Chris Knight

And the year before, too. We were so busy paddling in the boreal meltwater pools, we didn't notice that nothing much was happening at the other pole at the same time, and that nothing much out of the ordinary has happened since either. Slartibartfast and his friends must have had a good time, setting the southern polar continent over an active rift valley and a volcanic hotspot!

The temperature has yet to climb above -1degC, according to the sensors at the site, but the drifts may be showing some signs of melting due to the summer sun, as you point out GW. The temperature last year at this time, was a degree or so above zero, and melt pools were already apparent, as the following snapshot shows. The 2009 melt seems to be slower and later than 2008 was.

Quite correct!

Yes, I am, but I posted lots of stuff here above going back to the early noughties. What did for the ice is not the warmth - the bobbing about zero degrees C (in any arctic summer) are due to the fact that the temperature of ice and water coexisting give a surface temperature of ... about the freezing point of water!

Heat just does not hang around - it travels from warm to colder places (in effect - it travels randomly, but gets noticed when it warms colder things) - in the ocean, heat gets moved about with the currents, in the atmosphere it gets convected away, radiated to space, converted to mechanical energy etc. I am sorry but TWS's arguments about heat being trapped just do not ring true!

Go and have a look at the webcam (above). There are still snowdrifts, and no evidence of melt yet, despite being past the solstice!

Here's the latest - no melt this year yet, apparently!

From the beginning of the article: "The circulation of the sea ice cover and ocean surface layer are closely coupled and are primarily wind-driven" No-one seems to look at the wind data itself over the pole, during the melt season, over the past few exceptional years. Yet it is readily available from the same site as the reportcard: here is 2002 winds often exceeding 10 m/s 2003 Similar picture, note that the wind sensor remains operational throughout the year, because it is kept in constant motion. 2004 Is there a drop in windspeeds in the spring and summer? 2005 June and August were a little less windy, but otherwise, lots of wind 2006 Hey, is this the same place? No wind much greater than 8m/, throughout the summer? 2007 looks like a rerun of 2006, with the sensor failing in the late summer melt, as the icepack destabilises, still, low windspeeds again. 2008 Same again, perhaps the design of the buoy and instrumentation is not up the the job in fair weather! 2009 (so far) It is like a millpond up there, hardly a gust above 4m/s. Is this because the ice is flat mecause it is mostly single season, or is the ice flat because there have been no winds to break and pile it up?

I remember Mr Benn from some time ago on kiddiewinkies TV - he was a fantasist and dresser-up, but I don't know if his first name was Hilary. Still, he tells a good yarn for the inconceivable future of the environment. Our UK "Climate Change Farm" tells a different story though! As the North Atlantic drift warmth is again throttled by overriding Arctic meltwaters, for the third year running, the impending midsummer washout may make the BBC story sound even more like a fairy tale.

One, not looking tattered, basking in the evening sunlight on the edge of a field of barley in Durrington. Plenty of food plants nearby.

Or were Gore Hansen et al, all pawns in Enron's game of global domination? National Post article by Lawrence Solomon

The evidence is this: there was no arrow shaft in the wound in the poor chap's back, so much so that the wound and the deeply buried arrowhead lay undiscovered for 10 years after the body had been found. The likelihood is that the injury from the arrow killed him rather rapidly and also would have debilitated his arm. It is unlikely that he could have pulled the shaft out himself, and he would have had enough sense to know that attempting to do so on his own might have caused even more damage than he had suffered already. Either his killer(s) made sure he was dead, and retrieved the shaft for reuse, or there is another possibility - that he was not alone, and that one of his comrades removed the arrow shaft, knowing that the wound would prove fatal if the shaft remained, or just to make Ötzi more comfortable as he lay dying.

Also end the proposed carbon penalties, the precedence of "Novel" H1N1 flu vaccine manufacture for the developed world instead of manufacturing more effective Malaria, Aids and TB medicines for the third world, start free education for professional development for candidates in the third world, so they can develop their own universities, without having to "bootstrap" themselves.

