Chris Knight

See - they are working already! Gee - I'm honoured: I have a small glass sphere in which I shall install them, and place them next to the twin urns that contain my parents (separate) ashes. I shall revere them always. I must go now, as I am in danger of flooding the keyboard, thanks again...sniff...

Don't worry Pete, I knew that, and had already empathised them (their vibes, that is) to you via the internet.

I read that as a "no" then, and a guesstimate of <60cm. If the images are so misleading (hidden pun there ) why are we looking at them and trying to find meaningful answers there?

I guess that some of us have either better or less well developed baloney detectors than others - merely a hypothesis, you understand... <_<

Where does one start? Hypotheses are just that - proposals for discussion - and in the scientific sense, can merely be disproven, or can stand as long as another superior hypothesis is not forthcoming - in the case of climate change the discussion continues, the science is most definitely not settled. AGW is merely a hypothesis - not even a theory, and definitely not a natural law. <_< You also then presumably do not know the remainder of the people who are on the IPCC, and cannot comment whether they are bureaucrats or not? In science statistics deal with fuzzy quantities like this - how many people who are on the IPCC do you know, TWS? Knowing this fact, together with the published number of authors on the IPCC documents, we can then judge the validity of your comment.

Can I put in a plea to have a pinned topic showing the latest polar webcam image, to save bandwidth, rather than have to trawl through pages of images, all linked to the latest Arctic Theme webcam like we did last year? Then the comments will be easier to read, and the thread will be quicker to load, and we can more easily avoid reading the posts from posters that we do not wish to read <_< . As far as the current rapidfire pictures are concerned, GW: how thick do you estimate the ice must be to cast such shadows on the leads? Presumably there must be a way to count the pixels to estimate the length of the shadow, calculate the angle of the sun at the time the image was taken, and thus calculate the difference in height of the ice floe causing the shadow from the ice upon which the shadow is cast.

Hi Jethro, Of course it's rhetorical, you addressed it to God (capitalised) and we know he is not allowed to post in the Climate Change area of this forum. (He was banned for saying something like "I am right and you are wrong, because I say so, and because I know everything!" He also is reported to have said "And I created Darwin!", breaking grammatical rules and paradoxically denying him(her)self.) IMHO, as harridans go, you are really quite rounded. [OT] Since you mention CO2 (sic), Iceberg commented: Could not the same sort of criticism be fairly directed against, not SI, but CO2 regarding correlation with the temperature record of the twentieth century. Why has the relationship broken down in both supposed correlations. Perhaps the temperature record is wrong? (I do understand that this is superimposing one straw-man argument against another, and generating a third.)

I imagine you are looking at an old reconstruction. I linked to several more modern reconstructions on the leaky integrator thread, which is what this thread appears to be evolving into, C-Bob and Iceberg. Now you don't want to make Jethro mad again, for going OT, do you?

Jethro asked about cosmic ray levels. The NASA proposal said: "Cosmic rays at near record-high levels." Since 2005: Data from http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/ - probably the nearest thing to realtime data on the net! going back to the earliest data - it appears that we are at record high levels. Time to get out the tinfoil hats, maybe?

No C, surface temperatures are greatest during the northern summer - the atmosphere warms from the heated land mass which is greater in the northern hemisphere: http://www.netweather.tv/forum/index.php?a...st&id=65701 The southern hemisphere with a greater proportion of ocean does not heat so much during the southern summer - the heat goes into the ocean. http://www.netweather.tv/forum/index.php?a...st&id=65700 As you can see the stratosphere warms in direct proportion to the amount of solar radiation, and is warmest in the northern winter. This is the main reason why the ~1w/m2 variation in output of the sun between solar maximum and minimum is thought by some to have so little impact on the climate of earth, when the annual variation is about 90w/m2. Unless, that is, someone can offer a good explanation of why the earth's climate sensitivity should respond to such a small degree of forcing.

And these are mostly research vessels going to investigate the beginning of the Arctic melt season?

...but no axolotls? I said a long time - not how long. Did the animal grafitti have dates?

