May 29 2008

The Frozen Mindset On Global Warming

Published by at 10:29 am under All General Discussions,Global Warming

It is just hilariously ironic that a tour of the Arctic Ice melt, due to Global Warming, is now caught in and ice pack not seen in four years:

From the Globe and Mail article:

I am on the bridge of the massive Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, and the tension is palpable. We have hit ice – thick ice.

The ice master studies the mountains of white packed around the ship while the 24,000-horsepower diesel engines work at full throttle to open a path. The ship rises slowly onto the barrier of ice, crushes it and tosses aside blocks the size of small cars as if they were ice cubes in a glass. It creeps ahead a few metres, then comes to a halt, its bow firmly wedged in the ice. After doing this for two days, the ship can go no farther.

The ice master confers with the captain, who makes a call to the engine room. The engines are shut down. He turns to those of us watching the drama unfold, and we are shocked by his words: “Now, only nature can help this ship.” We are doomed to drift.

What irony. I am a passenger on one of the most powerful icebreakers in the world, travelling through the Northwest Passage – which is supposed to become almost ice-free in a time of global warming, the next shipping route across the top of the world – and here we are, stuck in the ice, engines shut down, bridge deserted. Only time and tide can free us.

The ice extent in both the northern and southern hemispheres is growing, with this year being a record for the southern hemisphere:

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the April 2008 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, which is measured from passive microwave instruments onboard NOAA satellites, was below the 1979-2000 mean, but greater than the previous four years.

Meanwhile, the April 2008 Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent was much above the 1979-2000 mean. This was the largest sea ice extent in April (17.5 percent above the 1979-2000 mean) over the 30-year historical period, surpassing the previous record set in 1982 by 4.1 percent. Sea ice extent for April has increased at a rate of 2.5 percent per decade.

Just a reminder here about “global” warming concepts.  They are built upon the idea ever increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (which due to the physics of chemistry are relatively consistent across the globe) increase temperature by trapping heat.   While there can be some regional variations, they cannot be too disparate for these models to be true.  Elements within a gas disperse to a uniform distribution.  While CO2 levels rise in one area they will rise across the globe as the CO2 distributes basically evenly.  The Southern Hemisphere should not be seeing this enormous amount of ice development over 30 years if the warming was due to gas distributions in our atmosphere. 

A few facts for the zealots from the Church of Al Gore to ponder as they grasp onto their own variant of ‘creationism’ – where the Earth God is angry at humanity for its exploitation of nature!

9 responses so far

9 Responses to “The Frozen Mindset On Global Warming”

  1. WWS says:

    As I said in a post yesterday, the more I research this the more apprehensive I get. Cycle 24 just isn’t starting – it’s tried to start and has fizzled out twice already.

    It’s not just that the lack of activity on the sun is predicting a big freeze-up; the freeze up started over a year ago and everyone is having to really try hard not to notice. The northwest passage closed again – snow in Baghdad for the first time in a century – temperatures are already dropping, and dropping with a vengeance.

    Maybe when Niagra Falls freezes for the first time since 1911 people will start to notice. Not so coincidentally, 1911 was in the middle of a previous period of diminished solar activity.

    And CO2 is just a complete red herring that has nothing to do with anything.

  2. AJStrata says:

    WWS,

    To be fair, the CO2 levels may help us avoid a large freeze up. Hard to tell, their impact is really so minor. If they attenuate the cooling by 10% that is a big deal.

  3. WWS says:

    Very ironic if our only hope for the future ends up being the need to burn as much coal as fast as we possibly can.

    Note to Sharon Stone: now THAT’S Karma!

  4. crosspatch says:

    There is a larger issue concerning CO2. At the start of the Cambrian, earth’s CO2 was about 7000 parts per million and the average temperature is believed to have been about 22C. Over time the CO2 has been taken out and the CO2 level dropped over time to a recent (geologically) record low of around 275 parts per million. When the CO2 was over 4000 parts per million, earth experienced a major ice age. If CO2 levels were to get much lower, many plant species would begin to go extinct. In fact, the demise of earth as a habitable planet would begin with the depletion of CO2 and the plants going extinct.

    CO2 increases the productivity of plants and increase food production. I fail to understand how these “scientists” can say that a doubling of CO2 to about 800ppm will lead to “runaway” greenhouse heading when we had several times that amount in the past and never experienced greater than 22C.

    Rather than go back and look at the past to see what the climate was like when we had various higher amounts of CO2, they simply plug numbers into their “models” and make their grab for funding and research on that basis. My question to them would be “what was the climate like in the past when CO2 levels were twice what they are now”? Not, “what do your models do when you double CO2”.

    They have everyone hoodwinked.

    http://climatesci.org/wp-content/uploads/fig-2-co2.jpg

  5. MerlinOS2 says:

    I saw a couple of stories earlier today where in one there is now a lawsuit starting to put the walrus on a threatened listing similar to just what happened to the polar bears and also a scare story on frozen methane we are looking to use could cause a global warming spike of catastrophic proportions.

    More games and goal post moving.

  6. crosspatch says:

    The issue of hydrate vaporization is real and has probably happened in the past. If ocean levels drop enough to relieve pressure on the hydrates then it might not take much more than a small earthquake, underwater landslide, or meteor strike to disturb them and release billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere. Methane a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is. That could pretty much end an ice age if enough is released.

  7. norm says:

    one question…why can’t you produce some peer reviewed science to back up your claims? oh that’s right…there isn’t any.

  8. WWS says:

    Actually, here’s a page that sums up quite a few of the “peer reviewed” (which means “members of our club”) papers that have been published. See the list of references at the end of this page for the sources and the publications.

    http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=130

    So now that you know that there ARE quite a few “peer reviewed papers” out there, how come there is so much pressure from the orthodox believers to hide these from view?

    Not one of the warmists will address the issues that these papers and these scientists make. Rather, just like Norm here, they pretend that this work does not exist.

    Just why is that? Are these ideas really too dangerous for anyone to discuss? That seems to be what the warmists think.

  9. WWS says:

    and here’s a published article from Space Weather, VOL. 4, S09005, doi:10.1029/2005SW000207, 2006, which predicted exactly the type of cycle we’re seeing ( in stark contrast to every NASA prediction) and which alo predicts 3 very slow solar cycles over the next 33 years.

    http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24Clilverd.pdf

    There’s far too many big words and equations in this one for someone like Norm to ever bother with, so I know he’ll continue to be a good warmist and follow the gameplan, which is never respond to any issue raised by these scientists and continue to pretend their work does not exist.