On Christmas Eve, the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy, on an Antarctic expedition to duplicate a voyage 100 years ago, the 1911-to-1913 voyage of Australian explorer Douglas Mawson to Antarctica, and study the effects of global warming, became stuck in ice and its 52 passengers were trapped for 8 days before a helicopter from the Chinese ship Xue Long rescued them.

Then the Xue Long got stuck in the ice.

Like climate activists and journalists who insist they need to fly to every climate meeting to build relationships while they tell us to reduce our carbon footprint, it has to be asked how much carbon was created undertaking the trip and the resulting rescue. Answer: A lot.

They had claimed they only needed to plant 800 trees to cover their carbon footprint. If you believe  that, well, you aren't doing the math. That uses the assumption that the ship was going there anyway, the other people were going there, and thus they only needed to cover their part. But even using that suspect metric the carbon footprint cost will now be almost 700 percent higher, some 5,000 trees.

The director of the French Polar Institute, Yves Frenot, called this a "pseudo-scientific expedition" - no surprise when it comes to environmental activists. But now it can be in the ledger for its high emissions costs too.

Forest needed to cover carbon footprint of icy rescue By Matthew Theunissen - New Zealand Herald