(Sort Of) LOCAL VIEW –Grumpy Farmers–

Perhaps it is not spiritual to get too attached to worldly things, but farmers can’t help but get attached to their dirt. The smaller the farm, the greater the farmer’s love is for their soil, and the older they get the deeper their love roots. A day will come when they will have to give it all up, and let go of their hold on their small holding, but I honestly feel the land remembers them. Not to get all mystical on you, but the love of ones homeland runs deep, and whispers in the wind.

It is quite a different thing to have a purely political view of land ownership, without any actual investment in sweat in an actual plot of sod. Some environmentalists are all theory without experience. It is like saying you are in love with someone you never really lived with. They swear they care for nature, but in fact they seem scared of nature. Many things farmers do seem too rough and gruff, and some feel compelled to tell farmers how to be more gentle with the land. This does not go over well with farmers. They then feel farmers are ignorant and stupid.

Here we have a picture of two famous ladies ignoring a stupid farmer’s legal posting on his gate, which forbids them from trespassing on his land. They are climbing over the middle of the gate, which is very bad for the gate’s hinges, and shows they don’t know anything about good manners in the country.

The famous ladies are attending an event where they are protesting “Frakking”, supporting Greenpeace,  and holding a sort of bake-muffins demonstration on the farmer’s land, with lots of TV cameras. The cameras recorded what happened next.

It is somewhat amusing that a voice in the background exclaims they should call the police, when they are the ones breaking the law. In any case, the muffins were less appealing as the farmer went about his business of fertilizing his fields. And the protesters did make the news.

This all seems very democratic to me, for manure has always gone hand in hand with politics.

 

Major New Complaint Submitted To BBC Over Climate Bias

My cynical side feels this effort will simply be ignored, but the effort must be made. The media must be confronted by the fact it is not “fair and balanced” by examples of balanced people who get no hearing. Although this post is too long for most of us to find time to read, it is loaded with good stuff, and well worth skimming.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

A major new and serious complaint has been sent to the Director General of the BBC, regarding the Corporation’s persistent bias in reporting of climate change issues. The complaint is a massive 163 pages long, and is a joint submission from ten complainants. In addition, there are several technical annexes, totalling 125 pages.

Below is the letter sent to the DG:

—————————————————————————————————————————-

22nd April 2016

The Director General
BBC
180 Great Portland Street
London

W1W 5QZ.
Amanda.churchill@bbc.co.uk
Dear Director General,
 

Complaint of BBC prejudice in covering of climate change and warning of potential judicial review

We enclose a complaint from all of us about persistent partiality in the BBC’s coverage of climate change. From the outset, on the climate question the BBC has tended to reflect only one view – that of the climate science establishment who are promoting a view that man is causing significant…

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Cold and Snow hit…Brazil!

As the northern hemisphere gets its last low blows from Old Man Winter, the southern hemisphere is getting cheap shots from the same Old Man, though it is still autumn down there. And we are talking Brazil here, not way down at the tip of South America.  (I’m wondering if I should hoard coffee.) (There are few physical things I can’t renounce for a good cause, but please God, not my coffee!  Not my coffee! )

WeatherAction News

Argiris Diamantis writes;
The translation that translate.google.com provides from Portuguese into English is not perfect, but we understand that there was rare snowfall in Brazil, with enormous drops in temperatures and meteorogists blame this on El Nino.

Snow in April in SC confirms harsh winter perspective; Friday, made 4 ° C in Curitiba

Posted on April 29, 2016

By Luiz Henrique de Oliveira

There were small snowflakes, but were historic. Since 1999 it not snowed in April in Brazil. Yesterday morning, the frozen precipitation occurred in the city of São Joaquim in Planalto Sul, Santa Catarina.Coincidence or not, and in the 90 temperatures plunged from 30 ° C to 0 ° C overnight.

