Antarctic Melting Faster, Jacksonville still has no plan

[Charleston native]

Actually, Stephen, I do believe in climate change.

The climate ALWAYS changes and is never constant on this planet. This has been the case since the beginning of time, and man has always been irrelevant to the causation of climate changes.

[second_pancake]

Rain-making linked to killer flood
18:05 30 August 2001
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Andrea Graves

Lynmouth flood, Latymer Upper School
UK Royal Air Force
The Rainmaker, BBC Horizons
Artificial rain making operations may have caused a storm that nearly wiped out an English village in 1952. New evidence has emerged that the UK's Royal Air Force was carrying out cloud seeding experiments that could in theory have led to the disaster.

A torrent swept through Lynmouth, Devon and remains the worst flood on record for the UK, drowning 35 people. "I'd never seen a sky that colour - yellowy, greeny, purple - it was uncanny," one eye-witness said.

Government defence officials have always denied that cloud seeding experiments were carried out before 1955. But now documents have been unearthed showing that scientists had teamed up with the RAF to try to make rain in the week of the disaster.

De-classified War Office documents also suggest that the military had been interested in using rain to cause downpours to hamper enemy movements, clear fog from airfields, and even increase the fallout range of atomic weapons

Nope.  Human beings don't change the climate at all

Just think, if all of this happened prior to 1955 and wasn't reported or "unearthed" until 2001, what is happening now, that we won't know until 50+ years later?

[midnightblackrx]

That sounds exactly like the kind of stuff in Micheal Crichton's book "State of Fear".  (a good read btw)

We can redirect and lower the impacts of Hurricanes as well.  But that doesn't mean we can tame mother nature.  But I don't think the English released CO2 into the atmosphere to accomplish this feat.

[JeffreyS]

I am skeptical about how much we can do at this point but there was some good news from the AP today. I guess a cheap way to supplement livestocks diet so to almost eliminate methane emissions.  These emissions constitute 5% percent of greenhouse gases but they are much more potent at containing heat than CO2.  This looks like something that can be quickly instituted.

[gatorback]

I know it's true I saw it on tv.  I didn't want to post this but, you made me.  Click play under the starving sea cow. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/30/60minutes/main2631210.shtml

[Ocklawaha]

Stephendare, Hey brother, missed you at the meeting today. Ever notice how the same super religious right that raised the two of us, is the first to deny the events mentioned in the "end times" of the Bible?

The earth gets trashed by fire and heat according to the scriptures...

NO warming ANYWHERE according to the churches.


Starvation on a mass scale in the end times according to scriptures...

The weather is just fine, and within normal changes according to churches.


Wars and mega-wars according to scriptures...

"Peace talks" and close to peace, war for peace according to churches.


The list just goes on and on... Really strange.

Ocklawaha

[Skot David Wilson]

I say we bomb the hell out of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Lybia, maybe even part of the Sudan and Chad, dig some inland seas, and pump water in for aquaculture......
that and hire some Dutch to build dykes.....

[second_pancake]

That sounds exactly like the kind of stuff in Micheal Crichton's book "State of Fear".  (a good read btw)

We can redirect and lower the impacts of Hurricanes as well.  But that doesn't mean we can tame mother nature.  But I don't think the English released CO2 into the atmosphere to accomplish this feat.

Never read the book.  Micheal Crichton generally puts me in a state of fear with all his doom's day kind of theory...stuff I'd rather not think about, you know?

"...that doesn't mean we can tame mother nature", that is exactly my point.  That we can dramatically change the natural balance of the world around us, but ultimately,nature is going to push back and it's going to (and has) have devestating effects.  I don't think the English "released CO2" either, but they did seed clouds to create rain, and so does OUR government.  We have released an amount of CO2 into our atmosphere that are beyond normal natural levels, and we (including our government) make decisions every day that impact the health of our planet and all living beings on the planet. 