Nobody has a clue Jethro. So what if the sun has a slight variance over periods from as short as a second to as long as a (few) billion years? It (the sun) only affects the weather when it isn't cloudy, and when climate is the effect of cloudiness over periods of greater than thirty years, the sun really has no part to play at all. In places like the central Sahara, the climate hasn't changed for a long time - the diurnal changes are greater than the annual ones. It's probably the same in other parts of the world that have constant cloud cover, except the diurnal range is less pronounced. If this was "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" I'd suggest "ask an axolotl".

Here's another version The diagram I posted above is a spoof, BTW.

There is only one doubt that nags me HP re. ozone as contributory to GW. The major effects of ozone depletion are seen in the southern hemisphere. The major reported increase in temperature is in the northern hemisphere. If ozone was responsible, wouldn't you expect the temperatures in the south to be rising fastest?

Must have used the wrong diagram then: Who wanted to read the Livingstone and Penn paper? Hiya, see below: livingston-penn_sunspots2.pdf

Welcome Pamela to NW, the Small comet research, and conclusions impressed me too. Amazing to think how much more there is still to learn about our little corner of the universe.

It is a terrible condition to be both green and a sceptic - looking on the positive side, I find myself being classed as a "Septic", by those, presumably "Antiseptics".

Devil's advocate here - Nobody here is stupid, but the thinking is so parochial! Try thinking energy and not heat. Like in a storm, the most destructive force is in the wind force, not the weight of water falling down, nor the change in temperature or pressure. How does wind equate to heat? When wind blows itself out so suddenly, where does the energy go? When tiles are blown off a roof, and trees are felled in a gale, where does the energy that has been used go? (does that energy go back in time reversing the potential energy that went into growing the tree, or that which powered the roofer lifting the tiles into place?) Is the energy in condensing water in clouds lost to space in the upper troposphere or does it come bouncing back down to the surface through the very same clouds? You don't get a sudden poof of heat when a wall collapses because a gust of wind blows it down, but a large expenditure of energy has occurred, nonetheless. As far as the current Arctic situation goes GW is fond of talking volumes (he has always talked volumes ), the heat that is stored in the ocean from the Arctic loss of Ice is latent heat, so no change of temperature is evident. So all that missing ice volume that was there in the 1970s now exists as liquid water, ready to release the latent heat when the ice volumes at the north pole recover. If there is less sea ice at the north pole, then although mean sea level remains the same, there is more fluid water in the oceans. Now what happens? Does the earth become more oblate, as water freed from the Arctic ocean can become displaced to the equatorial bulge? Does this affect the angular velocity of the earth, slowing it down like an ice skater extending their arms to slow down a spin? Now here's another strange thing - the velocity of rotation of the earth is affected by the weather - the winds push against mountains, and the rotation of the earth has been shown to slow or speed up. Presumably, the likelihood of strong El Nino or La Nina events depend on little pushes from the earth's rotation to make them stronger or weaker. Overall the rate of change of the earth's rotation is progressively slower, but the rate varies due to the factors mentioned above. The tides provide the friction that progressively slows the rotation of the earth, but the energy, the heat released is mostly in the shallow oceans, much of it, funnily enough, in the North East Atlantic. Gulf Stream or tides? Ask your alternative energy broker which is the best bet!

...does seem to be a wonderful contradiction

I apologise, not fair. AGW, though, is not fairly treated from either side of the divide. The issues are contentious and nothing is settled.

Just goes to show that Ice and Roo have not bothered to read the links in the topic I pointed to. All that is needed is to click on the links and read. Understanding is optional, and somewhat dependent upon the intellect of the reader. No, it is not AGW, it is a parallel case, a phenomenon which divides the closed- and open-minded. In there is a specific case of Nature (the Journal) turning down the paper that it considered unsuitable for publication, (reasons given) and the sidelining of genuine researchers on the cusp of novel research that makes the old authorities unsettled, since the old school would have to rethink their comfy theories that they have fed off for years. To Quote Prof. Frank in 1997:

See "small comets" thread in Space, Science and Nature for one example. It is either "Jump on the bandwagon" or get sidelined.

Here's Professor Louis Frank's lecture. More Info on the Small Comet website here. The "gentle cosmic rain" apparently totals about an inch over the whole global surface every 20,000 years. This apparently balances the loss of ocean subducted under the earth's tectonic plates.