One EV can do $100 million dollars worth of damage
By Jo Nova
Will anything be salvageable?
The latest update shows the fires still burning and extensive damage to the hull.
A week after fire broke out on the Morning Midas, the salvage crew have finally reached the boat. The bulk car carrier was abandoned last Tuesday and has been adrift 300 miles south of Alaska. One early reports said the fire was extinguished, so I been waiting to see if it remained alight. The ship only had 68 full EVs on board, with 681 hybrid cars, among a total load of 3,000 cars. The last anyone saw of this ship was last Wednesday when the US Coast Guard flew over the ship and reported a subdued amount of smoke.
World Cargo News
But alas, a week later, the photos show the slow burn has consumed much of the ship. Even though the hull appears intact and the ship is not listing, the damage is extensive. How much of the cargo on board would have survived a week of smoke and heat?
The Morning Midas is a bulk carrier which was headed from China to Mexico. The fire […]
The DDOS Cyber attack has ramped up today with a flood of traffic coming in from Hong Kong.
Eric took many measures today that improved things, but it remains difficult to write and publish blog posts.
I have paid for a new level of security and tools today which had some success, but it is an arms race with the vandals who don’t want you to read this site.
Traffic patterns are highly unusual today. We see super high strange bursts from US sources, and then the long grinding burst of thousands of new “fans” in Hong Kong who all decided to read an Australian site this afternoon. Compare the new robot traffic to the normal size of reader traffic in Australia, France and Germany.
So behind the scenes it is hard to write or publish while we add armor to the site to control the trouble, and so please forgive errors, typos or other unusual lack of polish. I can’t predict when a draft will be saved…
Thanks to people who have donated to help shore up the site.
A June 3, 2025 article in The Conversation, titled “Greenland’s melting ice caps reveal the true extent of climate change,” claims that retreating glaciers and melting ice are transforming Greenland’s coastline, providing proof of the severity of man-made climate change. The article states, “[t]his rapid reduction not only has consequences for Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants, but also on a global scale, as it affects rising sea levels and the balance of the planet’s climate systems.” This claim is highly misleading. A closer look at the actual data reveals that while Greenland’s ice does melt seasonally, the net loss is vastly overstated in terms of both context and consequence. The evidence shows that the total ice volume in Greenland is so immense that these melt events barely register on the global scale.
Greenland’s ice sheet holds about 2.9 million cubic kilometers of ice. Each year, it experiences a melt season during the summer, followed by an accumulation season during the long, dark winter. This is not new. It has been happening for centuries. According to Climate at a Glance, even the much-hyped 2019 melt season, one of the highest in recent memory, amounted to just 0.1% of Greenland’s total ice mass as seen in the figure below. That amount is hardly “revealing the true extent of climate change.”
A comparison of presentations of satellite data capturing Greenland’s ice mass loss. The image on the right shows changes in Greenland’s ice mass relative to its total ice mass. Sources: The data plotted in these graphs are from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise, a joint exercise by NASA and the European Space Agency. Graphs originally by Willis Eschenbach. Adapted and annotated by Anthony Watts.
The Conversation article leans heavily on the premise that ice loss has “outpaced previous estimates by 20%”—but this is little more than statistical smoke. When the baseline estimates are revised upward due to better satellite technology or changes in modeling assumptions, we must ask: is the ice truly disappearing faster, or are we simply observing it with a more exaggerated lens?
Next, we’re told that retreating glaciers are redrawing the coastline and that a 2,500 km increase in Arctic coastline over 20 years is somehow an emergency. Historically glacier retreat and expansion are a natural part of the glacial lifecycle. Glaciers advance and retreat depending on precipitation and temperature—more snowfall means advance, less snowfall or greater melt means retreat. In Greenland, the snow accumulation zone remains robust. According to a peer-reviewed study in Nature Geoscience, snowfall over interior Greenland has actually increased in recent decades. This underscores a fundamental point: it’s precipitation, not temperature alone, that controls the size of glaciers. Snowfall feeds glaciers, and unless you’re tracking that, your melt panic doesn’t paint the complete picture.
The article also dances around the issue of sea level rise but stops short of quantifying it—likely because the numbers would undermine the alarmism. If Greenland lost ice at the 2019 rate every year (which it doesn’t), sea level would rise just 1.5 inches per decade. This amount is not outside the range of historic natural variability and would certainly not prove catastrophic. Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age and there’s no evidence to suggest we’re seeing anything outside of that long-term trend. In fact, research shows that Greenland has been warmer in the past and recent research shows that Greenland has been ice free in the past, even when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were much lower than at present.
The authors also mention melting permafrost and coastal erosion as evidence of climate danger. Again, this cherry-picks the worst-case scenarios without noting that permafrost thawing is hyper-local and varies widely with terrain, vegetation cover, and hydrology. Even if permafrost thaws in some coastal locations, it has little to do with the Greenland ice sheet and more to do with local conditions—and yes, cyclical climate patterns that predate SUVs.