[second_pancake]

Stephendare, Hey brother, missed you at the meeting today. Ever notice how the same super religious right that raised the two of us, is the first to deny the events mentioned in the "end times" of the Bible?

The earth gets trashed by fire and heat according to the scriptures...

NO warming ANYWHERE according to the churches.


Starvation on a mass scale in the end times according to scriptures...

The weather is just fine, and within normal changes according to churches.


Wars and mega-wars according to scriptures...

"Peace talks" and close to peace, war for peace according to churches.


The list just goes on and on... Really strange.

Ocklawaha

Ok, let me just preface this by saying, I'm objective and look at issues from all aspects before coming to a conclusion on something which is why I'm about to say what I'm about to say, and this is VERY rare considering the subject...don't read anything into it ....

There is a belief within many Christian organizations that says one can never know when the world is going to end...that just when there is physical evidence to prove that the "end times" are near, that's when God basically changes his mind because no mortal being can know when the end is going to happen.  So, it may be that the churches you are referring to are saying that the end is "not" near and they won't recognize the changes because they are not supposed to know the end is near (not saying it is, just theorizing based on that belief).  That and the fact that they've screamed "End Times!" so many times before and we're all still here, that maybe they don't want to be 'the-boy-who-cried-wolf.' 

There's also another theory that I've heard, which is that the description of the end written in the bible is an extreme depiction of weather patterns that were evident on earth at that point in time...the authors were taking observed disasterous events from their time and the known history, and speculating that the end would be that times 100, for instance.  So less literal Christian groups will state that what we are experiencing now is no different than what has gone on in the past and they make the decision to overlook or otherwise ignore current events.

My personal belief is that no one wants to believe we could have contributed to a life of lesser quality or worse, that we could be putting ourselves, our children, and our way of life at risk.  They don't want to believe it, therefore it doesn't exist...the equivalent of closing your eyes, putting your fingers in your ears and mouthing, "la, la, la" until it all goes away.

There is a saying in the Tao Te Ching (roughly translated) that says, "The harder one tries, the more resistance one creates for oneself."  I believe we have proven this time and again with our actions in trying to harness and control nature, or otherwise work against it.  The sooner we learn to respect it, the better our quality of life will be.

[second_pancake]

I also take exception to the wickedness and cruelty involved in this whole "so fucking what, its the End Times!" argument.

And along the same lines, the belief that while not "perfect" they are "forgiven."  Reminds me of a kid in my 4th grade class who kept making the same mistake over and over and telling the teacher he was "sorry."

Something tells me, when those that deny we contribute to climate change, finally come to the realization that it was indeed the truth and not some government or media-induced "scare tactic", they will simply say, oops, my bad.  Unfortunately, their belief means that they'll be looking down from heaven upon a wrecked planet, wrecked at their own hands.  If they have a conscience, wouldn't that mean they're actually in hell?  Hmmmm....

[Charleston native]

The climate ALWAYS changes and is never constant on this planet. This has been the case since the beginning of time, and man has always been irrelevant to the causation of climate changes.

until now.

[jandar]

The western shelf of Antarctica is melting, while the eastern shelf grows and gets colder.

State the whole truth about Antarctica.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=a_OD3Hqa9l1A&refer=canada

Increased Snowfall

While scientists in recent years have observed more melting of glaciers in west Antarctica, the continent as a whole may gain mass due to increased snowfall in the east, according to the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year produced its most detailed study of global warming in a series of four reports.

The research by Corr and colleagues was published yesterday in Nature Geoscience. The government-funded British Antarctic Survey has an annual budget of 45 million pounds ($88 million), and operates five research stations in and near Antarctica. The group is based in Cambridge, England

[jandar]

The eastern ice in Antarctica is growing, the west is shrinking.

It is balancing out right now (best guess anyone has)


The western ice sheet has always been unstable, has been for 2 million years.


Read this:
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/articles/bind.html
Its by a glaciologist that worked for NASA.

