Tag Archives: ice

Rain barrels aren’t much good. Wood chips are better, And I’d avoid rain gardens, even as a neighbor.

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A lot of cities push rain barrels as a way to save water and reduce flooding. Our water comes from the Detroit and returns to it as sewage, so I’m not sure there is any water saving, but there is a small cash saving (very small) if you buy 30 to 55 gallon barrels from the city and connect them to the end of your drain spout. The rainwater you collect won’t be pure enough to drink, or safe for bathing, but you can use it to water your lawn and garden. This sounds OK, even patriotic, until you do the math, or the plumbing, or until you consider the wood-chip alternative.

The barrels are not cheap, even when subsidized they cost about $100 each. Add to this the cost and difficulty of setting up the collection system and the distribution hose. Water from your rain barrel will not flow through a normal nozzle as there is hardly any pressure. Expect watering to take a lot longer than you are used to.

40 gallon rain barrels. Two of these give about 70 usable gallons every heavy rain fall. That’s about 70¢ worth.

In Michigan you can not leave the water in your barrel over the winter, the water will freeze and the barrel will crack. You have to drain the tank completely every fall, an almost impossible task, and the tank is attached to a rainspout and the last bit of water is hard to get out. Still, you have to do it, or the barrel will crack. And the savings for all this is minimal. During a rainy month, you don’t need this water. During a dry month, there is no water to use. Even at the best, the The marginal cost of water in our town is less than 1¢ per gallon. For all the work and cost to set up, two complete 40 gallon tanks (like those shown) will give you at most about 70 usable gallons. That’s to say, almost 70¢ per full filling.

How much lawn can you water? Assume you like to water your lawn to the equivalent of 1″ of rain per week, your 70 gallons will water about 154 ft2 of lawn or garden, virtually nothing compared to the typical Michigan 2000 ft2 lawn. You’ll still have to get most of your water from the city’s main. All that work, for so little benefit.

Young trees with chip volcanos, 1 ft high x18″. Spread the chips to the diameter of the leaves.You don’t need more than 2″.

A far better option is wood chips. They don’t cover a lawn, but they’re great for shrubs, trees or a garden. Wood chips are easy to spread, and they stop weeds and hold water. The photo at left shows a wood chips around the shrubs, and a particularly poor use of wood chips around the trees. For shrubs, trees, or a garden, I suggest you put down 1 to 2 inches of wood chips. Surround a young tree at that depth to the diameter of the branches. Do not build a “chip volcano,” as this lazy landscaper has done.

Consider that, covering 500 ft2 of area to a depth of 1.5 inches will take about 60 cubic feet of wood chips. That will cost about $35 dollars at the local Home Depot. This is enough to hold about 1.25″ or rainwater, That’s about 100 ft3 or water or 800 gallons. The chips prevent excess evaporation while preventing weeds and slowly releasing the water to your garden. You do no work. The chips take almost no work to spread, and will keep on working for years, with no fear of frost-damage. A as the chips stop working, they biocompost slowly into fertilizer. That’s a win.

There is a worst option too, called a rain garden. This is often pushed by environmental-gooders. You dig a hole near your downspout, perhaps ten feet in diameter, by two feet deep, and plant native grasses (weeds). When it rains, the hole fills with water creating a mini wetland that will soon smell like the swamp that it is. If you are not lucky, the water will find a way to leak into your basement. If that’s your problem look here. If you are luckier, your mini-swamp will become the home of mosquitos, frogs, and snakes. The plants will grow, then die, and rot, and look awful. It is very hard to maintain native grasses. That’s why people drain swamps and grow trees or turf or vegetables. If you want to see a well-maintained rain garden, they have two on the campus of Lawrence Tech. A wetland isn’t bad, but you want drainage, Make a bioswale or muir.

Robert Buxbaum, May 31, 2023. I ran for water commissioner some years back.

Arctic Ice has shrunk 1.5% since ’99 and Gore’s inconvenient truth. Is this bad?

