Nice, Thick Irony

Fromm Watts Up With That:

WUWT and WeatherBell help KUSI-TV with a weather forecasting request from ice-trapped ship in Antarctica Akademik Shokalskiy

Today, while shopping at lunchtime for some last minute year end supplies, I got one of the strangest cell-phone calls ever. It was from my friend John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel and Chief meteorologist at KUSI-TV in San Diego. He was calling via cell phone from his car, and he was on his way into the TV station early.

He started off by saying, “Anthony, we have a really strange situation here”.

Then to my surprise, he relayed a conversation he had just had; a person on the Akademik Shokalskiy had reached out, because they didn’t have adequate weather data on-board. At first, I thought John was pulling my leg, but then as he gave more details, I realized he was serious.

They were looking for weather information on wind and sea-ice breakup.  Mr. Watts handled it with grace and alacrity.

My first thought was that no matter how much we’ve been criticizing the expedition for its silliness, that if such a request had reached all the way from Antarctica to me, I’d do everything I could to help...

I immediately called Joe D’Aleo at WeatherBell, who was as incredulous as I at the request, and asked him to call John Coleman right away. I explained to him that we had to remember that we were dealing with a Russian ship, not a military ship, but a charter vessel and they likely didn’t have all the tools that American meteorologists had and may not even know where to look for better data. I also pointed out that the Australian scientists on-board were climatologists, and not operational weather forecasters, and finding this sort of weather data probably wasn’t in their skill set.

As one commenter pointed out:

Interesting who folks turn to when truth is required to save their behinds. Not at all the same as when the world is a stage and “winning the conversation” is what passies for “reality”.