I am officially closing the old thread and blessing this new thread for discussion of our approaching new winter. And what a headline to start off with, courtesy of Bill Patzert[1][2]. So I think it is important to bring this to the forefront before everyone starts yapping about the unusual winter weather and how cross-over driving soccer moms are all to blame.
Could you please tell me what conclusions you have drawn from this. This seems unrelated to climate change.
10 years and no major hurricane has made landfall in the US. We really need to act now, people. /sarcasm [rQUOTEr]10-year major hurricane landfall drought may be ‘arbitrary,’ but it’s far from meaningless On Saturday, the United States passed the 10-year mark since its most recent major hurricane landfall — Category 3 or stronger. The last time a major hurricane made landfall in the United States was Hurricane Wilma in October 2005, which roared ashore in southwest Florida as a Category 3 packing 120-mph winds.[/rQUOTEr]
I'm confused completely. I mean, I understand the OP's strident take and his agenda, but what is this thread about: El Nino (pretty fascinating and possibly important/deadly to Cali); 2015-2016 global weather (meh, could be interesting); or long-term climate (the OP's often confused but militant typical obsession)? Having an El Nino thread would be cool. Hoping like hell we get lots of rain (and snow in the mtns) out here in NoCal and hoping I fixed the damned leaks on the back of our house!
Ole Cohete and infamous climate change denial thing. Bahaha... <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3E0a_60PMR8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Thought experiment. Seasons occur because of the wobble in the axial tilt of the earth. "Summer" occurs because in the hemisphere in question the sun appears higher in the sky resulting in more insolation (solar radiation). "Winter" occurs because of the opposite - the sun appears lower in the sky, resulting in less solar radiation. I think everybody gets this. The periods of most/least sunlight are known as "solstices". The planet gets the most solar radiation, and the sun appears highest in the sky on the "summer solstice". The day of least sunlight, and therefore solar radiation is the "winter solstice". HOWEVER... The "summer solstice" this year was June 21, but the hottest days of the year don't occur until July and August. Conversely, the "winter solstice" in December 22, but the coldest days won't occur until January. THINK ABOUT WHY THIS IS. WHY IS THERE A DELAY BETWEEN INSOLATION AND WEATHER? IN WHAT OTHER WAYS ARE THE SAME ISSUES RELEVANT ON SHORTER AND LONGER TIME SCALES? Alternately, your car engine becomes hot when you drive your car because of heat waste energy from all the tiny explosions occuring in your engine, and when it isn't operating, the car cools to ambient tempratures. However, after you stop your car and go in your house, the engine remains dangerously hot to touch for a significant period of time after it is no longer running. WHY IS THIS? When you really get it, a lot of the stupid things people repeat about climate change will no longer be coming out of your mouth.
Just pointing out a technicality that the seasons occur because of the tilt (axis of rotation is not at 90° to its orbital plane around the sun).
[sarcasm] (1) Just because your car is hot, you can't tell me how to drive my car. (2) Yeah, but the car always cools off in the end. Why are you worried about a hot car when it's been hot and cooled off before? (3) Yeah, but cars have been heating up and cooling off every since the Model A. [/sarcasm] How did I do? And Cohete Rojo is correct about tilt with no wobble. But in general, excellent post on thermodynamics. Near and dear to my little heart.
With the talk about how hot your car's engine gets has anyone ever tried cooking food with your engine block? http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-Food-on-Your-Car's-Engine I'm curious to try this the next time I have a long car trip.
Switching gears from El Niño, which has been bringing rain to California and a hurricane to Yemen, to sea level rise - Antarctica has been gaining mass over the past several decades. [rQUOTEr]NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.” Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks. But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” The study analyzed changes in the surface height of the Antarctic ice sheet measured by radar altimeters on two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites, spanning from 1992 to 2001, and by the laser altimeter on NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) from 2003 to 2008. Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time. “At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said. The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice – enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise. Zwally’s team calculated that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year. “The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.” “The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in Zwally’s study. "Doing altimetry accurately for very large areas is extraordinarily difficult, and there are measurements of snow accumulation that need to be done independently to understand what’s happening in these places,” Smith said. To help accurately measure changes in Antarctica, NASA is developing the successor to the ICESat mission, ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. “ICESat-2 will measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” said Tom Neumann, a glaciologist at Goddard and deputy project scientist for ICESat-2. “It will contribute to solving the problem of Antarctica’s mass balance by providing a long-term record of elevation changes.”[/rQUOTEr]
We used to get little cans of pork and beans in our lunches. A lot of wildland firefighters would put the cans on an engine to heat them up, others would use a flaming stump or some other fire, and others would eat it cold.
Cohete Rojo - science denier and non member of the climate change religion posts two articles with science and data. The enlightened liberal climate change clerics and science believers... post snarky comments with no data or science. Just a normal day in the D&D.
Except this is only marginally new information, not the gotcha that ithe seems to be presented as out of context. The only new data is that a small fraction of the East Antarctic is accumulating instead of losing. Listen to what the authors are saying. They aren't guffawing at the "global warming hoax". I could explain it all again in detail, but it gets really tiring. Very quickly - northern hemisphere more than southern, more water vapor in the atmosphere = known increased precipitation in antarctica, worry about Greenland ice sheet first, Arctic next, Southern hemisphere trails. This has been the situation all along.
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At least your response was slightly less than snarky but still condescending and completely without facts or information. I seriously doubt you could "explain it all in detail". I'll go ahead and admit that I don't know much about climate, but I do know that it always changes. Halleluiah, I'm a believer!
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He has before. I used to do it on here, over and over. Plenty of scientists have written in excruciating detail about it for the popular press. But that's not important. Some people will absolutely believe only what they want to believe. With a system this big and complex, you can always cherry pick a few nuggets, ignore the rest, and feel content. Self-righteous and superior, even. I'm not a climate scientist. I'm a physicist who has read through the data for years. I understand the interaction of so-called greenhouse gases with incoming solar radiation. I understand the basics of all the models. I've kept track of all the data I can find that is peer-reviewed and reputable. In the end, I think the data make a very clear statement about what's going on. Could it all be wrong? Sure. The risk-reward scenario, however, regarding carbon-loading the atmosphere is truly pretty scary, so it is worth taking seriously. I accept some people will never believe human behavior could influence this Earth. We live for 80 years, maybe, and the changes usually take much, much longer. It's a difficult cognitive and sociological issue. Cheers. I still have no idea why an El Nino thread has anything to do with the same old tired topic of the longterm global climate though. Anyone? What was the OP aiming for here?
