The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.
"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.
Then there was the cold - quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.
"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.
The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming.
They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."
Ahh yes so global warming doesn't cause warm temperature in the artic, but rather unpredictable weather. First I've heard of it
As Luboš Motl puts it
They were clearly not far from their Darwin Awards that are given to the people whose death measurably increases the genetic quality of the mankind because the dead people demonstrate unusual stupidity that leads to their death.
Every person whose IQ exceeds the women's IQ at least by 40 points knows that the amount of "trend" warming - if we can talk about it at all - is so tiny that it can hardly be measured by accurate devices - about 1 degree Fahrenheit per century - and it can surely influence nothing qualitative whatsoever about the experience at the North Pole where the temperature is frequently 100 degrees below the convenient temperatures in our apartments.
No sane person could have ever detected any "global warming signs" in his or her lifetime. The corresponding changes are tiny, completely negligible in comparison with the natural weather fluctuations and local climate variations, and can only be seen if you measure the temperatures very accurately and average them very carefully. And even if you are a scientist who does so, the interpretation is very unclear.