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ARCTIC SEA ICE –Comparison with 2006–

I was listening to some Bach yesterday to mellow out my temper, but unfortunately was on a PBS station which injected a bit of Climate Change hoopla into my brain before I could change the channel, the result being I was anything but mellow. The editorial was so full of incredibly distorted news that I’m surprised the speaker’s nose didn’t grow so long it poked out through the front of the radio.

Just for an example, every El Nino makes the waters warmer around Australia, which allows waters to get hot enough, in the shallowest reef-waters, to “bleach” some coral. The coral dies, and then comes back after the water cools. I’m not sure what percentage gets bleached, but it isn’t all that high. I’m not sure how long it takes for the reef to recover, but it isn’t that long. Like a forest fire in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, “bleaching” is not pretty, leaves a short-term wasteland, but is a part of the natural cycle of things.

I know all this because there was a “coral reef bleaching scare” around ten years ago, and I paid attention to a degree where I actually visited Australian websites. Some fellows at resorts were irritated that they might lose customers because people would assume the reefs were dead, while other fellows thought tourists would come if the guides played on a theme of “see the reef before it is too late.” However I soon understood the reefs were not anywhere close to dying out; bleaching had occurred before, and the reef always recovered. Some websites frequented by scuba divers were downright contemptuous of the media, and how ill-informed the reporters were, and how some scientists were pandering for funding, to study reefs the scuba divers already knew about. The divers joked the scientists were looking for a paid vacation. In the end the scare blew over and the coral recovered.

The PBS editorial I accidentally listened to was replaying all the exaggerations of the old scare, based around this latest El Nino. For example, in an area of sun-baked shallow water up to 99% of the coral can die. That is a true fact. However it is a gross distortion to use the “up to 99%” figure for the entire barrier reef. Yet the editorial said something along the lines of, “A professor and his students were reduced to weeping because up to 99% of the Great Barrier Reef had died.” That may not be an out and out lie, if you parse the sentence with a lawyer, but it gives a false impression, and therefore PBS seemingly is misusing its funding. It is suppose to educate the public, not bleat propaganda. (The (unnamed) professor is suppose to do the same.) (Weeping isn’t scientific, and weeping is known to, in fact, cloud scientific objectivity. A bunch of bawling students is therefore not a sign of a good teacher.)

The editorial went on to do the same with other facts regarding sea-ice. My favorite involved blithely explaining away the cold hitting Europe as “cold displaced by the heat at the Pole.”

Joe Bastardi at Weatherbell site  posted a Dr. Ryan Maue forecast map of snow in Germany this week.

I was curious as to whether the forecast had verified, so I checked back to the Weatherbell site, and Joseph D’Aleo was (as usual) right on the ball. I learned temperatures over Germany were ten degrees below normal.

And Pierre Gosselin reported to Joseph,

“Winter transforms Germany’s Thuringia Forest into a winter wonderland today. Massberg webcam photo 11.07 a.m.

Newsite Thuringia Antenne here writes that winter has returned and will stick around for awhile, reporting of icy roads, accidents and cold. Meteorologist Dominik Jung of http://www.wetter.net forecasts 5 to 10 cm of snow across wide regions of Germany, especially Bavaria and Thuringia.

The Rheinbrecke at Rees had to be closed for over an hour and a half early this morning due to accidents from icy conditions, the RP Online reports here.”

While it is true Europe is smaller than the Arctic Ocean, (3.931 million square miles versus 5.427 million square miles), when you include the area of Atlantic Ocean covered by the cold hitting Europe you wind up with an area larger than the Arctic Ocean. Nor is the entire Arctic Ocean above normal. Slightly less than half of it is, in fact, below normal.

None of this was mentioned in the editorial, of course.  In the end it basically dissolved into a diatribe against people who vote out Alarmists, such as Australians. What was most nauseating to me was its “science-is-settled” attitude, which accepted guff as gospel.

