One lady writes,
My husband and I purchased an old home in northern New York State from two elderly sisters. Winter was fast approaching and I was concerned about the house’s lack of insulation. But my husband confidently declared, “If they could live here all those years, so can we!” But one November night the temperature plunged to below zero and we woke up to find all of the interior walls covered with frost. My husband called the sisters to ask how they had kept the house warm. And after a rather brief conversation, he hung up and muttered to me, “For the past thirty years they’ve gone to Florida for the winter.”
Well, the plan was simple. One hundred years ago in 1913, Australian explorer, Douglas Mawson, traveled to the Antarctic Circle to do some ice measurements. And what better way to now demonstrate global warming than to retrace the steps of the famed scientist and duplicate his measurements (which will surely show a massive decrease in ice amount, if there was still any unmelted ice there at all). So the tax-payer funded BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) agreed to finance the climate study excursion. Thus seventy-four people (mainly scientists and journalists) boarded a ship to take the fifteen-hundred mile trek from Australia to the Antarctic.
And who’s going to pay for all of this? After all, the rescue bill will be some millions of dollars. Again, according to ocean law, it is the owner of the vessel, in this case, Russia. But often that responsibility is passed on to those who charter the ship. So you can be sure the lawyers for the BBC and ABC are right now going over the contract with a fine-tooth comb.
By the way, the only visitors to the ship? The penguins! They’ve been walking up, looking in, and undoubtedly thinking, “Hey, don’t you people know it’s not 1913!”