Will sailing the Northwest Passage be more difficult in 2009?

Here’s something from National Snow and Ice Data Center, and their prediction doesn’t bode well for our sailing plans.

Arctic sea ice extent declined quite slowly in April; as a result, total ice extent is now close to the mean extent for the reference period (1979 to 2000). The thin spring ice cover nevertheless remains vulnerable to summer melt.

Sea ice extent averaged over the month of April 2009 was 14.58 million square kilometers (5.63 million square miles). This was 710,000 square kilometers (274,000 square miles) above the record low for April in 2007, and 420,000 square kilometers (162,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.

High/Low: Is There Now Reasonable Agreement on the Costs and "Benefits" of Waxman-Markey? — MasterResource

To repeat, this was a surprising, unexpected turn of events in the cap-and-trade debate. I fully expected proponents of Waxman-Markey to claim that households would see only modest increases in energy prices, and that faithful adherence to the emissions reductions mandated by the proposed legislation would avert serious climate change.

But some of the most credentialed and respected supporters of cap & trade are not saying this at all. They agree with the numbers: Waxman-Markey would cost households $3,100 in higher prices per year (possibly offset through truly productive government spending and/or tax relief), in exchange for a world which warms 9/100ths of a degree less by 2050 than it otherwise would.

Windmill disintegrates - Tehachapi News - Tehachapi News

The California Highway Patrol shut Highway 58 "in an abundance of caution," she wrote, "because the wind turbine was visible from the road."

Experts say the only way to stop such a runaway turbine is to wait for the wind to die down.

Several weeks ago, an AES worker suffered injuries in an accident atop a wind turbine.

Kern County Fire Department carried out a rescue operation that involved lowering him down the outside of a turbine.

BBC - Climate Change: The Blog of Bloom: Just how endangered is the polar bear?

Total numbers are pegged at around 20,000 - 25,000, which nonetheless represents a massive increase since unregulated hunting ceased in the Seventies.

As Bjorn Lomberg pointed out, if we want to protect polar bear populations, we could simply try shooting even fewer of them, at a saving of 250 or more bears a year.

Perhaps more importantly, we are forgetting that the polar bear is a tough and adaptable creature that fossil evidence shows has already survived a much warmer period than the one we're going through now. This is probably why there is little evidence to support the popular misconception that lots of polar bears are drowning.

The 'drowning' thesis was a speculative conclusion based on sightings of four carcasses 'presumably, drowned' seen floating in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea during aerial surveys in September 2004. You could just as easily speculate that they were killed by the big storm that preceded the survey, because when it comes to swimming, a predator like the polar bear knows its limits, even if we don't know ours.