I have my doubts about recent record-keeping, due to some being polluted by  “adjustments”, but, using those records, we are indeed feeling the effects of a large El Nino, and the air temperatures of the world are at “record highs” as the sea-ice-extent is brushing “record-lows.” I don’t find this particularly alarming, as records are set all the time, when the period when the records have been kept is relatively short.  The last El Nino did indeed set a recent record, for the central Pacific, but didn’t for the waters just off Peru. Off Peru the 1998 and 1982 El Ninos were “the worst ever”.  In any case, I’ve been expecting a lot of hubbub to be made about this El Nino’s mildness, and the word “unprecedented” to be used a lot, and the PBS editorial didn’t disappoint me.

What is always interesting to do is to search the historical records we have from the period before modern records were kept.  They are full of surprises, and in fact it was my study of the conditions the Vikings in Greenland lived under that first alerted me to the fact that the word “unprecedented” didn’t include a huge swath of history.

I started poking around in the past, looking at low sea-ice extent, and I didn’t need to go far to find an example that surprised me. It was the year 2006, which most think of as a year with higher ice-extent, because most focus on September and not late April. I found a good site for making such comparisons, where you can erase all the years you don’t want charted, and avoid facing a hopeless tangle of graphed squiggles. I thought it would be interesting to compare 2006 with 2012, (2012 being the year with the lowest extent on record). Here’s the site, so you can do your own comparing:

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

What is interesting is that 2012 was above normal, while 2006 was at record-setting lows, at the start of May. By September 2006’s extent was barely below 6 million km2, while 2012 was well below 4 million km2. In other words, all the hubbub about how low levels now are might actually mean we are in for a year like 2006, rather than 2012.

At this point one runs into a lot of talk about how much more solid the ice was back in 2006, versus how flimsy it is now. So I did a bit of checking. People have been skiing from 89 degrees north to the Pole for over ten years, so I went and looked at the “final degree” diary for 2006. Temperatures were milder that year than this year, and April  17 had this intriguing headline.

 46 KILOMETERS LEFT, ALL IS WELL BUT LOTS OF  OPEN WATER

Reading a little discovered this:

We have crossed difficult leads of open water today, where we also had to use our two large sleds as bridge to get across. This we can do on two-three meter wide leads. We lash the two sleds together to make a catamaran, and push them out in the water. This raft floats well and becomes a stable platform; we then crawl across to the other side one after another. This system works on small leads, but on wider leads we need to find a crossing point.

We did 15.5 kilometre on our ten hour long day. It’s now 46 kilometres left to the Pole, and it looks like we will make it with good margin. At the end of the day however, we came to an enormous lead, 3-400 metre wide. We made camp nearby this lead, and Thomas and I went out to look for a crossing point for tomorrow. Pressure ridges and large leads have one thing in common; they don’t last forever. When we meet such leads there is just one thing to do and that is to walk along it until we find a crossing point. They can be several kilometres long but sooner or later the lead will close. The good thing about such leads is that they take up a lot of the movement in the ice and we hope conditions are more stable on the other side.

OK, that is 2006, when the ice was “thicker”.

Now let’s evesdrop on 2016

From April 14

A long and hard day. Lots of snow on the ice, and a lot of rubble. Not extreme, but it’s there all the time…

From April 16

Beautiful day, sunny but cold. Also today heavy walking, but nothing so bad that we have to turn back. The drift has changed direction and has almost stopped up.

Now, if I was like PBS I would never mention that they later came across open leads. I’ve made my point: The ice was thick and piled up this year. However, because I am in love with truth, I’ll mention the leads.

From April 17

Just slightly some wind, and it was in our back. Temperature probably around minus 30-35.

And drift was almost zero. We got into better ice, less bulky and with hard snow. We followed a new lead that went straight north for almost an hour.

From April 18

We skied 18 Km, same as the day before. Lots of snow in the ice, but good conditions. A lot of large pans.

From April 19

Sunny, a bit wind from the back, warmer aprox 25 under.

We met an open lead right away in the morning. Struggled there for a bit, but came over. After that we had to jump several cracks, and did a couple more leads…

We then meet the mother of all leads just before camp time! Luckily it had one point that was possible to cross. We went over and came into camp at 20:15.