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At the 1999 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, Al Gore announced an inconvenient truth: “There is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.” It was a bold prediction, part of a campaign that got Mr Gore a Nobel Prize and motivated the US to devote billions to stopping global warming. Supposedly 98% of scientists agreed with Mr. Gore and his remedies. Prince Charles and Bill Gates too. Twenty three years later there is still arctic ice, 98.5% as much as in 1999. Two questions arise: 1. Is the ice loss bad? and 2. Why were those 98% of scientists so wrong?

Arctic sea ice extent 1999-2021
Arctic sea ice extent when Al Gore spoke (1999) and since. Not much change, nor clearly for the worse

The second question is far easier than the first: the 98% number was bogus, a lie, like many other climate lies that followed. it was effective at stopping argument, and could not be checked immediately. It bullied scientists who argued that global warming wasn’t bad, or wasn’t man-made, and it gave do-gooders the ability to label their opponents “liars” and “science deniers”. The claim of 98% was used to silence scientists with long, prominent careers. Deniers lost their funding and were no longer published. Other scientists learned to keep quiet. Twenty years later, when the arctic ice wasn’t gone and antarctic ice hit a record extent, the deniers’ careers largely were gone.

Scientists are not stupid, nor independently rich, for the most part. They are dependent on government funding and their employers, the universities are too. As a group they (we) are incapable of stemming the tide of public opinion. This week Biden signed a nearly 1 trillion dollar bill to stop climate change. Every scientist with a chance to get the money will go for it. Whether or not they think a colder earth is good, they will claim it is in their proposals, and imply that their work can stop the natural chaos that is climate. They will ask for their share of the $1T to study the appropriate things: solar cells, corn-based power, and wind turbines. The proposals will not mention the huge costs in mining or land use. Scientists already know they can not get funded for nuclear power, though it works and produces no CO2, nor should can scientists benefit by criticizing China, as the largest source of CO2. That is seen as undermine the green effort at home. When we stop manufacturing at home, BTW, we end up buying the same materials manufactured in China, where they really generate lots of pollution. When asked about this, Biden’s climate chief said not to worry about it, we had to do our part, and Biden would speak to the Chinese. The result is the biggest buildup in coal-fired power plants in the world, with more coming on line.

This second question is at least as important as the first one: is less arctic ice bad? Or, asking more generally, is a warm earth bad? It’s an opinion question; it’s in no way science, impossible to answer definitively. Cold weather is bad for food production, and that’s bad for people, in general. Most people prefer to live where it’s warm, I find. Supposedly polar bears prefer it cold, but I don’t know for sure. I’m not keen to go back to the climate of the ice ages, 10,000- 100,000 years ago when ice covered Canada and you could walk from France to England. I’m not convinced that life was better when the world was 1°C colder. The sea was lower in 1900, but had been higher in the year zero. Less arctic ice means easier shipping. For all I know we may want to make a Northwest Passage. More food and a easier shipping are the convenient truths about global warming.

Robert Buxbaum, August 19, 2022. If you believe any of what I said about Gore/Biden’s green energy, you may like a movie by Michael Moore, Planet of the Humans, see it here. The political greens are not saving energy or cooling the planet, and they know it. It’s a money maker.

James Croll, janitor scientist; man didn’t cause warming or ice age

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When politicians say that 98% of published scientists agree that man is the cause of global warming you may wonder who the other scientists are. It’s been known at least since the mid 1800s that the world was getting warmer; that came up talking about the president’s “Resolute” desk, and the assumption was that the cause was coal. The first scientist to present an alternate theory was James Croll, a scientist who learned algebra only at 22, and got to mix with high-level scientists as the janitor at the Anderson College in Glasgow. I think he is probably right, though he got some details wrong, in my opinion.

