ARCTIC SEA ICE –Polar Dawn-Dusk (Updated Friday)

There are still three weeks before the sun actually rises at the Pole, but the sky is already starting to brighten. Sunrises linger a long time when the day is six months long, and now is when we start to get our first peeks at the condition of the ice. Unfortunately we have already seen two cameras knocked out of action, and the other two have obscured lenses. However even with O-buoy 15 we have the ice-thickness data from co-located Mass-Balance Buoy 2015G up to February 17, and see the ice was thick and getting thicker when whatever-happened occurred.

My guess is that a pressure ridge piled up the ice, and buried the buoys. We’ll have to get a good satellite shot to see the condition of the ice in the area near 83.33N, 175.100W. There may also be some leads involved, which will be rapidly freezing over with temperatures well below the freezing point of salt-water.

The DMI Maps show high pressure again building north of Canada, but weakened by some Pacific air pulled north which develops a weak low pressure. The general south wind over Barents Sea has reversed to the north, but for the most part the Pole is gathering a new pool of coldness.

Though temperatures are colder they remain above normal. The ice-extent graph that people love to focus on remains well below normal. This may be a lot of fun over the next few weeks, especially if the winds remain north in Barents Sea, and ice slides south in that sea. In 2014 it led to a late maximum-ice-extent, which embarrassed a few who had proclaimed a record low extent too early. At this late date the small peaks and valleys in the graph don’t mean much, as they usually involve thin ice at the very edges. A large part of recent increases has been due to ice outside of the Arctic Ocean, in the Sea of Okhotsk off Russia’s east coast. Strong, very cold west winds have extended that ice far out to sea, yet it is for the most part a mere skim a foot  or two thick. Sea-ice from Bering Strait gets shoved south down Russia’s east coast the same way ice gets swept south down the east coasts of Greenland and Labrador, but the Sea of Okhotsk is tucked away behind a string of islands, and is able to grow a brief skim of ice nearly every winter, which is usually gone by May. Perhaps it has an effect in terms of “albedo” equations, but I never can understand why it gets included in such equations while sea-ice off the east coast of the USA (For example in Delaware Bay last winter) isn’t. Also snow cover often isn’t included, especially when it is a here-today-gone-tomorrow snow over southern landscapes. It seems to me that if you are going to take the albedo effect seriously you need to include events over southern landscapes where the sun is especially bright.

I like to compare the above map of ice thickness with last year’s, at the same date, to see how the winter’s individuality has effected the growth of ice. In fact I’ll do so below.

2105 is to the left and 2016 to the right.

In a general sense it seems less ice has been exported from the Laptev and East Siberian side over to the Alaskan and Canadian side. More ice has been pushed north in Barents Sea, and Kara Sea has exported more ice than usual to the north, and has had the polynyas of open water usually seen on the coasts of the Laptev Sea, this winter.

What impressed me last year was how effective the “blob” was at sending milder water north to melt the thick ice north of Alaska from the bottom up. The reds and yellows in the above map looked like they could stand up to an onslaught, but didn’t. The maps below compare February 28 with September 9. (While much ice was melted, I should note some was pushed north.)

The question this year will be: Will the warm “Blob” persist? It does seem to be weaker, but waters up towards Bering Strait remain above normal.That backwards letter “C” of orange in the North Pacific, surrounding blue, is the signature of a warm PDO. I really flubbed my forecast, for I thought the warm “Blob” would be much briefer, and the PDO would have turned cold again by now. (That is what occurred in the past, but the past did not have a “Quiet Sun” throwing a wrench into the works.) I feel very reluctant to guess what the above map will look like a year from now, especially as the El Nina may very well collapse into a La Nina. Or will it?  Below is a graph of the PDO. That first peak was suppose to be the “spike”, according to me, and it was suppose to be back in the blue by now.

You’d be amazed what a difference a cold PDO made, in terms of how much sea-ice melted north of Bering Strait, just before this warm period started in 2014.  If I get time I’ll post some maps later.  Oh heck, I’ll do it now. Left is September 9 2013, and right is September 9 2015.

In other words, keep an eye on the Pacific.

I hope to add more later.

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I think this may be an amusing melt-season, though hard to bear at first, for the Death-spiral crowd will see signs that will encourage them, and they’ll be in full chorus and likely call fellows like me all sorts of bad words, before things flip around and they have to take back what they said. That will be amusing, because nobody likes to take back what they say, and Alarmists are even worse than most.

One thing that should please Alarmists, and contribute to less ice in the Barents Sea, is that AMO, which has been wobbling like a top (likely because it is towards the end of its “warm” phase and about to become “cold”), has swung back strongly “warm”.The AMO seems likely to remain “warm”, and be less of a “spike” than  the last warm spell, as there is no sign of it yet falling, using the above graph. But that is where it gets interesting, for this AMO is different. Just as the current El Nino is an El Nino Madoki  (“Madoki” is, I understand, a Japanese word that means “the same but different”), this stage of the AMO should likely be called an “Warm AMO Madoki”.

Joseph D’Aleo posted about this on his blog on the Weatherbell site. To simplify his more thorough explanation, a more usual and typical warm AMO has water temperatures describing the backwards “C” like this: Notice how warm it typically is south of Iceland. But the current reality shows it is cold south of Iceland:Just to confuse things a bit more, there are differing ways of measuring the AMO. The grand old master of hurricanes, Bill Gray (now passing the baton on to Dr. Klotzbach) adds the factor of barometric pressure to sea surface temperatures, and while his graph usually is much like NOAA’s, recently it has plunged towards “cold” as NOAA spikes “warm”. (Just be wary about this, so you don’t get sucked into arguing about whether the AMO is currently warm or cold, when it is actually just two different ways of looking at the same thing and the same data.)

In conclusion, I think we are seeing a new and different situation, likely brought on by the “Quiet Sun”. Just when we think we have the cycles figured out, a wrench gets thrown into the works. Perhaps a good analogy is the slosh a small child can get going in a bathtub by moving his butt back and forth. The slosh is very predictable, but when the mother’s footsteps approach the child changes the frequency of the butt-sliding, and the slosh is disturbed and will hopefully vanish, when the mother pokes her head in the door. Currently the “Quiet Sun” is altering the frequency of the “butt-sliding”. (Aren’t you glad to see science made so poetic?) In any case, I think few have a clue what will happen next, and we are in for some surprises.

One thing I will be watching for is much less sunshine up at the Pole. I noticed this last summer. Although most of the melt comes from underneath, it does make a difference if there is less sun and more snow at the top, especially in terms of “albedo”, which can effect the local air temperatures even on a sunny day.

Here is the February 26 (most recent) NASA map of sea-ice. What is interesting is the light orange line, which gives you an idea of how much the sea ice can expand in Barents Sea when the AMO flips (Also notice the now slightly above-normal ice across the globe in the Sea of Okhotsk; it was well below normal only a month or so ago.)

By the way, there is some concern about the accuracy of the NOAA and NASA maps:

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/noaa-is-losing-arctic-ice/

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FRIDAY UPDATE  —Expect Whiplash—

Already I’m seeing some Alarmist “I told you so’s” as I peruse various websites, and I can’t say I see any reason to deny them their day in the sun. Their conclusions may be all wrong, but this is a very mild period we are experiencing, in terms or the world’s temperatures, and the levels of sea-ice are quite low in both hemispheres.  The “Sunshine Hours” site  produces some good graphs of sea-ice extent:

https://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/

The graph below shows that the combination of sea-ice in the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere reached a record low  level briefly,  this winter.The low total was achieved because Antarctic ice dropped from record high levels last year. This may merely be due to the warming effect of the El Nino to the north, or it may be a more significant sign, and not of warming and a “Death Spiral” in the arctic.