Come on TWS, it is admitted as baseless spin by Kofi Annan:

Hi Ossie, in an ideal world you are right, but doors, windows and where the boiler is in relation to the drainage determine how the pipe runs. In my case, the boiler is at the front (northwest) of the house, and the waste stack is at the back (northeast) of the house, so there was nearly a full side of the house to traverse. It had to run above a front porch and below a side window - more than 10 m horizontally, and the fall was adequate, in plumbing terms, I hope. The British Gas fitter certainly worked in a competent manner. I don't know how much condensation these devices produce, or at what temperature, but I could assume indoor room temperature 18 deg C - a drip every few seconds, perhaps, and I could imagine a drip rolling down a 10 m pipe could easily freeze towards the far end of the pipe if the temperature was a couple of degrees below freezing. Subsequent drips would encounter ice and would freeze as soon as they dropped below zero deg C, I guess. A drip from a pipette is about one twentieth of a millilitre, if I remember correctly, so twenty drips to a ml, or a cubic centimetre. Pi * r squared for a 32 mm pipe is about 8 square centimetres, so if we assume about 10 centimetres length of pipe to form an ice plug, you would need 80 ml, or 1600 drips to block the pipe. We could try to work out how much gas would be needed if the condenser was 100% efficient: Methane is CH4, so CH4 + 2 O2 = CO2 + 2 H2O. The molecular weight of methane is 16, and water is 18 so 80 mls contains 4.44 moles, requiring 2.22 moles of methane or 35.56 g. Note the stoichiometry - one molecule of CO2 to 2 H2O - in old-fashioned inefficient boilers, only one third of the greenhouse gas emissions would have been CO2, now, they approach 100%! So, how much gas would this need? Avogadros constant (6.022 *10^23) tells us how many molecules in a gram mole, so about 13.37 * 10^23 molecules in 2.22 moles. PV=nRT P=1 atm n=2.22 R=8.314 T=291 K(18 deg C), so it seems to work out as 0.053 cubic metres of gas, which would be easy to use on a cold evening. The calorific value for the end of January 2009 in the south east was 39.2 megajoules /cu m 39.2*0.053=2.08 megajoules = 496918 calories, enough to raise the temperature of 10 litres of water by 49.7 degrees C (i.e from cold water at 10 deg C to about 60 deg C)- about enough for all the washing up after a large family dinner, about 4 bowls of 2.5l hot water. So I think that it may be possible to freeze a 32mm plastic pipe with a dripping condensate initially at 18 deg C, with the outside temperature at a couple of degrees below freezing. After all, condensed water would be fairly pure, the most likely dissolved compound in it being CO2. I told the story because, even British Gas has been taken unawares by the recent cool winter conditions, and the reaction (sensible I feel) is to plan for even colder eventualities during the ten-fifteen year life-cycle of the boiler.

Saw one today in Southsea, Portsmouth, surprised - that's an orange red admiral? was my first thought, but no, a painted lady, in excellent visual condition.

He was once proposed as the England coach - they wanted to take all his teeth out and put seats in > Boom Boom

On one hand, it may be a good thing that he is in his 87th year. On the other hand, no-one has managed to end his illustrious career yet. There is good and bad in all of us , I suppose, Dev.

Hey GW, it's a condensing boiler, which means that most of the heat in the gas exhaust has been exchanged with the incoming colder water, hence the "pluming" and "condensing" parts of the contraption, and there ain't a lot of waste heat left to reheat the condensate, without a cut in efficiency. Keep awake, lad! Of course there are bio-alternative strategies - rats or water voles to keep the waterways open, or my favourite, crawfish, which make excellent, if shy, pets and first courses.

I had a new condensing boiler installed last week. It has been about 3 or 4 years since building regulations have said that any new boiler installation should be of the energy-efficient condensing variety, which therefore require the installation of a pipe to conduct the condensed water vapour to a drain or waste stack. The British Gas installer was chatting to me whilst installing this waste pipe around the side of the house. Initially the 20mm plastic waste, as it leaves the boiler was permitted to be used to drain the condensate, but then it was realised that this could freeze during a cold snap, so the regulations limited 20mm to the first vertical metre after leaving the boiler, and thereafter, any horizontal pipework should be 32mm to connect to the household waste. However, last winter saw so many callouts because even the 32mm pipe had frozen, causing the condensate to back up into boilers, that this year, 40mm pipework is likely to have to be installed to prevent danger and inconvenience due to frozen condensate drains. There must be a business opportunity here - like electric heating cables to keep your condensate waste ice-free in sub-zero weather.