James Croll was born in 1821 to a poor farming family in Scotland. He had an intense interest in science, but no opportunity for higher schooling. Instead he worked on the farm and at various jobs that allowed him to read, but he lacked a mathematics background and had no one to discuss science with. To learn formal algebra, he sat in the back of a class of younger students. Things would have pretty well ended there but he got a job as janitor for the Anderson College (Scotland), and had access to the library. As janitor, he could read journals, he could talk to scientists, and he came up with a theory of climate change that got a lot of novel things right. His idea was that there were  regular ice ages and warming periods that would follow in cycles. In his view these were a product of the precession of the equinox and the fact that the earth’s orbit was not round, but elliptical, with an eccentricity of 1.7%. We are 3.4% closer to the sun on January 3 than we are on July 4, but the precise dates changes slowly because of precession of the earth’s axis, otherwise known as precession of the equinox.

Currently, at the spring equinox, the sun is in “the house of Pisces“. This is to say, that a person who looks at the stars all the night of the spring equinox will be able to see all of the constellations of the zodiac except for the stars that represent Pisces (two fish). But the earth’s axes turns slowly, about 1 days worth of turn every 70 years, one rotation every 25,770 years. Some 1800 years ago, the sun would have been in the house of Ares, and 300 years from now, we will be “in the age of Aquarius.” In case you wondered what the song, “age of Aquarius” was about, it’s about the precession of the equinox.

Our current spot in the precession, according to Croll is favorable to warmth. Because we are close to the sun on January 3, our northern summers are less-warm than they would be otherwise, but longer; in the southern hemisphere summers are warmer but shorter (southern winters are short because of conservation of angular momentum). The net result, according to Croll should be a loss of ice at both poles, and slow warming of the earth. Cooling occurs, according to Croll, when the earth’s axis tilt is 90° off the major axis of the orbit ellipse, 6300 years before or after today. Similar to this, a decrease in the tilt of the earth would cause an ice age (see here for why). Earth tilt varies over a 42,000 year cycle, and it is now in the middle of a decrease. Croll’s argument is that it takes a real summer to melt the ice at the poles; if you don’t have much of a tilt, or if the tilt is at the wrong time, ice builds making the earth more reflective, and thus a little colder and iceier each year; ice extends south of Paris and Boston. Eventually precession and tilt reverses the cooling, producing alternating warm periods and ice ages. We are currently in a warm period.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing stable, cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

Global temperatures measured from the antarctic ice showing stable, cyclic chaos and self-similarity.

At the time Croll was coming up with this, it looked like numerology. Besides, most scientists doubted that ice ages happened in any regular pattern. We now know that ice ages do happen periodically and think that Croll must have been on to something. See figure; the earth’s temperature shows both a 42,000 year cycle and a 23,000 year cycle with ice ages coming every 100,000 years.

In the 1920s a Serbian Mathematician, geologist, astronomer, Milutin Milanković   proposed a new version of Croll’s theory that justified longer space between ice ages based on the beat frequency between a 23,000 year time for axis precession, and the 42,000 year time for axis tilt variation. Milanković used this revised precession time because the ellipse precesses, and thus the weather-related precession of the axis is 23,000 years instead of 25,770 years. The beat frequency is found as follows:

51,000 = 23,000 x 42,000 / (42000-23000).

As it happens neither Croll’s nor Milanković’s was accepted in their own lifetimes. Despite mounting evidence that there were regular ice ages, it was hard to believe that these small causes could produce such large effects. Then, in a 1976 study (Hayes, Imbrie, and Shackleton) demonstrated clear climate variations based on the mud composition from New York and Arizona. The variations followed all four of the Milankocitch cycles.

