HILARITY: Global Cooling Deniers Trapped in Arctic Ice That They Said Didn't Exist; Al Gore Hardest Hit

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Cold Climate: In an event chock-full of bitterly cold irony, perhaps even Al Gore has noticed that multiple icebreakers couldn't free a boat stuck in Antarctic ice that global warming was supposed to have melted.

Few of the media reports on the plight of the Russian-flagged research vessel MV Akademik Schokalskiy have noted the irony of a ship full of climate scientists getting stuck in an Antarctic ice sheet so thick that early attempts at breaking through the ice to free them were failures.

"We're stuck in our own experiment," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement. "We came to Antarctica to study how one of the biggest icebergs in the world has altered the system by trapping ice. We ... are now ourselves trapped by ice surrounding our ship."

In a statement only climate-change die-hards could make, the group said, "Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up."

A Chinese icebreaker was unable to reach the ship, and another vessel, the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, got within 10 nautical miles of the stranded ship but couldn't see it through a driving blizzard and had to turn back to open water, Fox News reported.

A makeshift helicopter pad on the ice sheet was being readied for a helicopter rescue.

"A decision has been reached to evacuate 52 passengers and four crew members by helicopter from China's Xue Long ship, should the weather allow," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement which did not note whether it was solar-powered or not.

Expedition leader Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia's University of New South Wales, dismissed the irony of their situation, claiming the ice they were trapped in was old ice likely formed from an iceberg that broke away years ago, and proves nothing.

But Titanic-like icebergs have been forming since long before the Industrial Revolution, and in our view an inconvenient truth is that ice is ice.

The 2004 science fiction movie "The Day After Tomorrow" — and the operative word here is "fiction" — opened with a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet shearing off as a prelude to planetary doom.

But as we recently noted, while the global-warming alarmists obsess about ice sheets breaking off, Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record-large extent for a second straight year.

A review of the Icesat satellite data from 1992 to 2008 showed a net gain in ice mass in Antarctica — not a decline.

In 2013, the ice reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center website.

That number topped the record-high level set in 2012 of 19.48 million square kilometers. The Australasian Antarctic Expedition has now found itself trapped in some of that ice as its leaders try to explain away the ice's presence.

Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, points out that the East Antarctic sheet, which contains about 90% of the world's fresh water, is not melting, but expanding.

Rather than look at the much bigger picture, the alarmists selectively focus on the West Antarctic Peninsula, which holds less than 10% of Antarctic ice. South Pole temperature data show no warming since records began in 1957.

The facts are that global temperatures have flat-lined for the last 15 years, the sun has entered a solar lull in terms of sunspot activity and both the Arctic and Antarctic are gaining record amounts of ice.

Himalayan glaciers that were supposed to disappear and islands that were supposed to sink under rising sea levels are still there.

These explorers are not only trapped in Antarctic sea ice, but in a climate myth of their own making. Al Gore, call your office.

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