Research has shown that the ice has thinned by 200-400 meters in the last 10,000 years.

[jaxnative]

January 22, 2008
Will the Ice Caps Melt?
By Jerome J. Schmitt
"The engineer has learned vastly more from the steam-engine than the steam-engine will ever learn from the engineer."
    -- Prof John B. Fenn, Nobel Prize, Chemistry, 2002

There is considerable debate over whether the "greenhouse gas" effect will raise the temperature of the atmosphere by between 1-5°C over the next 100 years. But even if you grant for the sake of argument the Warmist claim that the earth's atmosphere will go up a full five degrees Centigrade in temperature, Al Gore's claim that ocean levels will rise 20 feet thanks to global warming seems to ignore the laws of thermodynamics. I am no climatologist, but I do know about physics.


Anyone who has ever spent time in a temperate climate following a snowy winter realizes that when the air temperature rises above 32°F the snow and ice do not melt immediately. We may experience many balmy early spring days with temperatures well above freezing while snow drifts slowly melt over days or weeks. Similarly, lakes and ponds take some time to freeze even days or weeks after the air temperature has plunged below zero.  This is due to the latent heat of freezing/melting of water, a physical concept long quantified in thermodynamics.


That aspect of basic physics seems to have been overlooked by climatologists in their alarming claims of dramatic and rapid sea-level rise due to melting of the Antarctic ice caps and Greenland glaciers. But of course, we have learned that models predicting global warming also failed to take account of precipitation, so overlooking important factors ("inconvenient truths") should not cause much surprise anymore.


The scientific data necessary to calculate the amount of heat necessary to melt enough ice to raise ocean levels 20 feet is readily available on the internet, and the calculations needed to see if polar cap melting passes the laugh test are surprisingly simple. Nothing beyond multiplication and division, and because we will use metric measures for simplicity's sake, much of the multiplying is by ten or a factor of ten.


Let's review the math.  The logic and calculations are within the grasp of anyone who cares to focus on the subject for minute or two, and speak for themselves.


I should first mention that the only source of energy to heat the atmosphere is the sun.  The average energy per unit time (power) in the form of sunlight impinging on the earth is roughly constant year-to-year, and there are no means to increase or reduce the energy flux to the earth. The question merely is how much of this energy is trapped in the atmosphere and available to melt ice thus effecting "climate change".


How much heat must be trapped to raise the atmospheric temperature by a degree centigrade (or more)  can be readily calculated, knowing the mass of the atmosphere and the specific heat of air.  Specific heat is simply an empirically-determined quantity that corresponds to the number of units of heat energy required to raise a specific mass of a substance, in this case air, by 1 degree in temperature.  A common unit of energy familiar to most of us is the calorie.  But for simplicity, in this calculation I will use the MKS

• metric unit of the Joule (J), which, while perhaps unfamiliar to many readers in itself, is the numerator in the definition of our common unit of power, the Watt[†] = Joule/second.
  
  
  The mass of the atmosphere can be found here. We also know that it is principally composed of air, so without loss of accuracy in what is essentially an "order of magnitude" calculation, it is fair to employ the specific heat of air at constant pressure, Cp which also can be referenced on the internet here.  While this has a value that changes with temperature, it doesn't change by orders of magnitude, consequently, I choose the value at 0° C, which, as we all know, is near to the global mean temperature at sea level.  In this I err on the side of caution, overestimating the heat energy in the calculation below, because as we all know, both air pressure and temperature drop with altitude.  Also note that while the specific heat value cited uses the unit °K in the denominator, this is equal to a °C. I use the tilda (~) as symbol for "circa" or "approximately". 
  
