Climate fraud used to promote high speed rail

"It's a way of solving our global warming problems that also creates jobs and provides a boost to the economy," he said. But the competition will be fierce. "We are very jazzed about it," said Karen Parsons, executive director of the Southern High - Speed Rail Commission.

Catlin finds some ice at least 17 feet thick

The team spends four hours a day drilling into the ice to take measurements. Hadow has a manual drill that can go down 5.2 meters and so far has hit ice that deep just four times.

"If we'd had more multiyear ice there it's more likely that he would have got (that deep) on more than just four occasions," Cunliffe said.

World Climate Report >> Arctic ice thickness fluctuating decades ago

[Ahlmann, 1953] The thickness of the ice forming annually in the North Polar Sea has diminished from an average of 365 centimeters [12 feet] at the time of Nansen’s Fram expedition of 1893-96 to 218 centimeters [7.2 feet] during the drift of the Russian icebreaker Sedov in 1937-40. The extent of drift ice in Arctic waters has also diminished considerably in the last decades. According to information received in the U.S.S.R. in 1945, the area of drift ice in the Russian sector of the Arctic was reduced by no less than 1,000,000 square kilometers between 1924 and 1944. The shipping season in West Spitsbergen has lengthened from three months at the beginning of this century to about seven months at the beginning of the 1940s. The Northern Sea Route, the North-East Passage, could never have been put into regular usage if the ice conditions in recent years had been as difficult as they were during the first decades of this century.