Southern hemisphere ice is growing, something that confounds CO2-centric experts

Southern hemisphere ice is growing, something that confounds CO2-centric experts

Further confirmation came from studying the antarctic ice, above. You can clearly see the 23,000 year cycle of precession, the 41,000 year cycle of tilt, the 51,000 year beat cycle, and also a 100,000 year cycle that appears to correspond to 100,000 year changes in the degree of elliptic-ness of the orbit. Our orbit goes from near circular to quite elliptic (6.8%) with a cycle time effectively of 100,000 years. It is currently 1.7% elliptic and decreasing fast. This, along with the decrease in earth tilt suggests that we are soon heading to an ice age. According to Croll, a highly eccentric orbit leads to warming because the minor access of the ellipse is reduced when the orbit is lengthened. We are now heading to a less-eccentric orbit; for more details go here; also for why the orbit changes and why there is precession.

We are currently near the end of a 7,000 year warm period. The one major thing that keeps maintaining this period seems to be that our precession is such that we are closest to the sun at nearly the winter solstice. In a few thousand years all the factors should point towards global cooling, and we should begin to see the glaciers advance. Already the antarctic ice is advancing year after year. We may come to appreciate the CO2 produced by cows and Chinese coal-burning as these may be all that hold off the coming ice age.

Robert Buxbaum, November 16, 2018.

Global warming and the president’s Resolute desk

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In the summer of 2016, the Crystal Serenity, a cruse ship passed through the Northwest passage, going from the Pacific to the Atlantic above the Canadian arctic circle. It was a first for a cruise ship, but the first time any modern ship made the passage, it was 162 years ago, and the ship was wooden and unmanned. It was the British Resolute; wood from that ship was used to make the President’s main desk — one used by the last four presidents. And thereby hangs a tale of good global warming, IMHO.

President Trump meets with college presidents at the Resolute desk. Originally the front had portraits of Queen Victoria and President Hayes. Those are gone; the eagle on the front is an addition, as is the bottom stand.

President Trump meets with college presidents at the Resolute desk. Originally the front had portraits of Queen Victoria and President Hayes. Those are gone; the eagle on the front is an addition, as is the bottom stand. The desk is now 2″ taller than originally. 

The world today is warmer than it was in 1900. But, what is not generally appreciated is that, in 1900 the world was warmer than In 1800; that in 1800 it was warmer than in 1700; and that, in 1640, it was so cold there were regular fairs on the frozen river Themes. By the 1840s there were enough reports of global warming that folks in England thought the northwest passage might have opened at last. In 1845 the British sent two ships, the Erebus and the Terror into the Canadian Arctic looking for the passage. They didn’t make it. They and their crews were lost and not seen again until 2014. In hopes of finding them though, the US and Britain sent other ships, including the Resolute under the command of captain Edward Belcher.

The Resolute was specially made to withstand the pressure of ice. Like the previous ships, and the modern cruise ship, it entered the passage from the Pacific during the peak summer thaw. Like the ships before, the Resolute and a partner ship got stuck in the ice — ice that was not quite stationary, but nearly so, The ships continued to move with the ice, but at an unbearably slow pace. After a year and a half captain Belcher had moved a few hundred miles, but had had enough. He abandoned his ships and walked out of Canada to face courts martial in England (English captains were supposed to “go down with the ship”). Belcher was acquitted; the ice continued to move, and the ships moved with it. One ship sank, but the Resolute, apparently unscathed, passed through to the Atlantic. Without captain or crew, she was the first ship in recorded history to make the passage, something that would not happen again till the Nautilus nuclear submarine did it under the ice, 100 years later.

 

The ghost ship Resolute was found in September 1855, five years after she set sail, by captain Buddington of the American whaler, George Henry. She was floating, unmanned, 1200 miles from where captain Belcher had left her. And according to the law of the sea, she belonged to Buddington and his crew to use as they saw fit. But the US was inching to war with Britain, an outgrowth of the Crimean war and seized Russo-American property. Franklin Pierce thought it would help to return the ship as a sign of friendship — to break the ice, as it were. A proposal for funds was presented to congress and passed; the ship was bought, towed to the Brooklyn Navy yard for refitting, and returned to Britain as a gift. The gift may have worked: war with Britain was averted, and the seized property was returned. Then again, Britain went on to supply the confederacy early in the Civil War. None-the-less, it was a notable ship, and a notable gift, and when it was broken up, Parliament decided to have two “friendship desks” made of its timbers. One desk was presented to President Hayes, the other to Queen Victoria. One of these desks sits the British Naval museum at Portsmouth; its American cousin serves Donald Trump in the Oval office as it has served many president before him. It has been used by Coolidge, Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama before him — a reminder that global warming can be good, in both senses. If you are interested in the other presidents’ desks, I wrote a review of them here.