I haven’t heard a good explanation, but for some reason when ice increases in the the Antarctic it tends to decrease in the Arctic, and vice versa. The fact the levels of ice in the Antarctic are dropping may be a sign of a flip about to occur to the north. This summer may be the last hurrah for the “Death Spiral” crowd, before the whiplash hits.

The Weatherbell site has a great selection of maps and graphs produced by Dr. Ryan Maue. A seven day free trial is available.   http://models.weatherbell.com/

One great graph is the graph of world temperatures created from the “intial” data used for model runs. It avoids all the silliness of “adjustments”, which corrupts other temperature graphs, because the models are based on actual data from actual weather stations, and they want to make sure that data is as accurate as possible, or else the model will screw up even more than chaos already causes it to. After all, a mere butterfly flapping its wings can have repercussions in the future, so the last thing they want to do before running a model is “adjust” reality. Therefore this graph is likely one of the most accurate we have, based on surface temperatures.

This graph is showing the current El Nino has the planet more than a degree above normal, which is a record for recent times. It is warmer than the 1997 El Nino.

I will have my nose rubbed against this graph by certain people I debate, I’m sure. The thing of it is, a whiplash is liable to occur here as well, as we flip from El Nino  to La Nina. On his blog at Weatherbell Joe Bastardi raised my eyebrows by showing one of the better models was showing a flip of major proportions.

To tell you the truth, I think the model must be overdoing it. As I recall, the strongest La Nina we have on record is around -1.8.  If it really got to -2.64 we’d be in “unprecedented” territory.

Of course, even if a major La Nina caused world temperatures to drop two degrees, once the word “unprecidented” is involved the Alarmist will pull out their “cooling due to warming”  card. Let them. It is then they look particularly silly.

My suspicion is that the whiplash is due to the quiet sun, and isn’t “unprecidented” because it likely happened during the Maunder Minimum. However we have next to no records from that time, and some have the attitude that if it wasn’t recorded by modern gadgets it never happened.

I am thinking that the way this winter has flip-flopped to and fro between extreme mildness and extreme cold in my area (New Hampshire) this winter does have a sort of whiplash feel to it. I continue to be nervous about a final big blizzard, for the “Blizzard of 1888” occurred after a winter with many mild periods, on March 17.

The last “nudge” up at the Pole did bring some cold air our way, though a lot got shunted east into the Atlantic south of Greenland.  The cold air seems more broken into blobs as spring approaches. I think one is suppose to  speak of “shortening wavelengths,” but I liked the meteorologist Eliot Abrams’ way of called the blobs of cold”bowling balls”.

The DMI maps show cold is building again at the Pole, and according to my “nudge hypothesis” that means we should get a break from arctic outbreaks. It was 12°F yesterday morning and 17°F this morning  here, but by next Wednesday it is suppose to hit 60°F. (Nudge hypotheses verified.)

The wind has swung back around to the south in Barents Sea, but so far some sort of front seems to  have set up and prevented a true nudge from charging across the Pole.

Because the wind has swung around to the south, the sea-ice that was being spread out in Barents Sea is likely being all crammed back to the north. With sea water  and temperatures so cold up there, the actual amount of ice is likely the same, but the “extent” is less. 

 

LOCAL VIEW –THE BALLET OF A BROOK–

It is Friday night, and after the week I’ve been through I’m ready to tell responsibility to go to hell. I figure that is OK, if I have done “responsibility” all week. It is Monday morning that winds you up in trouble, if you tell responsibility to go to hell..

Last week some of my excellent employees were unavailable for work, so I had to step in and cover for them. Considering they had recently covered for me, as I had a kidney removed, I am not about to whine much. But I will whine just a little bit, because being post-operative reminded me of something I’d nearly forgotten: This world doesn’t need me. I can kick back, and everything doesn’t collapse in a heap. I sort of liked kicking back, but last week I abruptly had to stop it.  My first real vacation in fifteen years was over.

Most people seem to need a vacation to recover from a vacation. They have no desire to return to the rat race, because they have fleetingly seen life can be much, much better. The revelation is downright traumatic, which is why they need another vacation. They need to reassess. They need to reevaluate what the hell they are suffering for.

It was different for me, because I was craving to get back to work. When the vacation is enforced, due to an operation, you are itching to get back in the saddle. Then, when you are allowed to again do the most simple things, such as sweep a powder of snow from steps, the joy you feel is all out of proportion to the magnitude of the task. Sweeping of the snow is no earth-shaking deed, yet you feel like singing the Hallelujah Chorus.

Yet I too had no desire to return to the rat race. There is something about calling our labor a “rat race” that demeans life. We are missing the point. We are missing the majesty.

When my wife and I started our Farm-childcare nearly a decade ago we hadn’t read “Last Child In The Woods” by Richard Louv or “Simplicity Parenting” by Kim John Payne. But we knew what they knew. Our society is missing the majesty.

It is bad enough when we turn our own lives into a rat race, but when we turn little children’s lives into rat races it is a bridge too far. It violates the sanctity of of an obvious and simple church called “Childhood.” Yet the most loving people do it.  Childhood is suppose to be a sanctuary, but parents and schoolmarms disturb the peace.

Six hundred toys is not peace; it is hectic. It isn’t loving, nor are ballet lessons after organized sports after classes after classes after classes before yoga sessions about serenity. Yet both parents work two jobs, and send innocents to Farm-childcares like mine from 7:00 AM until 6:00 PM, (most of a child’s waking hours), and suffer all this rat-race toil out of a love for those they abuse.

It is a love that is misguided. I am old, and if I am any sort of guide I need to say, “You should put my Farm-childcare out of business. Do you have any idea how much money you could save if you worked less, drove less, prepared your own food, and raised your own kids?”

My wife is usually the one who deals with our customers. I lack tact. But the fact I stay silent sometimes makes me feel like a Caspar Milquetoast.

Fortunately my wife is as radical as I am, and agrees children are better off being allowed the freedom to be young. If a child wants to spend time by a brook, rather than listening to the insipid prattling of elders about ballet, they may very well learn more about ballet from a brook, and more about beauty from a brook, and certainly receive more healing from a brook than all the king’s doctors and all the king’s psychologists can ever provide.

You complain God is silent, but heed you
The sweet music of a burbling brook?
Maybe you buy the video, and do
Your best to cure insomnia, and look
To screens to see blue waters play, and guide
Your children to bleak deserts waterless:
Sessions and sessions, all puffing your pride
When in fact you are deaf, or even less.

I tell you God’s not silent, but you must go
To an actual brook, and do a thing
Called “sit still”, unwax your ears, and then know
What children know. Dare you try listening?
Who made this rat-race, so sure to depress?
The silence of God gives you more, asking less.

ARCTIC SEA ICE –Barents Sea Bafflement–

With the arctic flow so meridional this year there have been a lot of surges of mild air up to the Pole, and the south winds have seemed to repress the formation of ice in Barents Sea. Not that it can’t turn around even at this late date in the winter. For example, look at the three NRL maps below, from the late winter of 2014, and focus in on Svalbard. The maps are from February 20, March 16 and April 4, and show that while the ice was melting away on the Pacific side, it was actually still expanding in Barents Sea.

By April 18 the ice was starting to shrink in Barents Sea, but what blew me away back then was how the extent then fought back, as seen in Maps from May 21 and June 9. (Compare Barents Sea with how the ice vanished on the Pacific side.)

The situation arose in 2014 partly because a lot of ice (including our North Pole Cameras of that year) flowed south to the east of Svalbard, rather than through Fram Strait. But compare the June day above with our current February situation, below.

