There was an interesting report yesterday from NASA/NSIDC, the National Snow and Ice Data Center. For years we have been hearing tragic stories from Al Gore et al, who has two huge errors in his latest slide presentations, about global warming and environmental losses. This really of course upsets the wildlife warriors. Mostly these are fairly accurate and sadly many are all too true. However NAUTICAL LOG has always been puzzled about the loss of sea ice in the Arctic Region. Starving polar bears are not a good thing. Knowing a bit about the behaviour of ice from service in icebreakers something did not seem to match up. A report from NSDIC would tend to confirm our suspicions. Faulty sensors gave an inaccurate picture to the amount of 500,000 square kilometres or 193,000 square miles. Yes it IS quite an amount, actually it is the size of the State of California (United States not Austria). Now that really IS an error, we guess nobody thought to go up there and have a look. Well someone eventually did, found that technology had screwed up and 'humint' is the first thing to use when making assessments.
So you see even in the 21st. Century of mind boggling technology in electronics those impish bugs are busy little guys and equipment can say 'no' when its truly 'yes'. That can happen with all monitoring equipment really, it might register, oh! lets say a transponder for example, but then again it might not. Always that element of doubt with technology isn't there.
Anyway all is now well again, Arnold is there - California lost and found.
Good Watch
So you see even in the 21st. Century of mind boggling technology in electronics those impish bugs are busy little guys and equipment can say 'no' when its truly 'yes'. That can happen with all monitoring equipment really, it might register, oh! lets say a transponder for example, but then again it might not. Always that element of doubt with technology isn't there.
Anyway all is now well again, Arnold is there - California lost and found.
Good Watch
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