I am extremely dubious about point 1, BF. Sea ice cover in the Arctic dramatically reduces at the end of the Arctic summer, when the sun has least chance to warm the open Arctic Ocean (c.f. June and July). The Arctic Ocean area uncovered by recent summer melts was briefly an anomaly of 3 million sq kM in 2007, about 2 million last year, both followed by somewhat remarkable recoveries, compared to the anomalies recorded since 2003. The total area of Arctic sea ice in any case is trivial as a reflector of solar radiation, compared even to temperate cloud cover, or continental European, Asian and American winter snowfields at lower latitudes. Rather than a positive feedback, the open Arctic ocean of the last 2 years, radiating heat to space during the fading Arctic summer, probably represents a negative feedback in balance with more heat lost from warmer ocean compared to sea ice than the heat absorbed and not reflected by ice. Similarly point 4. "causes heat to be absorbed"?? Tropical thunderstorms have high albedo, reach much higher above the surface than temperate or polar clouds, and represent a transport of surface heat into the upper troposphere, where there is much less chance of the heat being reradiated downwards. So not only does solar shortwave get reflected away at higher levels, heat transported from the surface is statistically transported into the upper parts of the atmosphere above the clouds as the top of the clouds spread and evaporate to the north or south of the tropics as mentioned in point 6. So this too is a negative feedback, rather than positive. I also cannot agree with the statement "finely balanced Carbon cycle". Poorly understood maybe, because the accounts do not stand up to scrutiny - the role of winter ice on land in the northern hemisphere, and in the annual carbon cycle is not taken into account, neither are the areas of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, which prevent large areas of cold water from absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The so called "carbon cycle" is purely a computer model of the flow of carbon dioxide, with many flaws, basically little better than guesswork. Carbon sinks are apparently missing, or unknown, yet it is absolutely clear where atmospheric CO2 goes - it is precipitated together with rain, which is why rain has a normal pH of about 6.5, instead of a pH of 7.0 if it were pure water. In fact most temperate region rain is saturated with CO2, which destroys the myth that CO2 is a well-mixed gas - It may have a similar concentration 11,000 ft up a mountain to that measured by balloons and areoplanes, but it just gets mopped up by low clouds where they exist, and where the clouds aren't, like desert regions, the concentration builds at higher levels in the air, as many images from the AIRS satellites show. So annoying is this inconvenient fact to those who want to show that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is "polluting" the lower levels of the atmosphere, that they attempted to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory to image carbon dioxide nearer the surface than AIRS can. Sadly, the launch was a write-off. If there is no evidence of a balance, there is no evidence of any tipping - it is a myth. Another myth is ocean acidification, and coral bleaching due to carbon dioxide. Compared to the output of the odd volcano (of which you mention are not many majorly active at the moment) like the brief outburst by Kashatochi last year which released in a single explosion up to 10% as much SO2 as Pinatubo and a measurable quantity of bromine as the monoxide (rather bad for Ozone), and nearby Mt Redoubt which is still releasing large quantities of SO2 as it continues to erupt, 100 ppm increase of CO2/century on the acidity of seawater, is a drop in the ocean, literally. It is the carbonate and bicarbonate (i.e. dissolved CO2), together with divalent cations such as calcium and magnesium in sea water that keep the seawater buffered at an alkaline pH of about 8.1-8.2, despite strongly acidic anion moieties such as sulphite, sulphate, nitrate and chloride ions being constantly absorbed by the ocean from natural sources via the atmosphere. We don't hear much about acid rain today, like we used to - the real threat was cleaned up by the oil companies, especially with regard to aviation fuel, where the aircraft released the SO2 directly into the troposphere. And when they had scrubbed the sulphur from the fuel, the temperatures went up. Positive feedback - less aerosols over the temperate NH, less cloud cover, lower albedo, temperatures increase. More flights, greater amounts of partially burnt long-chain hydrocarbons directly released into atmosphere, with much greater Greenhouse gas effects than even Methane, positive feedback, temperatures increase. Currents shift to some extent due to the causes mentioned again in point 6, and are cyclical. The rate of spin of the earth is not constant, and not only does the length of day change, the rate of change alters too. Angular momentum must be conserved, because physics tells us so, and our fluid atmosphere, oceans and the earth's mantle react to these changes, in ways that geologists, oceanographers and atmospheric scientists are only just beginning to understand, and that climate modellers cannot yet dream of adding to their computer models. The cyclic fluctuations in plankton and thus the fish stocks, which have been recorded for centuries, and have little to do with recent fossil fuel use, but everything to do with Global Angular Momentum, cyclical variations in wind patterns, ocean current speeds and upwelling of fertile deep ocean waters from below the ocean thermocline, as well as the correlated climate pattern changes.