There. That is what real reporting looks like. You report truth, not just what supports your theory.

The “Race Against Time” expedition experienced the same arctic landscape. They started further south, experiencing some leads at the start, but then fought through a great deal of pressure ridging, which they described as “boulder fields”. Later they too came across the leads close to the Pole, and displayed their unabashed bias (apparent throughout the trip) by stating, “Strangely warm day around -10C. 8 hours trekking today. Reached a huge expanse of water, which is bizarre so close to the North Pole.”

They should have read up on 2006, for then they would have seen that the temperatures they experienced were colder than 2006 through much of their trip. Rather than “strangely warm” they should have stated 10ºC  was”temperatures like 2006″. Also if they had researched they would have known that the adventurers in 2006 also found leads near the Pole. Maybe they would have even researched to a point they would have known there were leads near the Pole in 1987.  It’s not so “bizarre” after all.

I always admire the people who ski to the Pole. The oldest has been 69 and the youngest has been, I think, 10. However the “Race Against Time” crew got a bit too maudlin for me.  On one hand they had to promote how “delicate and fragile” the arctic was, but on the other hand they had to make it sound like they were up against hardships only supermen could endure, and this made them describe the pressure ridges they had to haul heavy sleds over as being like the Himalayas. Wrong.  Making pressure ridges sound huge is politically incorrect, if you want to promote the idea all the ice is melting.  They forgot the political cause, in their lust for self-aggrandizement.

All I can say is, “Put on a hat, you fool!”

To return to more mundane matters, the last “whirl” faded away from the Pole, pumping a high behind it. This has cut off the export of cold down into the North Atlantic, but not before the trough mentioned at the start of the post was filled to the brim with cold. That trough will slowly drift across Europe to the east, and some milder temperatures will finally return to Europe from west to east as that trough moves to Russia.

It looks to me like Pacific air may try to generate the next “swirl” at the Pole, but the models suggest that low north of Iceland will be the next low at the Pole, splitting the high pressure in Frem Strait in half. Hmm. I guess we’ll see what we see.

O-buoy 13 has been experiencing dull weather, cloudy but with little snow, and steady temperatures at -10ºC.

O-buoy 14 has been producing the better pictures, and reminding me of what originally attracted me to these cameras. (Beauty). Temperatures have been going through a diurnal swing between -7ºC and -15ºC. It’s gradually clouding up.

Things remain fairly dull, usually, until the thaw starts, but perhaps the Alarmists will give me more to write about.

 

LOCAL VIEW –To Step on a Nail–

I have a friend who insists we don’t need to clean up our act before we die, because we have been cleaning up after our children all our lives, and turn-about is fair play. We can therefore feel right about leaving our children a house full of rubbish, for them to clean up.

To a certain degree I agree. After all, when I was young I was spoiled, and didn’t have to do my own laundry, or make my own bed, but that is long, long time ago, and it seems I have had to spend a disproportionate amount of time paying back for that born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-my-mouth luxury.

The luxury of my childhood made me see how lovely life could be, which is a prerequisite of poetry. However another prerequisite of poetry seems to be that you spend a fair amount of time afterwards as a dishwasher. Others eat high on the hog and dirty the dishes, but you just clean up the mess.

Others ride the high horses, but you clean the stables.

Others eat the pickled herring from fancy jars, as you clean the guts and gurry in the cannery.

Others sniff the roses, but you are the gardener with hands bleeding from thorns.

And on and on it goes, year after year, until at age 63 I am running a Farm-childcare, as a so-called “Childcare Professional”. My wife gets irked when I say that job-title is a bunch of bosh, and I’m just a “babysitter”. Others work the fine jobs, as I change the diapers. Others spoil the children, and I deal with the tantrums. Basically it is a matter of cleaning up other people’s shit.

Some people are so irresponsible they basically poop in their own pants, in a thousand symbolic ways, and it is the duty of poets to clean up the filthy mess.