You can see that in many ways there was more ice in Barents Sea that June than this February. The Alarmists are likely jumping for joy, as it will suggest to them that the “Death Spiral” is at long last upon us, and, because the world is ending, they will not have to get a Real Job. (I have great empathy with not wanting to get a Real Job, because I’ve been there and done that, 40 years ago.)

However before we jump to conclusions, lets compare the first map from February 2014 with our current map. So you don’t have to back track, I’ll do it below.

Actually Barents Sea doesn’t look all that different. The major things that jump out is that there is less ice south of Bering Strait and more ice off the Russian Pacific coast, plus less ice in the Canadian Saint Lawrence.

For all we know, looking at Barents Sea alone, we might see a replay of 2014. Or maybe not. Because my main feeling is that most honest people admit they are baffled about the reasons for the shrinking and growing of that ice.

One of the better things I’ve ever written involved asking for help, as I tried to figure out some answers to the Barents Sea Bafflement. It was actually published over on the WUWT site over two years ago, and got some flattering comments, and some interesting insights.

Author of its Own Demise – musings on the AMO

Yet here it is more than two years later, and I don’t feel I’ve done my homework. I am not much wiser.

Therefore I’ve started to poke about to see if there is any new stuff, any fresh discoveries concerning Barents Sea that a layman like myself can understand. One good site is “Science Matters” by Ron Clutz

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/

I’m starting to look back through his older posts, searching for stuff about Barents Sea, and I’m discovering he’s been able to find more free time than I, and also is smarter than I am and more able to decipher unintelligible papers. Among the papers I’ve bungled across is this one, wherein some fellows think it’s possible to forecast what sea-ice is going to do, over large areas of the Arctic Sea, by modelling how much ice there is at a certain time in Barents Sea. (Or that is what I got from the paper after a quick scan.)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL064359/full

One graphic from that study jumped out at me:

What grabbed my attention was that string of buoys between the north coast of Norway and Svalbard. Cool! Wicked cool! (It is the yellow line on the above map.) That string of buoys measures all sorts of interesting stuff. The buoys measure the flow of Atlantic water into Barents Sea, and the salinity and temperature, and not just at the top, but right down to the bottom, where the flow is the other way.

What baffled me was why I hadn’t heard much about these buoys. It has gotten to a point where even taxi drivers know about the El Nino, and will chat with you about what the water temperatures are off Peru. There are entire websites about the temperatures of the El Nino or La Nina at various depths in the Pacific, but the North Atlantic is seemingly ignored. Have I failed to  pay attention? Or are the people who have the data being stingy with it?

Now, I can understand why certain scientists would want to keep the information gathered by those buoys unintelligible, but I want to have it made palatable to a layman like myself.  The AMO is about to flip back from warm to cold, and when this last happened we had none of our modern gadgets and gizmos, nor satellites, to watch the flip with. As the change occurs I have the sense something very, very wonderful is about to be revealed to us.

Because I run a Farm-childcare, I often am in situations where fellow human just don’t “get it”, (because they happen to be very young). I may say, “C-A-T spells ‘cat’ and B-A-T spells ‘bat’, so what will F-A-T spell?” and nobody can answer. The answer is very, very obvious to me, but not to the short people I’m with.

I think we are in the exact same situation, regarding the AMO and how it flips. The answer is glaringly obvious, but we just don’t see.

In 1950 Continental drift was glaringly obvious. The two sides of the Red Sea are a perfect match, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, yet no one could see the fit until around 1960, when I was seven years old. In like manner something glaringly obvious is looking us in the face, right now.

I suppose I can understand why some lone individual drudging away in some obscure back-room of a college might want to get the credit for the eventual discovery.  Me too. We all want recognition. However the real Creator of what we are about to discover is not we peons, who love seeing the “why” in Nature. So perhaps we shouldn’t claim the credit, when we eventually comprehend what we will feel stupid for not figuring out earlier.

In any case, add “BSO”, which stands for “Barent Sea Opening”, to your Sea-Ice vocabulary, and find ways to make the data gathered accessible and intelligible to laymen. For the fact of the matter is this: The more minds you have working on a problem the more likely you are to solve it. And does it really matter who gets the credit?

It only matters if your focus is money. The problem with focusing on money, and hiding tidbits of truth because you fear some agent of industrial espionage will steal the envisioned “profit”, is that the benefit that might be gained, by sharing ideas, is lost. In fact the real profit is lost. Misers miss what matters.

The exchange of ideas that occurs on the web is beautiful, because most are not in it for the money. Most don’t make a cent. All they want is to see more clearly. For that reason, and not because I want to get rich (though wealth might be nice) I want to learn more and more about the Barents Sea. For, in the end, the real definition of wealth has less to do with income than either Capitalists or Communists ever can imagine, in their gnat-sized dreams.

I prefer to dream big, and exchange ideas with people who wander about the internet studying obscure topics like Sea-Ice and the BSO and the AMO, because they are interested in a non-obscure topic called Truth. Why?  Because the wealth that comes from such study is possessed of an Enormity that makes billionaires look like mice fighting over crumbs.

(Who would ever dream such a deep topic could come spinning off wondering about sea-ice? )

I hope to keep updating this post as I research Barents Sea. I’ll start another sea-ice post to continue my journaling of the Arctic Ocean’s daily doings, but have this post as a sort of notebook collecting any information I can about studies concerning Barents Sea. If anyone knows of good papers or sites, I’m all ears.

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Here is a paper I’m starting to look at. My initial impression is that they cannot see the forest for the trees, but it does do a good job of explaining that the Barents Sea currents are both complex and also variable.

Click to access RMO-2003-1.pdf

 

 

ARCTIC SEA ICE —SIBERIAN SURGE WIPES OUT CAMERAS–

This is just a quick note.

If you watch the ice north of Bering Strait and Wrangles Island during mid February you can see it surges to the west in a major way.  Here is another view of the same:

Unfortunately the sea-ice is likely getting crunched and heaped into jumbles. O-buoy 8b stopped reporting on February 17:And O-buoy 15 went silent on February 23:It would be a sad loss to lose two of our four cameras even before the viewing season started, but it does give us an idea how stormy the winter has been at the Pole, and how mobile the ice has been.

These cameras are tough and built to float, so there is a chance they will be able to reactivate them. Keep your fingers crossed.

LOCAL VIEW –Leave It To Beaver–

It is winter vacation for the schoolkids, but not a vacation at our Farm-childcare, for the kids need something to do and there is no snow. All that is left of the little snow we have had this winter are some shady places where the snow was trodden down and compacted, turned to slush and refrozen,  and became the slick ice one has to be very careful about, when walking over. It is in the distance in the picture below, especially past the gate to the upper right. The amazing thing is that a year ago the snow was nearly up to the upper rail of the fence. What a difference a year makes! I had to snow-blow a path across this playground, last February, for the snow was over the smaller kid’s heads.

The toddlers have no care, crossing the treacherous ice just through the gate to the upper right, because they haven’t far to fall, and wear such muffs of snowsuits that when they hit the ground it only makes a fluffy sound. Older people have farther to fall, and parents tend to be under-dressed because they are coming from work, and I noticed something funny, watching parents cross that particularly treacherous patch of ice, when they pick up their kids at the end of a long and hard work day. They take tiny, little steps, and walk with their arms out. In other words, they walk like a child just learning to walk. Meanwhile their own toddler is long past that stage. They charge across the ice like someone who learned to walk days and days and days ago, and for them it is great fun to fall down.

Older children, who have reached the vast age of six, tend to be more easily bored, and I have to figure out what to do with them, when there is no sledding, and no snow-forts, and no snow-man building. (The option of skating involves skates, which involves logistics I won’t bother go into, beyond saying I have been remiss.) In the end I have a bunch of kids roaming about a stark New England which is known for its rocks.

