ARCTIC ICE ON THE INCREASE, USCG ICE BREAKERS ON THE DECREASE

CDR Salamander: A maritime Opinion Blog Worth Your Time

CDR (Commander) Salamander http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com runs one of the more humorous and insightful maritime blogs on the Internet. The Commander uses this profile picture:
  As the latest employers of the Great Catfish Namazu we obviously are quite willing to consider that Commander Salamander might actually be a "Noosphere Holon"  (explained at http://americanadmiraltybooks.blogspot.com/2013/09/more-suggestions-from-namazu-reading.html) in the nature of Namazu but frankly he sounds a bit too much like a fairly recently retired Coast Guard , or Naval Officer or Chief. His speech is too spiced with the acronym laced language that we know as "NAVSPEAK:. For example consider his usual; subheading on his daily blog posts:

"PROACTIVELY “FROM THE SEA”; LEVERAGING THE LITTORAL BEST PRACTICES FOR A PARADIGM BREAKING SIX-SIGMA BEST BUSINESS CASE TO SYNERGIZE A CONSISTENT DESIGN IN THE GLOBAL COMMONS, RIGHTSIZING THE CORE VALUES SUPPORTING OUR MISSION STATEMENT VIA THE 5-VECTOR MODEL THROUGH CULTURAL DIVERSITY.
Probably only Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard vets get the joke.


Our bet is that CDR SALAMANDER is a pen name for some one who profiles a lot like our staff writers and is about as pleased with the course of Navy, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine developments as we are, which is about as far as we could throw an elephant. We only speculate on the relative reality of CDR Salamander because we have two fish on staff as our regular readers are quite aware. Recently the Commander noted some interesting aspects of this navigation season's arctic ice cover. As sort of an introduction to the Commander we reprint a bit of recent blog post below:

"There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of almost a million square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.

A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.
...
Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend.

At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age."

"Settled Science," indeed.

 Well, we hope that quote didn't exceed the "fair usage doctrine", but our purpose isn't to steal the Commander's thunder or material but to encourage you to read his blog. His comment on the Arctic ice cover certainly sounds like something right out of the Namazu School of Climatology but his actual blog post was really about the shortage of American Ice Breakers. We've mentioned this before ourselves so its nice to hear it from a different source. Please take a moment and have a look at this post from CDR Slalmander: http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2013/09/can-we-build-bloody-icebreakers-now.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FFBgLA+%28CDR+Salamander%29