  
  Mass of atmosphere:
  5 x 1018 kg
  
  Specific heat of air:
  1.005 kJ/kg-°C
  
  Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 1° C:
  ~5 x 1018 kJ
  
  Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 5° C:
  ~2.5 x 1019 kJ
  
  
  
  It is instructive now to compare this quantity of heat with the amount that would be required to melt sufficient volume of ice from the Antarctic ice to raise the sea-level by 20-feet as predicted by Al Gore.  Although ice floats, ice and water are very close in density, so at first approximation, it is fair to say that the volume of sea-water required to raise sea-level by 20-feet would be equivalent to the volume of ice that would need to melt to fill the ocean basins in order to cause that rise.  Consequently, let's first roughly calculate the volume of seawater necessary. 
  
  
  The surface area of the earth can be looked up here.  It is 5.1 x 108 square kilometers, which I convert to 5.1 x  1014 square meters below for the purpose of our calculation.  Al Gore's 20-foot-rise is equal to ~6 meter. Let's use the commonly cited figure that 70% of the earth's surface is covered by the oceans and seas.  Accordingly,
  
  
  Area of earth's surface:
  5.1 x 1014 m2
  
  Proportion of earth's surface covered by water:
  70%
  
  Area of oceans and seas:
  ~3.6 x 1014 m2
  
  Sea level rise predicted by Al Gore:
  20 feet = 6 m
  
  Volume of water necessary to raise sea-level 20-feet:
  ~6 x 1024 m3
  
  Volume of ice that needs to melt to raise sea-level 20-feet:
  ~22 x 1015 m3
  
  
  
  This is where the latent heat of melting comes into the equation.  As we all know, when we drop an ice cube into our glass of water, soft-drink or adult-beverage, it quickly cools the drink.  Heat is transferred to the ice from the liquid in order to melt the ice; this loss of heat cools and reduces the temperature of the liquid.  This cooling continues until the ice melts completely. 
  
  
  Scientists have long known that a mixture if ice and water (ice-water) remains at the freezing / melting point (0° C = 32°F).  Adding heat does NOT change the temperature, it just melts more ice; withdrawing heat does NOT change the temperature it just freezes more water.  The temperature of ice-water will not rise until all the ice is melted; conversely, the temperature of ice-water will not fall until all the water is frozen.  The heat that would have otherwise raised the ice temperature is somehow "stored" in the melt water - hence "latent heat". 
  
  
  As an aside, the transformation of the latent-heat of steam into work via steam-engines has had, and continues to have, vast industrial importance. The early systematic study of steam-engines in order to improve their performance, laid the groundwork for the science of thermodynamics, which undergirds essentially all of physics and chemistry.
  
  
  It turns out that latent heats of melting (and evaporation) are generally very large quantities when compared to the amount of heat necessary to change temperatures.  Also, as usual in such analyses we normalize to units of mass. Since the density of water/ice is roughly a thousand times higher than air, this also greatly impacts the magnitudes of energy involved, as you will see below.  So let's proceed with the calculation. 
  
  
  The latent heat of melting of water can be looked up here. It is 334 kJ/kg of water.  One of the benefits of the metric system is that 1 ml = 1 cm3 = 1 g of water; this "built in" conversion simplifies many engineering calculations.  Remembering this fact, we do not need to look up the density of water. Converting this density, 1g/cm3, to MKS units, yields density of water = 1000 kg/m3.  We now have all our data for the rough calculation:
  
  
  Volume of ice that needs to melt (from above):
  ~22 x 1015
  
  Density of water and ice:
  1000 kg/m3
  
  Mass of ice that needs to melt:
  ~22 x 1018 kg
  
  Latent heat of melting for water
  3.34 x 102 kJ/kg
  
  Heat necessary to melt ice to achieve 20-foot sea-level rise
  ~ 7.4 x 1021 kJ
  
  
  
  Following this "back of the envelope" calculation, let's compare the two energy values:
  
  
  Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 5° C:
  ~2.5 x 1019 kJ
  
  Heat necessary to melt ice to achieve 20-foot sea-level rise
  ~7.4    x 1021 kJ
  
  
  
  There is a difference of 300* between these two figures.  Even if I am wrong by an order of magnitude, there is still an enormous difference.  This does NOT mean that ice caps have not melted in the distant past nor that ice-age glaciers have not grown to cover much of the northern hemisphere; it simply means that the time scales involved to move sufficient quantities of heat to effect such melting or freezing occur over what we scientists commonly call "geological" time scales, i.e. hundreds of thousands and millions of years.
  