If there is anything worse than falling on ice it is falling on rocks, and if there is anything worse than falling on rocks it is falling from rocks from a tree.

The risky behavior of kids doesn’t actually bother me all that much, because I figure part of childhood is to fall from various places, and back in my boyhood I felt a bit inferior because the other boys had gotten more stitches than I had. One reason I opened my Farm-childcare was because I felt sorry for modern children, who live a sort of virtual and bubble-wrapped existence, where the only time they are allowed outside it is into a concrete playground more befitting of a prison, or perhaps a kennel, than a childhood. My wife largely agrees with me, but beyond a certain point we do tend to differ. For example, she doesn’t like the idea of boyhood involving stitches. Or girlhood. And therefore the above pictures make me a little nervous. My wife might see some danger in them I don’t, and might even forbid my posting them on our childcare-Facebook-page, because she wouldn’t want parents to needlessly worry.

Apparently I am always causing parents needless worry. What I tend to say is that the worry is stupid. That is why it is called “needless.” However just when I am on the verge of telling a parent exactly that, my wife gives me a certain look, and sometimes a certain kick in the shins under the table. I then remember she is in charge of “Customer Relations.”  I head off to have fun with the kids, and she takes care of the diplomacy.

Actually it is a relief there is no sledding. Even if you take kids to a hill that is practically flat, kids somehow manage to make it dangerous. They will sled standing up, and then standing on each others shoulders. So actually a lack of snow is safer.

The problem is: What to do?  Kids make a lack of snow dangerous, as well.

What I do is refer to H.T. Webster, who was a fantastically popular American single-panel cartoonist who wrote his last cartoon the year I was born. (It strikes me as amazing that he is so unknown only a half century later. He belongs up there with Mark Twain.) If there is a situation you have trouble finding the words to describe, he likely has a cartoon that describes it. For example, what is wrong with a lack of snow?

My response to this dismal situation was to take the kids on a hike to a beaver pond I knew of out in the woods. After all, beavers are a good example, are they not? They display industry and other good qualities do they not?

Well, actually, back when I was young and a few still actually knew how to cut down a tree with an ax, if a chainsaw wasn’t available, one of the worst insults you could make to a man with an ax was that his chopping was “Beavering.”

You see, the problem with cutting down a tree in this manner is that you really have no idea which way it will fall. (There are some examples of the tree falling on the beaver doing the cutting,  though such failures haven’t caused the extinction of the species.) (Nor will the examples of similar behavior, now being enacted in Washington DC, cause the extinction of the human race, though I sometimes think our population might decrease significantly.)

In the above case the beaver experienced a problem I have often seen humans with chainsaws experience. Even when humans cut correctly and employ ropes and “come-alongs”, they are dopes and try to fell a tree to the northwest when the wind is from the northwest and gusting, and the wind then gusts mightily and snaps ropes or rips pegs from the earth, and blows the tree to the southeast just far enough to become incredibly tangled to the branches of a tree to the southeast. Rather than a tree lieing flat on the ground you have created a “widow maker”.

(This is off topic, but I should confess that I know about this because I made this mistake,  and created a “widow-maker” back when I couldn’t make a widow, because I was unmarried and aged twenty.

After telling a wealthy customer I’d have their tree down in a jiffy, and waving bye-bye as they left to go shopping, a lone gust of wind blew the tree I was felling the wrong way. It fell much more steeply than the above example, and inclined over the customer’s patio at around a 45 degree angle. I had an hour to hide the evidence of my ineptitude, and, because I was young and stupid and desperate, I ran up the trunk with my chainsaw, cut the limbs keeping the tree from falling, and then, as it fell, reached out to another pine, and climbed down the other tree’s trunk. Then I cut like crazy, swept up the saw dust, and when my customer returned from shopping, all they saw was a nice and neat stack of logs. Live and learn…..but don’t forget to thank God you haven’t died in the learning.)

In the above example, the beaver saw the tree only just barely start to fall before getting snarled in the branches of a nearby tree. The rodent then probably swore a bunch of beaver curses, before going to cut an even huger tree. (Beaver only cut such big trees when they have exhausted the more choice species, which are poplar, birch and alder. The above tree was a beech, and the below example is an oak, which beavers rarely eat. Look at the chip the boy has in his hand. That is one bite, for a beaver.)

If a beaver could take such a chunk out of solid oak, just think what a chunk it could take out of you, if you went wading into the water to cuddle with what you took to be an over-sized Micky Mouse. Beavers have killed dogs that went swimming into the water after them. This is important information to pass on to the young, even if my wife thinks it might be a bit too gruesome, and, because the young man in the picture had stated he wasn’t afraid of an over-sized mouse with a flat tail, I had told him the mouse could take a chunk out of him as big in the chip in his hand, which accounts for his expression. (My wife will deal with the diplomacy with the parents, later.)

There are no pictures from the beaver pond, because the mild winter has made the ice thin, and the kids had to follow me like duckings behind a mother duck, to stay on the safest ice. Of course, humans are not ducklings, and they strayed, and every bit of my attention was used up keeping them from walking blithely to places when they would plunge waist-deep in ice-water. They did see the amazing dam the over-sized mice made, and the amazing lodge (which I called an “igloo” of sticks and mud), but I lost about five pounds keeping them away from the places the currents (and the beavers) make the ice weak. Consequently, there was no time to take pictures.

My tougher friends tend to kid me and make me a bit defensive about the fact I am basically a baby-sitter.  (Calling me a “child-care professional” is like calling a garbageman a “sanitary engineer.”) And I confess I blush a bit when I am like a mother duck with a string of ducklings. It just doesn’t seem macho. James Bond never is caught dead in such situations. But it does help me to appreciate mothers. You can have no idea of the attention it demands, and the calories expended. But, unlike mothers, I go places that make mothers frown.

My poor wife has to put up with me.  She tells me I can’t post pictures of children playing with trees that could fall and crush them. She explains that just because I know that it is physically impossible for the tree to fall, the parents will not know that, and therefore I am not suppose to post pictures like the picture below.

All I can say is that I haven’t lost a kid yet. Furthermore, the kids experience childhoods as free as the one I long-ago experienced, and hopefully get a transfusion of freedom in their veins.  I figure America is finished, if we old coots can’t hand the baton of Liberty to a new generation.

Pray for me. Pray first that the accidents, that inevitably happen, only are the little ones, when they happen to me. And pray second that the so-called “liberals” don’t find out, for we know how “liberal” they actually are. 

North Pole Camping at Barneo. Only $28,995.

Time is running out, if you want to get rid of me by sending me to the North Pole.

https://portal.quarkexpeditions.com/STW/STWProduct.aspx?Theme=QUARK&ProductCode=LND-BAR-5D2016

After all, what is a piddling $28,995 to a wealthy person like you? And there is always the hope I won’t come back, though the tour guide calls this “embracing the unexpected.”

http://www.polarcruises.com/arctic/ships/land-based-trips/north-pole-barneo-ice-camp-arctic/north-pole-express-barneo-ice-camp

If you are a real tightwad, I suppose you can send me the cheap way, for only $18,995.

http://expeditionsonline.com/tour-148/north-pole-express-barneo-ice-camp

But you don’t really want to have people look at you and call you cheap, do you?

You had best hurry. Time is running out. Not only are all the vacancies filling up, but we all know the ice is melting away up there, and soon there will be none left to camp on.

http://www.icetrek.com/barneo-ice-camp.html

So please do not delay, and send your money to me swiftly.

For more on the topic of the Barneo camp, with some funny pictures,  you can check out the post I wrote last year on March 21:

https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/north-pole-sunrise-tour-now/

And here is a report I wrote about the 2014 season.

https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/%EF%BB%BFjets-landing-on-north-pole-ice/

And here is the report from last year, when the jets landing gear crumpled to get things off to an interesting start.

https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/jets-landing-gear-fails-at-pole/

By the way, they wont start actually building the camp up there for another month, I think. They like to wait until sunrise, which is March 22 at the Pole.