We had some snow (a dusting) in October last year, here in Worthing, West Sussex, so perhaps your forcast was just a hundred or so miles west of reality, with timing spot on!

In Margaret Thatcher's government, such wimps were known as "wets", I believe, and dragged around failing non-Tory beliefs until they had it handbagged out of them - ouch! NSSC is a formidable opponent, TWS - she may convert you!

Wartime bias - Also in the early 1960s (Cold War) - this was mentioned in VP's LI thread, due to an uncorrected error in the HadCRUT3 data series clearly caused by SST measurement bias because the Sea Surface temperature measurements were taken by engine inlet temperatures, rather than bucket measurements. Post WWI also showed a similar blip, supposedly corrected for. Thompson et al shows the bias clearly:

These are really interesting questions, and I bet that no-one really knows the full answers. Acoustics - the understanding of how sound changes in response to the environment - is an art, mainly relating to the interior of man-made structures. Buildings, loudspeaker enclosures and the like. When we get to the great outdoors, acoustics is usually relegated to the nuisance value of noise - how loud is the approaching plane under the flight track, why does this curved building focus London Underground noise on 47 Hammersmith Grove etc. Clouds are both denser and cooler than the surrounding air - if they were just water droplets, they should both refract sound from below upwards, and absorb and attenuate sound. Observational evidence says that clouds reflect sound from below, and within the entire cloud structure. I am sticking my neck out here. Much of the water, even in cumulus clouds, is actually ice, and not fluffy snowflakes, but little, and not so little solid frozen accreted raindrops. Not hail - which is refrozen ice and rain that has existed through several circuits through the up- and down-draughts in the cumulonimbus clouds in which hail forms. Occasionally this frozen rain falls in winter - it has the texture of the ice that collects on the interior of your freezer - not solid clear ice, but little pellets of white, crushable ice. Despite being constructed of ice with pockets of air, they reflect sound quite well, unlike either snowflakes, or water mist droplets. OK, back to thunderstorms. thunderclouds contain about 90% ice, maybe more. At cloud base there is a large temperature differential from temperatures of -20C within to near freezing below with a steady adiabatic temperature gradient down to the surface. Due to the turbulence within the cloud, much of the water exists as hail, solid, lumps of ice containing very little enclosed gas pockets. This is a great reflector of sound, and of course, large bodies of hailstones are being shifted up and down within the tower by the strong up and downdrafts, creating Doppler effects to any reflected sounds, both increasing and decreasing the frequency of the echo. So here is a hypothesis to explain why sometimes there is a crackle, and sometimes a crackle and boom: If there is above the CG strike an updraft, where rain is being sucked upwards, then there is no solid ice surface to reflect the echo of the sound of the strike back to the ground, only the absorptive effects of the raindrops, traveling upwards.................................. Crackle only. On the other hand if there is a downdraft at the time of the CG, forcing hail downwards at speed, the approaching solid front of descending ice reflects the advancing pressure front of the sound wave from the strike, enabling you to hear first the direct crackle, and then the reflected and amplified boom, as it focuses back towards you. As far as the first question is concerned, doesn't the whole atmosphere collapse downwards at night, due to lack of solar input? This is felt at all levels - the different propagation characteristics of radio waves, the general drop in temperature, it gets dark, you stop getting sunburnt, etc. A cooler atmosphere has different characteristics for sound propagation too - cooler is more dense, so sound travels slower, and frequencies decrease.