Placing Bets on Alaska's Ice Melting
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 03.23.08
Under more traditional circumstances, avid gamblers and climate scientists would seem to make for strange bedfellows. Yet Alaska's Nenana Classic, a yearly contest to guess the amount of melted ice on the River Tanana, has steadily built a cult following over the past few decades - attracting equal numbers of betters and world-renowned climatologists (the $300,000 prize tag certainly didn't hurt).
As The Sunday Times' Tony Allen-Mills explains, the contest has (perhaps surprisingly) become one of the world's most accurate indicators of the impact of global warming. This tradition of timing the first cracks in Tanana's ice dates back to over nine decades; before it even attracted legions of enthusiasts, the melting was already being meticulously recorded by the small village's 500 residents.
This year, the Nenana Ice Classic will attract tens of thousands of Alaskans and a large number of foreigners; betting will close at midnight on April 5. The contest's organizers have been monitoring the Tanana's ice cover twice a week since mid-March: at last count, the ice was 44.5 in thick. Scientists eager to obtain more data and gamblers will now wait for the moment a 26 ft wooden tripod, mounted on ice with a siren and clock in the middle of the Tanana, falls over to signal the ice breaking off.
Via ::Times Online: Global warming scientists eagerly await first Nenana ice cracks (news website)
See also: ::Alaskan village is falling into the sea, ::From Alaska to Ushuaia on Biodiesel in 15 Days
Fun idea, although that youtube video is absolutely worthless. Why, again, is it attached to this post?
The video shows the tripod which is used in the event. When the ice breaks the tripod shifts and pulls a rope which stops the time clock. Whoever is closest to the time wins the pool.
Every year Nenana has a festival which has numerous events and booths for the residents. I'm supposing that's what the video was conveying, primarily the entire purpose of the post relates to the video.
I analyzed the data myself (see http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/Both.htm for the data). Interestingly, a strictly objective analysis shows no global warming in the past 45 years. The average ice breakup all time is May 5 about 10:30 a.m. That means that half the years between 1917 and 2007 the river ice began breaking up earlier than that time. Now, if global warming were occuring, the average breakup would be much earlier in the past 45 years. Not so. The median year is 1962. The average breakup before 1962 was 10:30 p.m. on May 5, hardly a statistical significance. Thus, the Nenana Ice Classic shows that global warming either is not occurring or that an analysis of ice breakup on a particular river at a particular point on the globe is not an indicator of global warming. I wish reporters and their sources, environmental activitists, would bother getting the truth out instead of trying to scare the dickens out of our polar-bear loving kids. Remember, that the projected gloom and doom in which global warming is supposed to result is based on calculations, not on measurements. If the calculations were based on measurements and were made by objective scientists, we might have reason to fear. Sadly, the doomsayer scientists are usually members of organizations that use global warming as a reason to force measures they favor, such as restrictions on industry, housing, fishing, travel and any other perceived man-caused impacts on the environment.