 

LOCAL VIEW –Children and Millstones and Fingerprinting–

I seem to have survived my operation, and am back to work. In fact having a kidney removed is not much different from having a tooth yanked: You are not much good just afterwards, but….you yet over it.

But perhaps, as you have body parts yanked and cut out and cast into the dumpster, you start to realize that the part of you that goes on is not the body. After all, if they keep chopping off parts of me, and I keep going on, eventually I won’t be bothered by various appetites, because there will be nothing left to get hungry.

I’ve reached the fourth quarter of my life, and, if you ever have played a grueling sport, you understand how surreal things get when you glance at the clock and see the time is running out. Cassius Clay (Mohammed Ali) described the fifteenth and final round of a boxing match as a “dream-land”. In a strange way it is similar to the dream-land children are in, as they just start life. The old are like the young, and their experience is a “second childhood”.

Of course, people who are stuck-in-the-middle miss the dream-land that both begins and ends life, and call themselves this boring thing called, “sensible.” (Yawn) Yet they argue like the dickens about the dream-land, even as they deny it is anything more than a dream.

One argument I’ve had to deal with, as I run a Farm-childcare, involves whether children are sinners or saints. For various reasons this is something that certain stuck-in-the-middle people feel is very important to decide. Their entire philosophies depend on deciding, for once and for all, what children are. Are children splendid and beautiful and pure, and so precious that we corrupted adults can only harm them, and therefore children must be handled with kid gloves?  Or are children basically little devils, seething with selfishness, brimming with “original sin”, who must be whipped into shape?

(Obviously this must be decided, if you are stuck-in-the-middle, for there is a difference between “kid gloves” and “whips”.)

For an old geezer like me the question is stupid. Children are neither saints nor sinners. For crying out loud, children are children. Have you no eyes?

However people stuck-in-the-middle demand answers to silly questions, and so I will heave a sigh and, pretending to be a wise yogi up on some cliff in the Himalayas, supply an answer to the question regarding whether children are sinners or saints, and the the answer is, (drum roll), “Both, but neither.”

If selfishness is wrong, babes are sinners, because they don’t practice self denial. For the small there is no distinction between want and need. When hungry, they make that fact known. It is ridiculous to imagine they worry like adults do, about whether their hunger is a need that nourishes, or a want that will make them fat and need to diet.

If disrespect-of-laws is wrong, again children are sinners, for the only way they can learn anything about the laws is to test the limits. This includes the Law of Gravity. It is ridiculous to feel you are harming a child by drawing the line and telling them where a limit is.

(In my profession it has become something of a joke how the “authorities” insist you must amend the way you treat children, and the following year they amend their own stupid  amendment. For example, ten years ago it was wrong to tell a child, “Get in the car.” That “stifled freedom”, and instead you were suppose to say “Would you like to get in the car?” Now the same “authorities” scold you, if you say “Would you like to get in the car?” because it burdens children with more responsibility than children can handle.)

In the end there is only one subject children are superior in. It is best described by witnessing a babe enter this world from between a woman’s thighs, be brought to her breast, and to see that the child never once asks to see his mother’s driver’s licence, or some other form of ID. Nor does the child ask for references. The child is born with faith.

Faith is a given. You don’t gain it; it is something you lose when it is shattered, and unfortunately in my business I’ve seen the shattered. Heroin is a serious problem in New Hampshire. Some mothers are too drugged to respond to their baby’s cries. Sometimes the mother is dead, as the baby cries. The result is small children with the hard eyes of bankers.

But even if heroin wasn’t the problem, there are plenty of other ugly things that mangle and claw the beautiful faith we are born with. Left to our own resources, we would all eventually prove scientifically that faith is stupid. The very thing we are born with would be proven to be unscientific. Speaking only for myself, I’d say this world was doing a very good job of making me scientifically unfaithful by the time I was twelve years old.

If the faith a child has in its mother is a good thing, and if a faith a employee has in a boss is a good thing,  and if the faith a citizen has in their government is a good thing, and if the faith a person has in their religion is a good thing, then it takes more than being left to your own devises. No infant can keep the faith without the mother being worthy of faith.

In other words, this cruel world will destroy our faith, unless older and wiser people keep the faith. People mock the idea of being “born again”, when religious fanatics speak of it, but it is a truism, because life is hard and cruel and tends to kill us, until we meet some person who keeps the faith, and restores our faith. To restore faith is indeed like being “born again”, for it restores us to the original situation, when we did not ask our mother for an ID and references, and simply trusted.

Life is a heck of a lot easier when you can trust. After all, hiring private detectives can get mighty expensive, when you distrust and have to make sure a person you need to trust isn’t sneaking about behind the scenes. Yet parents and the government do this to me, demanding I get a background check over and over to make sure I am not some sort of sexual predictor, though this is expensive. Fingerprinting alone costs me around a hundred dollars, and that is just the start.

I’m getting old, and this entire business of needing to pay to prove my innocence, or else be judged guilty, is getting old, as well. I know there are vile and sleazy people in the world, but must I be degraded? It sure looks like it. There have been so many scumbags that the innocent must pay.

There is scripture that states, “It would be better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around your neck than to cause one of these little ones to fall into sin.” As far as I am concerned, that is enough. I don’t need the Federal Government to step in and fingerprint me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARCTIC SEA ICE –The Newest Nudger– (Concluded with Wednesday AM Surprise)

The past week has seen an interesting change up at the Pole. The high pressure that has been stubbornly parked up there on the Canadian side has drifted over to the coast of Central Siberia, and elongated. This has created a two way street of Cross-Polar-flows, one bringing Pacific air along the East Siberian coast, and another bringing cold Siberian air the other way across to Canada and also a spear of milder Atlantic air right over the Pole as far as the Canadian coast.

I’ve been watching these invasions carefully this winter, and noting how they seem to precede weather events down south, where I live in New Hampshire,  by roughly a week. The invasions seem to “nudge” the build-up of cold air off the Pole and down south through Canada, to the USA, where they make headlines. Two nudges ago brought us the Washington DC blizzard, and then that snow swiftly melted away as the nudging ceased and the cold built at the Pole. Then a smaller nudge sent another outbreak south, but it was strong for such a little nudge, and set records for cold even though it was brief. Now it is warm again, reflecting the last period the cold was building up at the Pole, and I’m expecting another outbreak a week from now, due to the current nudge.

Looking at a Dr. Ryan Maue map (from the Weatherbell Site) of temperatures three days from now (Canadian JEM model) you can see the bright pink in northern Canada, indicative of temperatures down at minus 40, (that great temperature where Fahrenheit and Celsius finally agree).

The surface map for that time (three days from now) shows an interesting low over northern Hudson Bay, and the north winds on its west side seem likely to shift that very cold air south towards me. I don’t imagine it will warm much as it comes south, for it will be passing over snow-covered landscapes, and the nights are still longer than the days.

A look down from the top of the planet five days from now sees that low still parked over Hudson Bay, and a new low north of Greenland. In fact the high pressure over Greenland seems totally surrounded by storms.

What is especially interesting is that the temperature map five days from now shows that, despite the invasion of milder air over the Pole, major cold remains over both north Canada and Siberia. The imported mildness is being squandered, lost to outer space, without warming the tundra much, though perhaps it is nudging that tundra’s cold south to places where it is unwanted by the old, and enjoyed by the young.

The invasion is causing the temperatures-north-of-eighty-degrees-latitude graph to show warming.