I’m sorry if that seems too crude and too blunt, but it seems a reality that young writers should be aware of. Too often young poets think they’ll spend all their entire life traipsing about rose gardens telling people how exquisite the blossoms smell. I have to sadly inform them that the only poets who succeed in remaining in rose gardens either have given up on writing, and are experts in rose genetics and cultivation, or else they are the gigolos of rich old ladies.

The real garden of real poetry involves less lovely smells. You sniff dish-washing soap, and diapers, and stables, and canneries, and the fumes of factories, but you work with the salt of the earth, and you learn where real beauty is found. You have to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues.

It is ironic in a way that the rich and powerful think they are controlling things, when they can’t even cook their own meals, wash their own dishes or laundry, or grow their own food or roses. In some cases, when they get old and decrepit, they even revert to diapers, and need someone to change those as well. In essence the rich and powerful are hapless and pathetic, but they like to think they have power over those they depend on, and have this word, “delegate”, that makes their dependence look like power.

In a better world those in the position to delegate work to others would be aware they are dependents. They would be full of gratitude and there would be none of this nonsense of some thinking they are so high and mighty. However, as heaven is not coming to earth (so far this week), the basic fact of the matter is that those who are the salt of the earth are in essence crucified. Real poets are included in this crucified crew.

Of course none is crucified to the degree the Christ was, but, to a lesser degree, in this fallen world, any good worker must put up with some degree of crucifixion. I know this is a sad truth to state to young poets who know how glorious and poetic life might be, “if only”, but “if only” is not the current state of affairs, and therefore the only alternative to some degree of crucifixion, and to singing the blues,  is to join those fat-cats who are fallen, but think they are high and mighty. Only fools want that.

I think it is far more high and mighty to change diapers. I’ve got a bumper sticker that states, “Men who change diapers change the world.”

I am pretty arrogant, I suppose, when I think I am superior to my superiors, but the fact of the matter is that history bears me out.

One of the greatest masters of music of the past was Bach, and he is remembered far more than any of the fat-cats he wrote his music for. In fact no one would remember  Brandenburg, if it weren’t for Bach. Yet, in his time, Bach was just a servant, even to the degree where he wore the same uniform as a butler.

Servants should take pride in the fact their pride is treated like a doormat. If Vanity is ugly, then the humble are beautiful, and therefore, if poets love beauty, they should love being dishwashers.

I should confess I hated washing dishes, at first.  But time has taught me that the very music of poetry is based upon giving others a gift they may not deserve, but need. Some times, washing dishes is the poetry, because it is needed, though the messy do not deserve it.

Therefore I recently concluded that, when I die, I didn’t want to leave my children an unholy mess to clean up, such as my father left me. Not that it wasn’t fun to sort through his mess and fill big dumpsters with trash, because I made thousands with other stuff on E bay. However that took hours upon hours, and I think my own kids have better things to do, and might prefer to skip that bother.

Therefore I decided to be noble, and clean up my trash before I die. I waited until the “Red Flag Warning” (caused by a local drought) was lifted, and then had a big fire.

Into the fire went all sorts of lumber which I hadn’t thrown away, because I “might” be able to use it, however I had never gotten around to those dream-projects. In fact some lumber had sat around waiting for so long that, even if I had gotten around to the project, the lumber would have been too rotted. However other lumber still might have been used, for such projects, but recent cancer confronted me with how brief my remaining time may be, and how unlikely it is I’ll ever do what I dream, and I understood saving such old lumber was a fool’s fond hope. I was making the farm much more tidy, by burning all the hopes that will not be.

Burning some of the hopes was a bit of a crucifixion for me personally, but I figured it would spare my children the crucifixion of cleaning up a dead parent’s mess, when I die. All in all, it seemed to be a way of making life more heavenly.  I even developed a sense of humor, and decided there was a delicious irony in the fact that, after cleaning up after others for so many years, I was cleaning up after myself. The last thing I imagined was that such cleanliness would increase my personal sense of crucifixion. In fact I felt vain, which always seems to all but beg for some sort of nail to come along and puncture my fat ego.