As for the reason for the global warming of the mid 1800s, It seems that climate is chaotic. ON a related note, I have proposed that we make a more-permanent northwest passage by cutting thorough one of the islands in northern Canada. If you want to travel the Northwest passage in 2017, there is another cruise scheduled, but passage is sold out.

Robert Buxbaum, March 16, 2017.

Thinking the unthinkable

Do you know how you go about thinking the unthinkable?

 

With an ithberg, of course.

 

Robert Buxbaum. April 12, 2016. I thought it was time for another “dad joke.” Besides, the Titanic sank on April 14th. I spend a fair about of time thinking the unthinkable. On a vaguely similar note:

After Boris died, everyone gathered at his funeral.

The minister started to speak: “He was a model husband, a decent man, a terrific father..”

The widow then makes a motion for her son to come to her.

“What is it mother?” he whispers.

“Dear, go check the casket, I think we’re at the wrong funeral…”

Why are glaciers blue

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i recently returned from a cruse trip to Alaska and, as is typical for such, a highlight of the trip was a visit to Alaska’s glaciers, in our case Hubbard Glacier, Glacier bay, and Mendenhall Glacier. All were blue — bright blue, as were the small icebergs that broke off. Glacier blocks only 2 feet across were bright blue like the glaciers themselves.

Hubbard Glacier, Alaska. Note how blue the ice is

Hubbard Glacier, Alaska. My photo. Note how blue the ice is

What made this interesting/ surprising is that I’ve seen ice sculptures that are 5 foot thick or more, and they are not significantly blue. They have a very slight tinge, but are generally more colorless than glass to my ability to tell. I asked the park rangers why the glaciers were blue, but was given no satisfactory answer. The claim was that glacier ice contained small air bubbles that scattered light the same way that air did. Another park ranger claimed that water is blue by nature, so of course the glaciers were too. The “proof” to this was that the sea was blue. Neither of these seem quite true to me, though there seamed some grains of truth. Sea water, I notice, is sort of blue, but isn’t this shade of blue, certainly not in areas that I’ve lived. Instead, sea water is a rather grayish similar to mud and sea-weeds that I’d expect to find on the sea floor. What’s more, if you look through the relatively clear water of a swimming-pool water to the white-tile bottom, you see only a slight shade of blue-green, even at the 9 foot depth where the light you see has passed through 18 feet of water. This is far more water than an iceberg thickness, and the color is nowhere near as pure blue and the intensity nowhere near as strong.

Plymouth, MI Ice sculpture -- the ice is fairly clear, like swimming pool water

Plymouth, MI Ice sculpture — the ice is fairly clear, like swimming pool water

As for the bubble explanation, it doesn’t seem quite right, either. The bubble size would be non-uniform, with many quite large resulting in a mix of scattered colors — an off white– something seen with the sky of mars. Our earth sky is a purer blue, but this is not because of scattering off of ice-crystals, dust or any other small particles, but rather scattering off the air molecules themselves. The clear blue of glaciers, and of overturned icebergs, suggests (to me) a single-size scattering entity, larger than air molecules, but much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. My preferred entity would be a new compound, a clathrate structure compound, that would be formed from air and ice at high pressures.

An overturned ice-burg is remarkably blue: far bluer than an Ice sculpture. I claim clathrates are the reason.

An overturned ice-burg is remarkably blue: far bluer than an Ice sculpture. I claim clathrates are the reason.

