© Xinhua/AFP Photo
In this Nov. 16, 2009 photo released by the Australian Antarctic Division, an iceberg is seen at Sandy Bay on Macquarie Island's east coast, in the Southern Ocean 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) southeast of Tasmania, Australia.
A flotilla of hundreds of icebergs that split off Antarctic ice shelves is drifting toward New Zealand and could pose a risk to ships in the south Pacific Ocean, officials said Tuesday.
The nearest one, measuring about 30 yards (meters) tall, was 160 miles (260 kilometers) southeast of New Zealand's Stewart Island, Australian glaciologist Neal Young said. He couldn't say how many icebergs in total were roaming the Pacific, but he counted 130 in one satellite image alone and 100 in another.
Large numbers of icebergs last floated close to New Zealand in 2006, when some were visible from the coastline - the first such sighting since 1931.
Maritime officials have issued navigation warnings for the area south of the country.
"It's an alert to shipping to be aware these potential hazards are around and to be on the lookout for them," Maritime New Zealand spokeswoman Sophie Hazelhurst said.
No major shipping lanes or substantial fishing grounds are in the area, but most ships there have little hull protection if they collide with an iceberg - which typically has 90 percent of its mass under water. Very few adventure sailors would be in the waters in November, when it is still the southern hemisphere's spring.
Comment: If Monbiot thinks an email will EVER surface that plainly and explicitly reveals the conspiracy to misinform the public about global warming, he needs to retire and drink warm milk.
The aspect of 'conspiracy' revealed by these emails is not a case of some people getting together and saying "Oh, let's have a conspiracy!" Conspiracy in this context simply means that a group of people act in certain ways that they KNOW are dishonest at a fundamental level, and they use what Lobaczewski termed "subconscious selection and substitution of premises" to explain things in their own minds. This is a predominantly subconscious process though it certainly has to be conscious in some respects.
It is definitely a conspiracy where these scientists are concerned because they have all made a decision to support a particular world view that has been "decided before hand, be damned to the data". Sure, there is no widespread conspiracy by all climatologists to cook the data for global warming, but there are a few "top" scientists lacking in conscience that have been leading the "human-made global warming" campaign and have been doing so for at least 10 years.
Here's a recent sample email: