fly a helicopter over the North Pole!

And some more interesting bits of non-trivial trivia that I came across while researching this.  Who was the first person to reach the North Pole and when?  More on that here.  And how easy was it to get to the North Pole back in 1988?  What about trying on a sailboard?  Does anyone know if Stéphane Peyron made it? He did cross the Atlantic on a wind-surfer. Back in 1988 (glasnost era) a joint Canadian-Russian group tried crossing the Arctic on skiis to promote international cooperation, and they made it!

This article gives a thumbnail sketch of the Arctic with some historical context.

From 1958 to to 1987 to 2010

As for Anthony's wrong then corrected then repeated but uncorrected claim relating to a photo he wrongly attributes to a submarine surfacing at the North Pole in 1959.  While the Skate did surface at the North Pole in March 1959, Anthony's photo was not of that event.  Nor does it signal that ice cover today is anything like what it was back then.

Here is a comparison of Arctic seasonal sea ice extent over the years from 1900 to 2010. Click the image for a larger version.

Source: Cryosphere Today

1958 - First sub go under the North Pole (reportedly)

And here's an article about the first ever submarine to travel under the North Pole - or perhaps to admit to it.  The Nautilus.  In August 1958. But it didn't surface there.  Here is a paragraph:

The submarine traveled at a depth of about 500 feet, and the ice cap above varied in thickness from 10 to 50 feet, with the midnight sun of the Arctic shining in varying degrees through the blue ice. At 11:15 p.m. EDT on August 3, 1958, Commander Anderson announced to his crew: "For the world, our country, and the Navy--the North Pole." The Nautilus passed under the geographic North Pole without pausing. The submarine next surfaced in the Greenland Sea between Spitzbergen and Greenland on August 5. Two days later, it ended its historic journey at Iceland. For the command during the historic journey, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decorated Anderson with the Legion of Merit.

Here is the New York Times reporting the same journey.  Some relevant extracts:

He recounted briefly how the Nautilus had cruised submerged on a northerly course past the Aleutian Islands and through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia toward the brittle fringe of the ice pack and then beneath it.

Above the Nautilus the covering icecap was plainly visible over the vessel's closed-circuit television, the sixth months period of Arctic daylight making visibility no problem. Now and then great holes appeared in the icecap but the Nautilus sped on....

...Commander Anderson indicated a distinct lack of curiosity about the precise make up an penetration of the icecap below the surface of the sea. It ranged in thickness from ten to fifteen feet and loses about three feet of its winter depth in summer. But pressures caused by wind and tide, sent it to a depth of fifty feet in unchartered places and these were well above the submarine, he explained....

...A humorous note crept into the recitation as Commander Anderson gave the first public definition of what he called "longitudinal roulette," a passtime not to be indulged in while traversing the arctic sea for the first time in a submarine.

"A trip across the North Pole, where there is no opportunity to observe anything outside of the ship, no opportunity to observe stars or do any type of electronic navigation, presents a very formidable problem- or what has been up to now a very formidable problem," the skipper explained.

"For example, it would be possible for a ship equipped with conventional navigation equipment to become so confused at the North Pole that they might actually work themselves around in a slow circle, thinking that they were going in a straight line, and end up coming into perhaps the ice-locked coast off Greenland, or even more disappointing, back where they came from."

I doubt Commander Anderson would have imagined back then that not much more than sixty years later, the Arctic would not only be able to be traversed by submarines, there would be commercial shipping routes opening up - without ice-breakers or with only occasional help from them.

From the Wall Street Journal, ships transporting oil and gas through the Arctic, which is quite a worry, given the huge risks posed by commercial shipping in the Arctic, from Seatrade Global.

Now go and check out Neven's excellent blog for the latest on the Arctic sea ice.

WUWT recycling trivially false trivia

Looks as if Anthony Watts has run out of Quotes, recycling one from his May 20 Quote of the Week.

Let's look at it:

Quote of the Week: : “The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.” Richard Lindzen [H/t Tom Sheehan]

Well, that's about the most wrong-headed thing you could come across from someone who calls himself a scientist.  Everyone knows the influence of "mankind" is having a huge impact on climate.  I don't know who Tom Sheehan is** but I do know who Richard Lindzen is.  He's the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Professor Lindzen describes himself as a "dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability". ("Dynamical" is a term used in science and mathematics.  I'd never come across the word till now.)

Professor Lindzen when he was a more active researcher published a lot of papers and made a solid contribution to the field.  In his later career he appears to have got somewhat fixated on trying to prove that climate sensitivity is low, without success.  That hasn't stopped him from talking to various collections of people who also want to have proven that climate sensitivity is low, and reassuring them that it is.

In trying to track down the source of the quote from Lindzen, I came across this 2010 presentation to a Hearing of the House Sub-Committee on Science and Technology (USA), but the quote was slightly different:

The claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a greenhouse effect, and that man’s activities have contributed to warming, are trivially true and essentially meaningless in terms of alarm.

Lindzen ignores the crushing weight of scientific research

Ah, I remember that, I thought to myself.  That was when the Republican-minority committee got a list of science delayers, deniers and not-even-scientists to tell them "not to worry", "God will protect us" and all that sort of nonsense.  Joe Romm was on top of it of course.  Here is a link to his first article about it, and here is a link to his second.  To give you a taste, Joe Romm writes:

...Of course, Lindzen’s testimony somehow manages to ignore the crushing weight of scientific research finding dramatic, unprecedented changes in the natural world in all realms, including (for just one example) the freak Russian heat wave and associated Asian monsoon which killed over 60,000 people this summer during the hottest year on record.

Then there was Lindzen's 2012 presentation to a meeting held in the UK (wrongly promoted on some fake skeptic blogs as being to the House of Lords or to the House of Commons, but it was just a public meeting for deniers).  His presentation was of the same style and had the same quote as his presentation to the US House Sub-Committee of eighteen months or so earlier:

The claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a greenhouse effect, and that man’s activities have contributed to warming, are trivially true and essentially meaningless in terms of alarm.

I remember there was a bit of a fuss about that too.  Here is an article on realclimate.org, figuring out how Lindzen's charts got so screwed up.  Lindzen sort of apologised for the mess up, but probably a bit late for the denier blogosphere to notice.

So I've been unsuccessful in tracking down Anthony Watts'/Tom Sheahan/Sheehan's Quote of the Day.  Maybe the quote suffers from the Chinese Whispers syndrome.


**I believe I've discovered where on the internet the Tom Sheehan article is.  His name could be Tom Sheahan and maybe he is Thomas P. Sheahan, Ph.D, Western Technologies, Inc., whose name is on a list of 100 science deniers circulated back a couple of years ago by the Cato Institute.  A Tom Sheahan (with two "a"s) wrote an article last week for the conservative blog, the somewhat inappropriately named American Thinker, using Anthony's Quote of the Day.  Sheahan doesn't give the source of his quote except that he attributes it to Richard Lindzen.

Update: American Thinker has now changed Thomas Sheahan to Thomas Sheahen.