OH DEAR, IS THERE A PROBLEM? – AT 10:59 A.M. ET:  Didn't we see pictures last week of Hillary Clinton visiting the Arctic last week to be instructed on melting ice and the effects of devil global warming?  Yeah, I saw those photos.  Then came this, from the L.A. Times:

SEATTLE -- The heaviest polar ice in more than a decade is clinging to the northern coast of Alaska and could postpone the commencement of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic until the beginning of August — a delay of up to two weeks, Shell Alaska officials said Friday.

Unveiling the newly refurbished ice-class drilling rig that is poised to commence plumbing two exploratory wells this summer in the Beaufort Sea, Shell executives said the unusually robust sea ice would further narrow what already is a tight window for operations in a $4-billion program designed to measure the extent of what could be the United States' most important new inventory of oil and gas.

Shell has pledged to end its first season of exploratory drilling by Oct. 31 in the Beaufort Sea and 38 days earlier in the more remote Chukchi Sea to remain within the relatively ice-free summer season.

Meeting with reporters and U.S. Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) on board the Kulluk drilling rig in the Seattle shipyards, Shell’s vice president for Alaska operations, Pete Slaiby, said the company had given up on its controversial attempt to win permission from the federal government to extend Chukchi drilling though October as well.

“Not this year. I think it’s a done deal,” he said.

COMMENT:  I do wish the trendies in the environmental movement would get their stories straight.  Is there an ice-melt disaster, or is the ice too thick?  If we had a different president, less beholden to the Aspen crowd, I'd say he should appoint a Challenger-like commission, similar to the one that successfully investigated the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, to look into all the claims and counter-claims about "global warming" and its effects.  There are simply too many questions for us to make national policy based on a theory.

But the trendies are in charge, and there shall be no commission.  And those who dare ask questions are simply denounced as "no nothings" and "flat Earthers."  What a comment on our intellectual status as a nation.

June 9, 2012