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Corner Post from Mark Steyn on the growing Arctic and Antarctic ice.
News from Santa’s Grotto:
Global warming hysterics at the BBC warned us in 2007 that by summer 2013, the Arctic would be ice-free. As with so many other doomsday predictions by warmists, the results turn out to be quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, down the other end at Santa’s summer vacation condo:
Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world.
Antarctic ice is now at a 35-year high. But scientists are “baffled” by the planet’s stubborn refusal to submit to their climate models. Maybe the problem with Nobel fantasist Michael Mann’s increasingly discredited hockey stick is that he’s holding it upside down.
Nonetheless, the famously settled science seems to be re-settling:
Scientists Increasingly Moving To Global Cooling Consensus
Global warming will kill us. Global cooling will kill us. And if it’s 54 and partly cloudy, you should probably flee for your life right now. Maybe scientists might usefully consider moving to being less hung up on “consensus” – a most unscientific and, in this context, profoundly corrupting concept.
Here’s the Daily Mail, UK article that prompted Steyn’s post.
A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 29 per cent.
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.
The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter climate change.
Those predictions now appear gravely flawed. …
The Verge takes us behind the scenes of a FOX NFL broadcast.
It’s 90 minutes to game time in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and Troy Aikman’s not speaking to anyone.
Around him, a dozen or so crew members, assistants, and friends chatter as they finish last-minute preparations, making sure Gillette Stadium is ready for football. They’re testing cables and video feeds, rechecking stats, and setting up the fabric “NFL on FOX” backdrop that will turn this bland, gray, carpeted room into the tiny booth millions will soon see on TV.
Through it all, Aikman stays silent. He’s surrounded by four computer monitors displaying every stat and feed he’ll need for the next several hours, but he’s focused on a small tablet on the desk in front of him. He’s scrubbing back and forth in a single play, over and over, looking for something only he can see. The gold Super Bowl ring on his left hand occasionally catches the mid-afternoon sun as it shines into the booth, just above the first level of stands at the 50 yard line.
In an hour and a half, the New Orleans Saints and the New England Patriots will kick off one of the most important and most anticipated games of the young NFL season. Aikman will stand next to Thom Brennaman, his play-by-play partner for the day, and call the game for an audience that will total 26.7 million viewers. The game will be decided on a last-second desperation pass, will shape one quarterback’s legacy and two teams’ seasons, and will be endlessly discussed and replayed in the days and weeks to come.
But Aikman’s not worried about any of that. For him, and the entire Fox Sports NFL crew in the annals of the stadium below, it’s just another Sunday.
To watch a football broadcast is to see much more than a football game. There are only about 11 minutes of actual action during a three-hour game, which means 95 percent of the time there’s something else going on. The graphics, replays, highlights, and analysis that make a football game into the at-home experience millions of people know and love — it’s all from Fox, and it’s all done on the fly. Nearly everyone on the crew says that while they broadcast the game, what they really do is make television. …
… All 31 NFL arenas are different, and everything from stadium height to the type of lighting can affect the broadcast. (Light frequencies can clash with the high-frame-rate cameras, producing dark and light frames instead of a consistent shot — Callahan says Detroit causes problems every time.) But after years together, this crew knows the oddities of every one. Fred Aldous, Fox’s audio consultant, even has presets for every stadium on his enormous audio mixing console. “The colder it gets, the better off, because everybody bundles up… they’re wearing a sound blanket, if you will.” That’s why Aldous loves mixing in Green Bay. “This stadium,” he says, pointing toward the field behind him, “it’s nice because it’s an open stadium.” The sound escapes from the field, he says, rather than just reverberating throughout the stadium. …
… It’s the end of the game. Tom Brady’s just thrown a 17-yard touchdown to Kenbrell Thompkins, winning a seemingly lost game with five seconds to spare. Nearly half the game’s 68,756 fans left early, and the cheers from the parking lot and the highway drown out the ones from the stadium. The replay — a perfect shot of the moment, Thompkins snatching the ball in the back-left corner of the end zone — loops on the giant screens in Gillette, and presumably on every TV in every bar in Boston. There will be much celebrating tonight.
Underneath the stadium, the Fox crew starts to break down, to load its massive production back into 53-foot trucks. In two hours, they’ll be gone. And next week, they’ll pull into Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia and do it all again.
That’s just what they do on Sundays.
Eliana Johnson reports for WSJ on the healthcare “navigators.”
Even when the Obama administration was under the impression that the launch of the Affordable Care Act was going to work splendidly, with a first-rate website, the plan still called for “navigators” to help people sign up. Now, with the ACA website Healthcare.gov hobbled, and even many of the president’s supporters grumbling that the law may need a radical rethinking, the work of the tens of thousands of these helpers is more vital than ever.
How’s it going? Not well, to judge from a visit with navigators in North Carolina, one of 34 states that decided not to open their own health-insurance exchanges.
Durham is a relatively low-income city—nearly 19% of the residents are below the poverty level—that is 41% African-American and 14% Hispanic. It is the type of place that the White House expects to benefit most from ObamaCare. Yet the navigators I spoke with there earlier this month say interest has been sparse. Organizations like the Alcohol and Drug Council of North Carolina and the LincolnCommunityHealthCenter that received federal funds to hire navigators are contemplating how to reach out to potential enrollees, given that waiting for phone calls or walk-ins is not proving fruitful.
Occasionally, the navigators even make house calls. I accompanied Nyi Myint, a navigator with the Alcohol and Drug Council of North Carolina, to the home of Kimberly Munier, a self-employed single mother. Her Blue CrossBlue Shield plan was canceled over the summer, and she asked Mr. Myint for help with the federal exchange.
He begins by laying a wrinkled paper on the kitchen table, a green-and white-certificate indicating that he has completed the “Navigator Curriculum.” It is not a particularly official looking document: In the top left corner, it reads, “Print Close Window.” “This is how they sent it to us,” he says, laughing. …