I would expect the invasion from the Atlantic to compress the sea-ice to the north, decreasing the extent of the ice, but so far the extent-graph shows a slow rise.With storminess increasing at the Pole, it will be interesting to watch the NRL map of how the ice is moving. Currently it is describing the shape of the elongated high pressure, and the ice is staying put in the Arctic Ocean, with little being flushed out. The above map shows fast-moving ice crashing into slower ice north of the Mackenzie River Delta, likely building pressure ridges, while some leads are opening up north of Bering Strait, where faster-moving ice accelerates away from slower ice. A lot of shifting and crunching is likely to occur over the next week, and I am going to try to post more of these maps that show how the ice moves. They clearly show how mobile the ice is, and refute the idea that sea-ice is static stuff that is only effected by Global Warming.

O-BUOY 8b BITES THE DUST?

I never like to see one of the Arctic buoys go through a blank period, when reporting data:It is especially troubling in the case of O-buoy 8b, because it is located right where the ice seems stressed, in the above ice-motion map. Also it located right on the edge of a sort of San Andres Fault, formed within hours of when the bouy was placed last fall. If you have two minutes to spare, it is well worth watching the time lapse movie made of pictures taken by the O-buoy 8b camera last fall.  Among other things, it shows within an hour of the men working to place the camera on the ice, the ice cracked up.

http://obuoy.datatransport.org/monitor#buoy8/movie

This does make one think about the risk the men take, installing those cameras when the ice is weak in September. (Not to mention the chance of meeting a 1500 pound bear.) It also makes me wonder if the icebreakers they ride up there on actually weaken the ice, and cause a sort of structural failure of areas greater than the channel made by the boat itself. (I know it works that way when they break up the ice in harbors in the spring.) Here is a picture of the Mass Balance Buoiy 2015 right after it was placed last August.  (Note the vanity of the graffiti. Seems odd that fame is seen in having your name appear where it is likely only a polar bear will ever see it.)And here is a picture of Obuoy 13 after it was placed.Note the solar panels, which may explain why there are no pictures after the sun sets for the winter. The GPS must have a separate battery.

Sometimes these buoys come to life after surprisingly long periods of time off the air. One came back last summer after more than a month. Perhaps they get tilted, and can’t properly transmit. Also I read there can be times they can’t get room because other projects are using the available space on the Satellite they must all share, when transmitting. In such cases the buoy has the ability to save data and send it later.

I hope we see O-buoy 8b come back soon.

FRIDAY NIGHT UPDATE

Despite the steady import of milder Atlantic air up over the Pole, the cold continues to build in northern Canada.  Also a lot of the “nudged” air spilled down the east coast of Greenland and is chilling the north Atlantic, cooling the western shores of Europe. Joseph D’Aleo has an interesting post on his blog at the Weatherbell site about the possibility of late-season snows in Europe. I can’t claim I saw that cold air sneaking around from the northwest, as usually the Atlantic moderates the arctic air, but it sure looks like the western coasts of Europe are cooling. Their midwinter surge of mildness seems to be flipping. In fact I think this winter will wind up being remembered for a lot of flip flops in both Europe and North America. Europe has been spared the steady blasting of Siberian cold China has gotten, (and that I remember too well happening here last winter). (Personally I mind winter a lot less when it is served out in small helpings.)The DMI maps show the cross-polar-flow swinging from Siberia-to-Canada to Scandinavia-to-Alaska, but the milder air continues to flow over the Pole. It cools fairly dramatically as it approaches Canada, partly because there is still no sun close to the Pole, and partly because the air rises and doesn’t show on surface maps. Because the air is rising we are expecting low pressure to appear north of Greenland.

The winds pushing the ice back towards the Pole is finally showing a reduction of ice-extent on the extent graph. I confess I’m nervous about the extent being low. If it is a “record” low the hubbub of the Alarmists will be hard to bear. They will fail to mention that the mildness up towards the Pole meant the arctic air was displaced, and places like Mexico and Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw “unprecedented” cold this winter (which I documented). Though I mention the mild places, on this site, they are sort of color blind, or “cold blind”, and on their sites they won’t mention the suffering of the refugees in Syria and south Turkey. Instead they’ll start the tiresome “Death Spiral” malarkey all over again, and will wait in breathless anticipation of an ice-free Pole this summer, and suffer depression when it doesn’t happen.

The only gleam of hope I have is that the “displacement”, (more properly called “nudging”), looks like it will continue, and we could see some late season snows. There is nothing like snows in April to hush most Alarmists, (though the worst will claim most anything proves their point).

Not that I much want to see late season snows in my own backyard. I’m NIMBY when it comes to winter weather, these days. However the flip-flopping between mild and arctic does seem to bring together the ingredients that bake the cake of big storms. Last winter, once we got stuck in a frigid pattern, it stayed pretty dry. We were four inches of snow away from setting an all-time record for snow all over New England, in Early February, and then the final four inches didn’t seem to want to come. Maybe people were so sick of shoveling snow that they resorted to prayer. That is unscientific, and is among the powers (such as water vapor) that some models fail to include. In any case, we did break the record, just barely, in the end, but it was a close call. It was like Old Man Winter had us staggering, but never hit us with the knock-out punch. The old grouch has a kind side. Who knew?

Around here the real “knock out punch” happened the year my mother’s mother was born, and is called “The Blizzard Of 1888”. It had 4 feet of snow, drifts over 2 story houses, and 80-mile-an-hour winds, around here, (though Boston got a lot of slush), and one thing the old reports mention is that it happened after a fairly mild and snow-free winter. So, if you are inclined to worry, that gives you a reason to worry if the winter is kind. Me? I’m just enjoying the present mild spell.

That blizzard started out as light rain, with temperatures mild. Then the storm exploded and stalled, just southeast of New York City, and temperatures crashed. The ingredients for that storm seemed to be flip flopping patterns, which brought very mild and juicy air right against very cold arctic air.  Of course, other things were involved as well, but I’m expecting those “other things” to get lined up somewhere, the next sixty days, and create a whopper storm.

In yesterday’s post Joseph D’Aleo pulled out a brilliant trick he has, involving using the experience of the past to see the likelihood of current weather being warm or cold, or wet or dry. The trick (or part of it) starts with this map, which shows whether ocean temperatures are above normal or below normal:Most people immediately look at the above map and focus in on the hot spot in the center of the Equatorial Pacific. That is the El Nino there has been much fuss about, and it is actually fading very swiftly, especially towards South America. Because the El Nino is now away from South America and towards the Dateline, it now qualifies as an El Nino Modoki. That has different effects than an El Nino sitting right on the coast of South America. The genius of Joseph D’Aleo is that he goes through all the past maps of other El Nono Modoki situations, and combines them into a sort of blended average. For my neck of the woods, such an average suggests I’ll experience a cold late-winter.

But the Equatorial Pacific  is not the only part of the planet.  D’Aleo does the same thing for other parts of the planet. For example, in the above map you will notice there are cool pools in both the North Pacific and North Atlantic. What sort of blended averages do they give?

And that’s where it gets interesting, because they totally disagree with each other. The cool pool over the North Pacific is saying temperatures should be like this over North America (which would be cold for me.)But the cool pool in the North Atlantic states this is likely (which would be warmer for me).What a contradiction! My guess is that, (because we cannot see both), we will see a flip-flopping clash, which may create the meetings of mild and cold that creates historic storms.

However there is another lesson to be learned in this. It is this: You must be broad-minded. If one only looked at the Pacific, or only looked at the Atlantic, one would obviously miss the big picture. In like manner old coots like me must not only look at how high hornets build their nests, or only look at how fat the deer are, or only count the black sections of woolly bear caterpillars.

This is what drives me nuts about Alarmists, who only look at the levels of CO2. How can they be so insanely narrow-minded?