Sea-water forms clathrate compounds with natural gas at high pressures found at great depth. My thought is that similar compounds form between ice and one or more components of air (nitrogen, oxygen, or perhaps argon). Though no compounds of this sort have been quite identified, all these gases are reasonably soluble in water so that suggestion isn’t entirely implausible. The clathrates would be spheres, bigger than air molecules and thus should have more scattering power than the original molecules. An uneven distribution would explain the observation that the blue of glaciers is not uniform, but instead has deeper and lighter blue edges and stripes. Perhaps some parts of the glacier were formed at higher pressures one could expect that these would form more clathrate compounds, and thus more blue. One sees the most intense blue in overturned icebergs — the parts that were under the most pressure.

Robert Buxbaum, October 12, 2015. By the way, some of Alaska’s glaciers are growing and others shrinking. The rangers claimed this was the bad effect of global warming: that the shrinking glaciers should be growing and the growing ones shrinking. They also worried that despite Alaska temperatures reaching 40° below reasonably regularly, it was too warm (for whom?). The lowest recorded temperature in Fairbanks was -66°F in 1961.

Patterns in climate; change is the only constant

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There is a general problem when looking for climate trends: you have to look at weather data. That’s a problem because weather data goes back thousands of years, and it’s always changing. As a result it’s never clear what start year to use for the trend. If you start too early or too late the trend disappears. If you start your trend line in a hot year, like in the late roman period, the trend will show global cooling. If you start in a cold year, like the early 1970s, or the small ice age (1500 -1800) you’ll find global warming: perhaps too much. Begin 10-15 years ago, and you’ll find no change in global temperatures.

Ice coverage data shows the same problem: take the Canadian Arctic Ice maximums, shown below. If you start your regression in 1980-83, the record ice year (green) you’ll see ice loss. If you start in 1971, the year of minimum ice (red), you’ll see ice gain. It might also be nice to incorporate physics thought a computer model of the weather, but this method doesn’t seem to help. Perhaps that’s because the physics models generally have to be fed coefficients calculated from the trend line. Using the best computers and a trend line showing ice loss, the US Navy predicted, in January 2006, that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013. It didn’t happen; a new prediction is 2016 — something I suspect is equally unlikely. Five years ago the National Academy of Sciences predicted global warming would resume in the next year or two — it didn’t either. Garbage in -garbage out, as they say.

Arctic Ice in Northern Canada waters, 1970-2014 from icecanada.ca 2014 is not totally in yet. What year do you start when looking for a trend?

Arctic Ice in Northern Canada waters, 1971-2014 from the Canadian ice service 2014 is not totally in yet , but is likely to exceed 2013. If you are looking for trends, in what year do you start?

The same trend problem appears with predicting sea temperatures and el Niño, a Christmastime warming current in the Pacific ocean. This year, 2013-14, was predicted to be a super El Niño, an exceptionally hot, stormy year with exceptionally strong sea currents. Instead, there was no el Niño, and many cities saw record cold — Detroit by 9 degrees. The Antarctic ice hit record levels, stranding a ship of anti warming activists. There were record few hurricanes.  As I look at the Pacific sea temperature from 1950 to the present, below, I see change, but no pattern or direction: El Nada (the nothing). If one did a regression analysis, the slope might be slightly positive or negative, but r squared, the significance, would be near zero. There is no real directionality, just noise if 1950 is the start date.

El Niño and La Niña since 1950. There is no sign that they are coming more often, or stronger. Nor is there evidence even that the ocean is warming.

El Niño and La Niña since 1950. There is no sign that they are coming more often, or stronger. Nor is clear evidence that the ocean is warming.

This appears to be as much a fundamental problem in applied math as in climate science: when looking for a trend, where do you start, how do you handle data confidence, and how do you prevent bias? A thought I’ve had is to try to weight a regression in terms of the confidence in the data. The Canadian ice data shows that the Canadian Ice Service is less confident about their older data than the new; this is shown by the grey lines. It would be nice if some form of this confidence could be incorporated into the regression trend analysis, but I’m not sure how to do this right.

