The North West Passage

Being a history buff and having an interest in amusing instances of public hysteria, I want to post this comment from the website Climate Skeptic (typos from the original included, but emphasis added):

"The St Roch, a wooden sailing schooner (with auxillary engine) navigated NWP in 1942 from west to east (Vancouver BC to Halifax NS) and returned in 1944. Amundsen did it 38 years earlier. St Roch is a little ship, just over 100ft long. Too big to portage and certainly not an ice-breaker. So the passage must have been ice-free enough to permit her to pass. See wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Roch.

I believe Shell oil navigated a tanker through there around 1965 as an experiment.

btw. Cumberland Sound is at only at 65N. It is completely unremarkable that it was ice free even early in the summer. Davis straight is right next door and over 600,000 tons of wheat pass that way annually from Churchill going to ports all over the world. The port is navigable from late May through early September with open water all the way through Davis Strait into Hudsons Bay. There is persistent pan ice and growlers that create navigation hazards but the seaway is navigable (with due care) by ordinary ships operating at their normal speeds.

What is the big surprise that the ice moves around and isn't where the observers say it should be?"

I was also a big fan of the late, great Canadian folk singer, Stan Rogers, whose song "North West Passage" was such a quintessential expression of Canadian culture. Anyone who remembers that song or is familiar with that part of Canadian history will know that ships and boats of various kinds have been navigating those waters for a very long time, not always successfully, mind you, but it's the disasters, not the successes, that usually make it into cultural lore status.

I think it's also interesting how Aboriginal people who live in Canada's northern region are touted out by the media to talk about how the "warming" we are experiencing in Canada's north has never happened before. There are people who believe anything that comes out of a First Nations person's mouth as irrefutable truth and that their cultural knowledge is preserved in pristine condition through generation upon generation upon generation. Balderdash, I say!!!

I remember listening a few years ago to (or reading, I don't really remember) a comment from some guy who I think might have been of Aboriginal ancestry, talking about how the discovery of some ancient fossil remains of a now extinct giant ancestor of the beaver confirms that his people had been in the area for many thousands of years. Essentially he was saying that because there was a legend about giant beavers that his people still told, that was proof they had been living in the area since that giant beaver was around. No. Sorry. It's not proof. I'm not saying his ancestors were not there that long, but it's just another example of amusing public hysteria. All that has to happen for such a legend to arise is for people to observe the fossil remains poking out of the ground, which could easily happen in warm summers in the Arctic.

Anyone ever heard of the Grandfather of the Buffalo legend? Do you think the Peigans were living in what is now southwest Alberta at the same time as the dinosaur? I rest my case, but I'll save for another day my "lecture" on what environmental conditions have to be present for homosapiens to survive at the height of an ice age.