Due to health concerns I’ve been thinking a bit about my latter end, and what I might say, if it turns out we actually do stand before God and answer some Fatherly questions after we die. I think I’m going to be in trouble,  if I have to answer questions about how I treated ridiculous, narrow-minded Alarmists. I wish I could proudly stand before the Lord and announce I’d been charitable, and had patiently explained all the things Alarmists were not permitting past the blinders which they so willingly wear. I wish I could even say I stomped around and kicked the wall and said nothing. Instead I fear that, when asked how I responded to pitiable people, I will have to confess that I barfed.

In any case, I do not expect the current calm conditions to last.

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE

The relatively mild (but below freezing) Atlantic air moving up over the Pole has supplied the uplift, because warm air rises, to create a relatively meek low pressure up over the Pole. This will interrupt the flow of Atlantic air, and likely lead to lowering temperatures, especially if the the low fills and weakens.  The flow over Barents Sea will continue from the south, which will continue to compress the sea-ice north, and keep the ice-extent graph low.

OBSERVATION ABOUT LAPTEV SEA SEA-ICE

The Laptev Sea is a great exporter of ice, due to winds roaring off shore from the depths of Siberia. Even in the dead of winter there can be polynyas of open water along the shore, as the ice is shoved out to sea, towards the Pole and eventually to crunch up against the Canadian Archipelago and Northern Greenland, which are great importers of sea-ice.

There is considerable variety in the amounts of ice exported from the Laptev Sea, and this winter has seen much less ice be exported. Perhaps this is because a lot of the Siberian cold was pushed south into China, rather than coming north. In any case, the ice is much thicker than last year in the Laptev Sea, and also parts of the East Siberian Sea. We are talking three or four or even five feet thicker, in places. This will not show up in the extent graph, which does not care is ice is six feet or six inches thick. However it is something to keep in mind, as the ice melts this summer.

Ice in other places will be missing the reinforcements of Laptev ice, but the Laptev Sea itself may be slower to melt unless, of course, some late winter howling winds push all its ice off shore.

One interesting bit of trivia involves the island of thicker ice to the northeast of Wrangle Island. That was, late last summer, part of the “reef” which formed the southern boundary of the “Slot” of open water north of Alaska, and before that it was a sort of long and thin bulldozed pressure ridge towards the western Canadian Archipelago, formed as the multi-year ice plowed ahead through “baby ice”,  and at one point it was roughly fifteen feet thick (dark red in the above map.) It is amazing the changes ice goes through, even when it retains a sort of identity.

CONCLUSION —Surprise! Nudge didn’t come south—

One thing you have to be ready for when watching the sea-ice is to be wrong. I’ve actually attempted to avoid ever expecting anything, to avoid ever being wrong, but the mind simply  doesn’t seem to work that way. It notices patterns, and once you notice a pattern you expect it to happen again. Sometimes it does, and sometimes you are in for a surprise. Therefore I think I’ll  stop using the word “wrong” and start using the word “surprised”.

In any case, rather than hiding the evidence I’ll conclude this post with what surprised me. The DMI maps show a push of milder air up over the Pole, but what surprised me was that the cold air over the Pole didn’t come charging down into the USA, but rather was swept southeast and then east into the Atlantic,  south of Greenland.  Some cold air did leak south into the west of the USA, but a major storm blew up in the middle of the country, bringing very mild air up  the east coast. Therefore I was awoken by flashing lightning and loud thunder after midnight last night, with temperatures up near sixty right at a time I was expecting an arctic outbreak, when I looked ahead last week. Surprise! (And actually it is a sort of pleasant surprise, as there is nothing to  shovel.)

Here are the concluding DMI maps.

The low stalled over Scandinavia looks like  it will cut off the flow of Atlantic air over the Pole, and actually export air down over the Atlantic. That air, likely combined with the cold air being exported from Canada south of Greenland, ought give Western Europe the coldest sort of Atlantic air it ever gets.  Meanwhile the drained Pole can start growing a new pool of cold.

Below are The Dr. Ryan Maue maps from Weatherbell  showing the GFS model initial run of temperatures for this morning, and then temperatures for 2 days from now. You can see some of the cold does make it down to the eastern USA (so I could claim my nudge-theory was “right”, if I wanted to spoil the surprise), however you can also see the core of the cold is hooking east towards Labrador and the Atlantic.

And of course we need a map of the surprise storm roaring up west of here, giving the Great Lakes a pretty good blizzard, as we get a mild night and thunder like it is summer.As interesting as midnight thunder may be for me, it likely belongs more in a “Local View” post, and I should turn my eyes to Europe, and the waters north of there. Europe had a chilly dawn, though the air seems Atlantic, rather than east winds from Siberia. (pink is below freezing.)To the north the winds have shifted around to the north in Barents Sea, which may be spreading ice south rather than compressing it north, and explain (at least partially) the odd little up-tick in the ice-extent graph.For the most part winds have been south in Barents Sea this winter, and the Pole has been invaded by Atlantic air, making it above normal all winter up there. Barents Sea is pretty much wide open, and has been through a complete flip-flop over the past two years. I have the sense it is trying to  show us something, but we mortals are too dense to get it. In any case, I think  it will be the focus of my next sea-ice post.

 

 

 

 

 

LOCAL VIEW –COLD SHOT SETS RECORDS–

This will be a short post, as I’m dealing with frozen pipes both here and over at the Farm-childcare. It was -9° F here this morning, but calm, which made it feel far more humane than yesterday morning, when it was -15°F with a nasty  wind.  Yesterday set records for the date all over New England.  Not even including the wind-chill, this is the coldest it has been in the more southern parts of New England since I was a small boy. (Up here I did see it hit -27°F in 1994, and on the coast of Maine I saw an amazing -20°F right by the relatively warm ocean in 1977, but those were both in January.)

        COLDEST TEMPERATURES RECORDED SINCE 1957

RECORD LOW TEMPERATURES FOR FEBRUARY 14TH

BOSTON -9 /PREV -3 IN 1937/. COLDEST SINCE 1957.
 RECORD LOW HIGH 12 / PREVIOUS 14 IN 1916
HARTFORD -12 /PREV -9 IN 1979/.
PROVIDENCE -9 /PREV -7 IN 1979/.
WORCESTER -16 /PREV -11 IN 1979/. COLDEST SINCE 1957.

What cut worst was the wind. Windchills were below -30°F steadily, and when the wind gusted were below -40°F (which is handy, for it is also -40°C).

There is little snow, only around three inches, so the cold is able to get down in places that are usually protected, and at the Farm-childcare they have frozen a pipe someplace I can’t figure out, and that I have never seen before. The problem will get my mind off the depressing subject of politics, so I’m telling myself it is a silver lining.  However my wife and I had planned to go out and have a nice post-Valentine’s Day lunch. It is amazing how we have only to plan a lunch to spark some sort of crisis.

Here’s a Dr. Ryan Maue map from Weatherbell, showing the cold yesterday morning.

 

Local View –Post Primary Post–

The New Hampshire primary is over, and phone has stopped its endless, inane ringing. The fickle pollsters no longer need to pretend to care what I think. We’ve gone back to a “Don’t ask; Don’t yell” policy. This is likely  a good thing, for I don’t want to think. Nothing puts me in a worse mood than thinking about the current state of American politics.

However it’s likely best I ventilate a bit. I should get things off my chest, (after a solid month of annoying phone calls at dinner time, and even after bedtime), rather than walking about like a bomb about to  explode. Once I’ve gone and pounded sand for a bit I can go back to being a meek and kindly “child care professional”, (baby sitter), at the farm,  and deal with small children,  who are far smarter than pollsters and politicians.