It’s not so much that I doubt global warming, but I’d like a better explanation of the calculation. Weather changes: how do you know when you’re looking at climate, not weather? The president of the US claimed that the science is established, and Prince Charles of England claimed climate skeptics were headless chickens, but it’s certainly not predictive, and that’s the normal standard of knowledge. Neither country has any statement of how one would back up their statements. If this is global warming, I’d expect it to be warm.

Robert Buxbaum, Feb 5, 2014. Here’s a post I’ve written on the scientific method, and on dealing with abnormal statistics. I’ve also written about an important recent statistical fraud against genetically modified corn. As far as energy policy, I’m inclined to prefer hydrogen over batteries, and nuclear over wind and solar. The president has promoted the opposite policy — for unexplained, “scientific” reasons.

Ocean levels down from 3000 years ago; up from 20,000 BC

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In 2006 Al Gore claimed that industry was causing 2-5°C of global warming per century, and that this, in turn, would cause the oceans to rise by 8 m by 2100. Despite a record cold snap this week, and record ice levels in the antarctic, the US this week banned all incandescent light bulbs of 40W and over in an effort to stop the tragedy. This was a bad move, in my opinion, for a variety of reasons, not least because it seems the preferred replacement, compact fluorescents, produce more pollution than incandescents when you include disposal of the mercury and heavy metals they contain. And then there is the weak connection between US industry and global warming.

From the geologic record, we know that 2-5° higher temperatures have been seen without major industrial outputs of pollution. These temperatures do produce the sea level rises that Al Gore warns about. Temperatures and sea levels were higher 3200 years ago (the Trojan war period), without any significant technology. Temperatures and sea levels were also higher 1900 years ago during the Roman warming. In those days Pevensey Castle (England), shown below, was surrounded by water.

During Roman times Pevensey Castle (at right) was surrounded by water at high tide.If Al Gore is right, it will be surrounded by water again soon.

During Roman times the world was warmer, and Pevensey Castle (right) was surrounded by water;. If Al Gore is right about global warming, it will be surrounded by water again by 2100.

From a plot of sea level and global temperature, below, we see that during cooler periods the sea was much shallower than today: 140 m shallower 20,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, for example. In those days, people could walk from Asia to Alaska. Climate, like weather appears to be cyclically chaotic. I don’t think the last ice age ended because of industry, but it is possible that industry might help the earth to warm by 2-5°C by 2100, as Gore predicts. That would raise the sea levels, assuming there is no new ice age.

Global temperatures and ocean levels rise and sink together

Global temperatures and ocean levels change by a lot; thousands of years ago.

While I doubt there is much we could stop the next ice age — it is very hard to change a chaotic cycle — trying to stop global cooling seems more worthwhile than trying to stop warming. We could survive a 2 m rise in the seas, e.g. by building dykes, but a 2° of cooling would be disastrous. It would come with a drastic reduction in crops, as during the famine year of 1814. And if the drop continued to a new ice age, that would be much worse. The last ice age included mile high glaciers that extended over all of Canada and reached to New York. Only the polar bear and saber-toothed tiger did well (here’s a Canada joke, and my saber toothed tiger sculpture).

The good news is that the current global temperature models appear to be wrong, or highly over-estimated. Average global temperatures have not changed in the last 16 years, though the Chinese keep polluting the air (for some reason, Gore doesn’t mind Chinese pollution). It is true that arctic ice extent is low, but then antarctic ice is at record high levels. Perhaps it’s time to do nothing. While I don’t want more air pollution, I’d certainly re-allow US incandescent light bulbs. In cases where you don’t know otherwise, perhaps the wisest course is to do nothing.