  
  Even if sufficient heat is trapped in the atmosphere to raise it the maximum value predicted by anthropogenic "global warming" alarmists (5°C) over the next 100 years, hundreds of times more heat energy must be imparted into the ice-caps to melt sufficient ice to raise sea-levels the catastrophic levels prophesied by Al Gore.
  
  I humbly submit that this might constitute a flaw in his equations.
  
  *Editor's note: a transposed decimal point led to an incorrect multiple used here when this article was first published. The energy required is nevertheless hundreds of times greater than evidently assumed by Al Gore.
  
  
  Jerome J. Schmitt has a degree in mechanical engineering from Yale, and is president of NanoEngineering Corporation.
  
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  
• MKS = meter-kilogram-second instead of cgs units = centimeter-gram-second for the units of length, mass and time.
  
  
  [†] -After James Watt, inventor of the first practical steam-engine which employed a separate condenser.

[midnightblackrx]

Found something you might want to see...

Scientists Find Active Volcano in Antarctica

Article Tools Sponsored By
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: January 21, 2008

Here is another factor that might be contributing to the thinning of some of the Antarctica’s glaciers: volcanoes.

In an article published Sunday on the Web site of the journal Nature Geoscience, Hugh F. J. Corr and David G. Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey report the identification of a layer of volcanic ash and glass shards frozen within an ice sheet in western Antarctica.

For Antarctica, “This is the first time we have seen a volcano beneath the ice sheet punch a hole through the ice sheet,” Dr. Vaughan said.

Heat from a volcano could still be melting ice and contributing to the thinning and speeding up of the Pine Island Glacier, which passes nearby, but Dr. Vaughan doubted that it could be affecting other glaciers in West Antarctica, which have also thinned in recent years. Most glaciologists, including Dr. Vaughan, say that warmer ocean water is the primary cause.

Volcanically, Antarctica is a fairly quiet place. But sometime around 325 B.C., the researchers said, a hidden and still active volcano erupted, puncturing several hundred yards of ice above it. Ash and shards from the volcano carried through the air and settled onto the surrounding landscape. That layer is now out of sight, hidden beneath the snows that fell over the subsequent 23 centuries.

Although out of sight, the layer showed up clearly in airborne radar surveys conducted over the region in 2004 and 2005 by American and British scientists. The reflected radio waves, over an elliptical area about 110 miles wide, were so strong that earlier radar surveys had mistakenly identified it as bedrock. Better radar techniques now can detect a second echo from the actual bedrock farther down.

The thickness of ice above the ash layer provided an estimate of the date of the eruption: 207 B.C., give or take 240 years. For a more precise date, Mr. Corr and Dr. Vaughan turned to previous observations from ice cores, which contained spikes in the concentration of acids, another byproduct of eruptions. Scientists knew that an eruption occurred around 325 B.C., plus or minus a few years, but did not know where the eruption occurred. “We’re fairly confident this is the same eruption,” Dr. Vaughan said.

Now, they know both time and place.

“It’s probably within Alexander the Great’s lifetime, but not more precise than that,” Dr. Vaughan said.

The under-ice eruption was probably similar to one in Iceland in 2004. Although explosive, spewing ash more than seven miles in the air, the Iceland eruption was much less powerful than Mount St. Helens, the volcano in Washington State that blew off its peak in 1980.

Can you believe BIG BUSINESS planted a volcano right there to melt the ice away?!?! UNBELIEVEABLE!!!