The thing about small children is that they are basically honest. Even when they think they are being sly, Truth is close to the surface. Without understanding why, they have a close relationship with Truth,  which is having a close relationship with God. It takes years to develop the divorce seen in modern politics, with politicians so sly they have completely fooled even themselves.

Children are quite capable of fooling themselves, and often think they can fly (or such), which is why you have to keep an eye on them, because children learn that they are fooling themselves by  stubbing a toe or scratching a knee, which is acceptable,  or through worse injuries, which is not acceptable. It is all part of learning. Politicians, on the other hand, seemingly never learn, until complete ruin overtakes them, and sometimes the people they lead.

It has gotten to be that “an honest politician” is an oxymoron. Their general premise seems to  be that the public consists of imbeciles, who cannot handle the Truth. If politicians ever really believed that “all men are created equal”, this would mean they were conceding that  they actually were calling themselves imbeciles, but they apparently do not believe that “all men are created equal”,  and apparently think they are superior and smarter than the voters. The public is to be doled out a pablum of sound bites and false promises. They are not to be treated as if they are intelligent and can understand, and are in some ways and at some times smarter than the politicians themselves. Instead voters are to be referred to as “The Sheeple”. In essence, the behavior of many politicians is that of people who do not really believe in Democracy, and are merely going through the motions.

The Truth is that Democracy is a very spiritual concept, based on the idea that every person has value, and has insights that others don’t have. The reason a poor man gets the same vote as a rich man, and an uneducated layman gets the same vote as a highly educated professor, is because we humbly admit we don’t know everything. Rather than  automatically despising those who differ, we are suppose to “love our enemies.” Even in cases where we are 99.9% certain we are right, when we lose an election we are to respect those who didn’t see what we were trying to get across. We are to own up to our own failure to communicate, and to try to communicate better. We are to “hate the sin and not the sinner”, and treat others with respect and dignity. What’s more, we are expected to die for this belief, (or watch our sons and daughters die, if we are old and they join the army).

The concept of democracy is based on honesty,  and on educating each other about what our honest goals and aims are. It is based on trust, and has no room for skulduggery and lies. To watch a flock of politicians descend on New Hampshire, and all scramble over each other to say as little as possible as loudly as possible, smearing opponents as often as possible (yet attempting to avoid getting the smear on their own fingers), filled me with a profound sense of unease. Would no one say what they intended? Would no one speak the Truth?

People up here take the primary very seriously, but I felt myself becoming cynical. I felt that the main effort of the politicians was to avoid saying anything, because, if they actually said something, a fragment of what they said could be used by an opponent as a soundbite in a smear ad’s false representation of what they actually said. Therefore it was safest to say nothing, in the form of a sort of diluted blandishment.  I correctly predicted Trump and Sanders would win, though they struck me as cartoons, because they were the only ones saying anything, and voters had gotten completely fed up with the complete nothingness  which the others were spoon-feeding them.

I am starting to feel that is the only way things will change: People will become fed up. But we are not quite that far gone yet. There are still some who think they can benefit at the detriment of others. For example, people are happy if they get a cost-if-living increase, but tend to be furious if the other guy gets a cost-of-living increase and all they get is an tax increase. People can still be played off against each other, but there will come a day when absolutely everyone is disgusted. Things can’t continue like they are.

As the politicians went bopping around the state they often appeared in the setting of town meetings, and drove me nuts by saying nothing with amazing dexterity, even when people tried to corner them and pin them down. Yet occasionally they’d be so cornered that a shadow of a semblance of a hint of a ghost of a position might leak out.

Perhaps this only proves I have the short attention span of a modern American, but before anyone leaked out a hint of a position I had flung up my arms in despair, and my attention had long since gone to do more interesting things, (such as watch clouds), however more shrewd voters gathered all the hints of positions that politicians had leaked out by mistake, here and there across the state, and created computerized spreadsheets that indicated the various politicians actually had some differences. Several even created programs where you could answer a bunch of questions about various topics, and then see which candidate agreed with you most.

My younger daughter was struggling to decide which Republican to vote for. All she had determined was that Donald Trump was “too rude”. The other Republicans only confused her. Therefore she went on line to find a who-to-vote-for program, filled out the questionnaire, and pushed the “run” button.  The program told her to vote for Donald Trump, which did not please my daughter one bit. (I am such a cynic that I ventured Trump probably hired someone to write the program.)

When it came time to vote I felt guilty, for I  had little desire to vote at all. I hadn’t even found a fringe candidate to vote for in protest. However I did hear Hillary on the radio, and had the abrupt desire to register as a Democrat. I last did that in 1992, when I voted for her husband. Now I had a chance to cast a vote against the Clintons, so that is what I did. Bernie Sanders might faint if he found out a “denier” like myself voted for a person promoting the Global Warming humbug, but I did it to send the Clinton’s a very small and likely inconsequential message: “I was sick of your dishonesty after one year; after a quarter century your deceit has become worse than a cancer.”

Unlike the Clintons, the most honest people I ever talked to were the gay artists of the 1970’s. They took the idea of “if it feels good, do it,” and ran with it. Then when AIDS appeared in the early 1980’s, and there was initially no cure, it mowed down just about all the gay friends I had. People forget that entire neighborhoods became ghost towns.

It seemed to me that, in memory of their honesty, we should be as honest. It is quite possible to be honest without lusting, and without any sort of promiscuity, and especially without hating. However when it comes to the subject of sex people can’t handle honesty, but that is a subject for some other long post. Regarding the Clintons, we got “Don’t ask; don’t tell”, almost as soon as Bill became president. That isn’t what the gay artists I knew in the 1970’s were like at all. They did ask and did tell and were able to frankly discuss things no one else dared speak about, including the fact that sex could be more addicting than heroin.

In any case all the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky stuff surfaced not long after that, involving more don’task-don’t-tell, and indicating the president could stretch the truth to amazing degrees even while under oath.  He could redefine “having sex”, and state “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”, and later state, “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”.

This cannot help but make an ordinary fellow like myself question every other statement, about every other subject, that the man made and makes. However how could this involve his wife?

As soon as she became Secretary of State some odd policy became apparent in our nation’s dealings with the Arab world. Just as the Republicans tried to push some alien ideas into the Arab culture during the process of “Nation Building”, the Democrats were attempting to introduce the idea of Gay Rights.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pakistanis-denounce-us-embassys-gay-rights-party-as-cultural-terrorism?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a00105a671-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines07_26_2011&utm_medium=email

The idea of Gay Rights would be highly controversial in Arab lands, and likely to generate a considerable backlash, and may have in fact played a part in the Benghazi debacle, and the death of Ambassador Chris Stephens.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/did-obama-send-a-gay-ambassador-to-libya/

I am not saying this was the only factor, however rather than discussing the issue at all, all the blame was aimed at Mark Yousseff, an obscure Copt filmmaker in California, who was angry about Coptic churches being burned down and Copts being persecuted in Egypt. Perhaps the man was given to hatred, which I don’t like, (and fight in myself), but I imagine I can understand the reasons for his rage and his film. Art, after  all, is suppose to be about “expressing yourself.” Mark did manage to anger people in Egypt, which was likely his “artistic intent”, but using him as a scapegoat for what happened in Benghazi is simply another example of the Clinton’s policy of “Don’t ask; don’t tell.” The fact the Mainstream Media didn’t ask and didn’t tell simply shows the degree which this philosophy of deceit has been accepted.

The thing about the steady diet of dishonesty fed to the American people is that there is no way for the voters to be properly informed. People have no idea of what is going on, or why things are happening the way they are happening. Increasingly people turn to obscure blogs for news, as they increasingly are fed up with the Media and the Politicians.

People say that “Truth Hurts,” but dishonesty is far more harmful.