Robert Buxbaum, January 8, 2014

Lets make a Northwest Passage

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The Northwest passage opened briefly last year, and the two years before allowing some minimal shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific by way of the Arctic ocean, but was closed in 2013 because there was too much ice. I’ve a business / commercial thought though: we could make a semi-permanent northwest passage if we dredged a canal across the Bootha peninsula at Taloyoak, Nunavut (Canada).Map of Northern Canada showing cities and the Perry Channel, the current Northwest passage. A canal north of the Bootha Peninsula would seem worthwhile.

Map of Northern Canada showing cities and the Perry Channel, the current Northwest passage. A canal north or south of the Bootha Peninsula would seem worthwhile.

 

 

As things currently stand, ships must sail 500 miles north of Taloyoak, and traverse the Parry Channel. Shown below is a picture of ice levels in August 2012 and 2013. The proposed channels could have been kept open even in 2013 providing a route for valuable shipping commerce. As a cheaper alternative, one could maintain the Hudson Bay trading channel at Fort Ross, between the Bootha Peninsula and Somerset Island. This is about 250 miles north of Taloyoak, but still 250 miles south of the current route.

Arctic Ice August 2012-2013; both Taloyoak and Igloolik appear open this year.

The NW passage was open by way of the Perry Channel north of Somerset Island and Baffin Island in 2012, but not 2013. The proposed channels could have been kept open even this year.

Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum, October 2013. Here are some random thoughts on Canadian crime, the true north, and the Canadian pastime (Ice fishing).

Arctic and Antarctic Ice Increases; Antarctic at record levels

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Good news if you like ice. I’m happy to report that there has been a continued increase in the extent of both Antarctic and Arctic Ice sheets, in particular the Antarctic sheet. Shown below is a plot of Antarctic ice size (1981-2010) along with the average (the black line), the size for 2012 (dotted line), and the size for 2013 so far. This year (2013) it’s broken new records. Hooray for the ice.

Antarctic ice at record size in 2013, after breaking records in 2012

Antarctic ice at record size in 2013, after a good year in 2012

The arctic ice has grown too, and though it’s not at record levels, the Arctic ice growth  is more visually dramatic, see photo below. It’s also more welcome — to polar bears at least. It’s not so welcome if you are a yachter, or a shipping magnate trying to use the Northwest passage to get your products to market cheaply.

Arctic Ice August 2012-2013

Arctic Ice August 2012-2013

The recent (October 2013) global warming report from NASA repeats the Arctic melt warnings from previous reports, but supports that assertion with an older satellite picture — the one from 2006. That was a year when the Arctic had even less ice than in 2012, but the date should be a warning. From the picture, you’d think it’s an easy sail through the Northwest passage; some 50 yachts tried it this summer, and none got through, though some got half way. It’s a good bet you can buy those ships cheap.

I should mention that only the Antarctic data is relevant to Al Gore’s 1996 prediction of a 20 foot rise in the sea level by 2100. Floating ice, as in the arctic, displaces the same amount of mass as water. Ice floats but has the same effect on sea level as if it were melted; it’s only land-based ice that affects sea level. While there is some growth seen in land-ice in the arctic photos above — compare Greenland and Canada on the 2 photos, there is also a lot of glacier ice loss in Norway (upper left corners). The ocean levels are rising, but I don’t think this is the cause, and it’s not rising anywhere near as fast as Al Gore said: more like 1.7mm/year, or 6.7 inches per century. I don’t know what the cause is, BTW. Perhaps I’ll post speculate on this when I have a good speculation.

Other good news: For the past 15 years global warming appears to have taken a break. And the ozone hole shrunk in 2012 to near record smallness. Yeah ozone. The most likely model for all this, in my opinion, is to view weather as chaotic and fractal; that is self-similar. Calculus works on this, just not the calculus that’s typically taught in school. Whatever the cause, its good news, and welcome.

Robert E. Buxbaum, October 21, 2013. Here are some thoughts about how to do calculus right, and how to do science right; that is, look at the data first; don’t come in with a hypothesis.