Driving in international waters

I didn't see this on Sunday, but Sus emailed to tell me how bloody good it was:

Don't know if you watched Top Gear last Sun night, but if you didn't, the guys raced each other to the [Magnetic] North Pole.  That is, Jeremy & James in a seriously modified 4WD using GPS raced Richard on a dog-sled with one of the world's leading dog-sledders and her team.  It was amazing and insane and almost impossible.  At one stage it took J&J 20 solid hours to travel one mile through hills of solid ice.

These are Clarkson's closing comments, word for word:

"As James tucked into his ruined Spam, we thought a little bit about what we’d actually achieved.

"We’d set out to prove that polar exploration could be easy, but it isn’t. It’s brutal and savage. The fact is though, that two middle-aged men, deeply unfit and mostly drunk, had made it, thanks to the incredible machine that took us there.

"They’d said we’d never get to the (North) Pole because of the damage the car has already done to the ice cap. Perhaps then, that’s what we proved most of all.

"Really, the inconvenient truth is … it doesn’t appear to have even scratched the surface." (end)

All this, and on the BBC, too!

Good old You Tube -- the episode is already online.

Now remember, if you will, that this was not  for the most part driving across land.  These guys were driving across the Arctic Ocean -- the same Arctic Ocean that worry-worts say is thawing "dangerously" -- the World Wildlife Fund, for example, who declared back in April " that Arctic sea ice is melting so fast that it may soon reach a tipping point where irreversible change takes place..."   Well, no, actually. As Christopher Brooker notes in the Telegraph, and this is the reason Clarkson's trip was so (relatively) easy, is this simple fact:

What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).

There's  an inconvenient truth you can think about over your ruined warmist spam.

UPDATE:  Check out the production notes on the episode here and here,for answers to all those important questions.