The authors also cherry-pick glacier data focusing on retreating glaciers, while ignoring that fact that many of Greenland’s glaciers are stable or even advancing. According to NASA’s GRACE satellite data and other datasets summarized at Climate Realism, short-term variations in glacier movement are influenced by bedrock geometry, oceanic oscillations, and weather—not just temperature. Claims that glacier retreat is somehow “proof” of anthropogenic climate change are unsupported by a full review of the data.
Let’s also address the fallacy of linear extrapolation present throughout the article. The authors assume that a trend observed over 20 years can be extended indefinitely into the future. This violates basic principles of climate variability. Greenland has experienced warmer periods in the past, such as the Medieval Warm Period, when Norse settlers farmed in what is now frozen tundra. The idea that today’s trends are unprecedented is simply false. Ice loss and glacier retreat have happened before—and they have reversed before.
Finally, we come to climate modeling. The authors put faith in climate models to “project future scenarios,” but research shows that climate models have consistently overestimated warming and underestimated natural variability. As documented at Watts Up With That, these models are not validated forecasting tools but speculative simulations filled with assumptions. The supposed “integration” of remote sensing with models doesn’t correct for bias—it compounds it.
In conclusion, the narrative spun by The Conversation is a classic case of selective science wrapped in climate alarmism. Greenland’s ice sheet is vast, resilient, and far from being in crisis. Summer melt is a normal seasonal event. Glaciers retreat and advance due to a complex mix of factors, primarily snowfall—not just warming. And the supposed sea level implications are trivial when compared to the dire tone of the article.
Shame on The Conversation for parroting climate panic without rigorous scrutiny. If the story’s writers had bothered to examine the full scope of glaciological science—or even take a glance at precipitation trends and long-term natural variability—they’d see that the ice caps aren’t a smoking gun for a human-caused climate catastrophe. Greenland’s glaciers are just doing what they’ve done throughout history, waxing and waning along with changing climatic, oceanic, and regional conditions, not threatening to inundate the world.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
51.16182 1.75457 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/1/1930
MOD Boscombe Down is a fully functioning military aviation site operated by QinetiQ on behalf of the MOD. Originally built in 1917 as a small aerodrome it now has a 3,205 metres (10,515 feet) main runway capable of taking the largest aircraft. The weather station has manual records dating back to 1931 with digital archives running from 1957 for temperature readings. Most unusually for aviation sites it does not appear to have been relocated at any time in those recorded notes since 1931. From that point of view this should be a very valuable site for mid to long term historic temperature records. Rather a shame the site is so very poor.
When Tim Channon reviewed this site in 2012 he actually felt it may be as good as Class 3, however, I do feel he may have overlooked the 2 metre fencing running alongside the site from the south-southeast to north-northwest. This tall structure is not normal barrier fencing but high security heavy gauge wire with reinforced concrete posts to keep unwanted intruders out of the entire site. Additionally the remaining enclosure fencing is also very robust.
Although airfield sites are by definition very flat, often the perimeters reflect earth movement to have created that levelled area. Military sites also have many (typically unmarked on maps) bunker type constructions for operational purposes. Although the screen is not visible from the roadside, in the image below it sits just over the brow of the slope behind the second set of security fencing just above and to the left of the security warning poster.
The Met office themselves rate this site as the lowest possible CIMO rating of Class 5 and it is very relevant to the use of data from this site to reiterate the level of inaccuracy this demonstrates.
2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C) Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.
Boscombe Down has a long record from the same site BUT a particularly unreliable and inaccurate one that was, until recently, not openly available to the public to view. A consequence of this inaccuracy has a remarkable impact on the lives and finances of that self same uninformed public.
These “Weather statistics” may outwardly appear to simply be a recording system, but the data is used/manipulated to provide a wide range of further details that have major effects on the public.
Now the issues of “renewable electricity generation” and “heating degree days” suddenly have attached importance to temperature recording. So firstly how is the data for “temperatures” compiled? As I partially covered in my review of Leconfield national temperature data is supplied by the Met Office (DSIT) for the benefit of the DESNZ and is based on selected weather stations only as below.
The Met Office has used just 17 weather stations, “double counted” 4 of them (Hurn, Rostherne, Leconfield and Nottingham) and used probably the most bizarre geographical representation imaginable. Why on earth would any rational organisation use two aviation sites within 26 miles of each other? Would any rational person add data from the wildly inaccurate CIMO Class 5 Boscombe Down to the “double counted” inaccurate Class 4 Hurn that typically looks like this below?
Bear in mind that how many days a “typical” home is heated (and all the cost calculations thus derived) is calculated from this sort of massively distorted “data” that the “Government” does not want the public to openly know. Whether or not more “renewable electricity generation” is needed to power those compulsory heat pumps or determine the compulsion for new build hosing solar panels is equally determined from what can only be described as junk readings. As I have tried to highlight in other weather station reviews there are implications from all this very poor and unreliable data that the unfit for purpose Met Office is involved in.
In summary Boscombe Down is yet another Met Office acknowledged unsatisfactory weather station for climate reporting purposes that is producing data for non meteorological objectives that it was never originally intended for. All this could be remedied quickly and easily by a specific, dedicated climate reference network of weather stations as has been established in the US.
Iowa Climate Science Education 