Global Warming -- Corona Virus Hysteria Will Get Us First -- March 18, 2020

Whatever.

Clearing off the desktop.

Two recent reports regarding global warming which St Greta apparently overlooked.

Note: that St Greta is the Swedish phenom, not the Greta Vogel who wrote this story:

The global coronavirus outbreak is now curtailing research at the top of the world. Travel restrictions imposed by Norway have forced the cancellation of research flights in support of the Polarstern, the icebound German research ship that is the centerpiece of a $150 million mission to study the effects of climate change on the Arctic.

A series of 10 to 15 research flights due to take off from Svalbard, Norway, in March and April have been canceled, says Markus Rex, an atmospheric scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. “It’s very sad, but we had to cancel,” says Rex, leader of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC). A second set of flights, planned for August, might still happen, he says. “We just have to play it by ear.”

The mission is also facing a potentially more serious disruption: The next rotation of researchers, scheduled to join the Polarstern in early April, are also supposed to travel through Svalbard, a semiautonomous archipelago that has closed its borders to outsiders because of coronavirus concerns. Expedition leaders are working with Norwegian authorities to find a way to get 100 coronavirus-free researchers to the ship, which has not reported any cases of COVID-19.

Second: there appears no hurry to get the study done. USA Today grants the Arctic a 20-year reprieve. In 2009, scientists say that polar bears may disappear by 2014. Now? those same scientists say it will be at least 2034 before polar bears go extinct.