Global Warming strikes again.

It would seem that a group of idiots taking a “climate change” tour up to the arctic to observe the ice melt and epic devastation that global warming has caused up there have run into a problem. The sea ice that was supposed to be disappearing and opening up that new shipping chanel over the top of the world has trapped the Kapitan Khlebnikov, a 24,000hp Russian icebreaker, in more ice than it can break free of.

Global warming indeed! here’s an exerpt from an article about the incident:

I am on the bridge of the massive Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, and the tension is palpable. We have hit ice – thick ice.

The ice master studies the mountains of white packed around the ship while the 24,000-horsepower diesel engines work at full throttle to open a path. The ship rises slowly onto the barrier of ice, crushes it and tosses aside blocks the size of small cars as if they were ice cubes in a glass. It creeps ahead a few metres, then comes to a halt, its bow firmly wedged in the ice. After doing this for two days, the ship can go no farther.

The ice master confers with the captain, who makes a call to the engine room. The engines are shut down. He turns to those of us watching the drama unfold, and we are shocked by his words: “Now, only nature can help this ship.” We are doomed to drift.

What irony. I am a passenger on one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world, travelling through the Northwest Passage – which is supposed to become almost ice-free in a time of global warming, the next shipping route across the top of the world – and here we are, stuck in the ice, engines shut down, bridge deserted. Only time and tide can free us.

Oh, and for the record, I had to scrape frost from my car’s windshield yesterday morning and had to turn the heat back on in the house as the temperature dropped below freezing. In May. Almost June.

Oh, and I don’t want to hear “climate change” either, because that’s what it does. It changes.