Chris Knight
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Posts posted by Chris Knight
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http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/may/H..._Snow_Melt.html
Some how seemed to miss this last year. With the 'melt' images from the Trans Antarctic range behind Ross it makes you wonder as to the impacts meltwater has as it penetrates through the sheet to lubricate the base.
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!
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TBH Chris the right hand side seems to show snow on the lens (individual grains with space in between) the drift on the left (part of the drift that blacked out the camera?) is a little droopy and , if you go back a couple of days the snow looks 'slushy' (as we are all accustomed to seeing in the UK :lol: ).
Anyhoo, the snow cover is not the thing is it? it is the ice cover and were the snow to come into contact with water it would melt in seconds (again, as we all know from living here).
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.
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I don't think Chris is certain about anything.
Quite correct!
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Would you be a certain Chris Knight
Anyway, it's worth going through some of the years in the link that graph comes with on WUWT. For example if you look at 2007 what did for the ice wasn't June but the late summer and autumn being pretty consistently warm.
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!
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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!
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Go and have a look at the webcam (above). There are still snowdrifts, and no evidence of melt yet, despite being past the solstice!
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Here's the latest - no melt this year yet, apparently!
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http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ocean.html
Well done Dev! I.V.P. seems to be part of a team looking at this warming of the Arctic ocean since 1990 now.
EDIT: Infact why not Google the document title (as I did)
Observational program tracks Arctic Ocean transition to a warmer state
and have a good read from Polar bears to ice thickness to salinity to ice drift and all from 06 onwards (it appears) and much of the post 07' stuff is chilling.
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?
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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.
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One, not looking tattered, basking in the evening sunlight on the edge of a field of barley in Durrington. Plenty of food plants nearby.
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Or were Gore Hansen et al, all pawns in Enron's game of global domination? National Post article by Lawrence Solomon
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There is no evidence that any arrow was ever removed from him: he had one projectile still lodged in his shoulder and a number of trauma wounds consistent with hand to hand combat with one individual prior to the fatal arrow.
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.
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Well, the first action, is to cancel the debt (and the interest) we charge them so that they may engage on an independent course of self-determination.
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.
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As for Coast's link- it does debunk the common sceptic assertion that AGW would be a good thing- it might make the climate more conducive to plant growth and the like in many developed/temperate regions of the world, especially those with frigid winters and cool summers, but it may also tip marginal climates in developing countries over the edge. However the article's assertions rely upon continued warming over the next 20 years and even the mainstream climate scientists are unsure about whether this will actually happen.
Come on TWS, it is admitted as baseless spin by Kofi Annan:
“Copenhagen needs to be the most ambitious international agreement ever reached,” he said. “As this report shows, the alternative is greater risk of starvation, migration and sickness on a massive scale.”At the launch of the report, Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam, said that climate change was a “gross injustice” as well as a human crisis.
The research was carried out by Dalberg Global Advisers, a consultancy firm, who collated all existing statistics on the human impacts of climate change. The report acknowledges a “significant margin of error” in its estimates.
Mr Annan said the report could never be as rigorous as a scientific study, but said: “We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today.”
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Wouldn't it be simpler just to make sure that there is a good fall on the 'horizontal' pipework? It has to get bloody cold - Canadian-cold - to freeze a significant amount of the water if it is draining away freely and fast, I'd have thought....or maybe I'm talking rubbish if the quantity/flow rate is so low?
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.
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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.
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Brian Clough did you say. Proper good he was.
He was once proposed as the England coach - they wanted to take all his teeth out and put seats in > Boom Boom
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This item is a "Press Release: Citizens Electoral Council"
The Citizens Electoral Council of Australia were "Established in 1988, we joined the LaRouche movement to fight for Peace through Economic Development."
Lyndon laRouche is someone about whom, to put the very best gloss on it, there are considerably varying opinions....
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.
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I'd go for a metal element heated by the gas exhaust flue
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.
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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.
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Firstly you need to be careful about mixing up climate processes and carbon cycle processes. Since most of the details mentioned so far are about climate processes lets just summarize some of these.
1) Melting polar ice reduces planetary albedo (light/heat reflected away from the earth) (Positive feedback)
2) Increase in desert conditions increases planetary albedo (negative feedback)
3) More low level cloud in the sub tropics increase planetary albedo (negative feedback)
4) More thunderstorms in the tropics causes heat to be absorbed (positive feedback)
5) QBO process (negative feedback). I am not entirely happy about including this not because the idea is substantially wrong, but the interaction between CO2 and Ozone in the stratosphere has not been properly explored.
Now I will include a few possible mechanisms not mentioned yet.
6) The boundaries of the Hadley and walker cells are shifted, changing the potential for mountain torque to change global angular momentum. It will also change the type and location of cloud cover.
7) Sun activity causes oscillations in the ionosphere which changes the reflectivity of boundaries lower down, which can affect the strength of the stratospheric polar vortex.
CO2 affects the amount of ozone.9) Black soot deposited on ice reduces albedo.
10) Ocean transports slow or decline (deep water formation points change) this changes the distribution of heat in the sea, perhaps even melting sea ice.
11) There have been no recent major volcano eruptions.
Separate from climate is the very finely balanced carbon cycle. Just because we have tipped the balance one way does not mean there are feedback mechanisms which can either reduce or increase CO2 as a result. Some of these are listed below.
1) Warmer water shifts plankton production northwards where the oceans are narrower. Some argue that most of the increase in CO2 in recent decades may actually be due to this.
2) Plants are more vigorous in warmer conditions, absorbing more CO2.
3) Forest clearance reduces CO2 absorbance.
4) Acid rain changes plant and sea life so that less CO2 is absorbed.
5) Despite recent forest fires, forestry is much better managed these days and so there has been a reduction in fires.
Just a few ideas to mull over.
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.
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I forecast that it would snow in Dorset in October last year.
It didn't in the end, but did snow in February.
So my forecast was right, the timing was just later than expected
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!
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Again, I am not impressed by NSSC's lumping those who believe in AGW together as "AGW-ists" and apportioning opinions to all of them that not all of them hold.
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!
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There is a small mismatch in the 40s. Another possible flaw is that unlike the leaky integrator on the other thread, there are no delays in response to forcing in this method (apart from the response to ENSO)
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:
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. 
CO2 affects the amount of ozone.
Arctic Ice 2009
in Space, Science & nature
Posted
Currently, Lat 87.428 Lon -0.848, last year, at the same date and hour, Lat 86.303 Lon -2.292, Songster, so just a degree or so difference.