The crucifixion that then occurred didn’t involve anything as dramatic as stigmata on my palms.  Instead I just stepped on a nail, while burning a pile of old lumber. It was a beauty of an old, rusty spike, that sliced right through my boot’s sole and dove into the ball of my foot so deeply it was difficult to remove, despite the pain.

Oh, the irony! But that is what fuels poetry.

I’m not sure what it is about an old farm
That demands one has to, once every year,
Step down hard on a nail. All of the charm
Of rural life evaporates, yet, queer
As it may sound, the time you must then spend
Limping in pain reminds you that walking’s a gift.
After all, walking’s something that we tend
To take for granted. Our thighs and calves uplift
As humble feet deal with dirt. Our minds pretend
They’re high above such earthy cares, until
A nail spikes through our rubber sole, and we
Are forced to walk funny. Then pain’s our thrill,
Our focus, our consciousness, and our glee
Is when it stops. How we define mirth
Is bossed by one nail that brings us to earth.

When one nail can change things, life becomes simplified. Certain things are stricken from the daily schedule, and you attend to more boring things, which become poetic.  For example, how to identify the hawk that insists on screeching at you from limbs, but never stands still for a close up? Is this poetic?

My son insists it is a broad winged hawk, but I don’t know, as I limp about. It is just a screeching creature, that refuses to stand still for a zoomed in close-up. But that is not my job. My job is to attend to children, and to zoom in on them…..To forbid war-like things like video games and toy guns, and to teach them to be gentle young poets. But when I zoom in on them, what are they making of sticks, and what sort of respect are they showing me?

(Sometimes I get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.)  I suppose some will suggest I should make sticks be illegal, but the sniper in a small boy somehow reminds me of young poets. Authority holds no glamour, and they think they can improve upon it.

I try to be big about getting assassinated from all sides by small boys in their make-believe worlds. (After all, on other days they treat me like a rock star.). However the violins of self-pity get going, after you have stepped on a nail. Walking hurts, hawks screech at you, and small boys snipe. Where is the justice!!!???

Even the pussy willows have gone by, before I could pick them and plunge them in glycerin and freeze them in suspended animation. If I’d done that I could have made a few extra bucks, selling them to flower shops. But, even though the spring is retarded and nothing else wants to bloom, the pussy willows jumped ahead. They are no longer the furry gray buds that flower shops pay for. The cat’s-fur gray is gone, and instead they look like this:

Hmm!  Not half bad!  Maybe the folk who shop in flower shops don’t know what they are missing.

Maybe the parents who don’t know their sons are snipers don’t know what they’re missing.

Maybe people who are never screamed at by hawks don’t know what they’re missing.

Maybe I’m lucky to step on a nail and limp around afterwards.

 

 

ARCTIC SEA ICE –Yet Another Swirl–

Well, it is happening again. Warm air has swirled up to the Pole, where of course it rises, and forms low pressure right where the textbooks say the air should be sinking, and there should be high pressure. At the risk of boring those who visit this site often, here is the textbook idea:

This winter there has often been rising air, rather than descending air, over the Pole, because the Creator doesn’t need textbooks. In fact He never bothered go to college, because according to stuff I’ve read He was something called “omnicient” even back before He invented time. I wouldn’t know about that, because I do need to study, and even then I don’t know all that much. But I do know when the textbooks are wrong.

I think they have been wrong this winter because the El Nino pumped a lot of extra heat into the atmosphere, and, because our planet is always trying to smooth out the difference between hot places and cold places, the jet stream had to become more “loopy” (meridienal) to transfer the heat to the Pole. Rather than low pressure parading around the Pole in a nice, orderly “zonal” manner, lows have headed right up to the Pole itself.

At times it is possible to use the above textbook diagram, even with a low sitting atop the Pole. You just assume the descending  air has been displaced, and look for a high pressure area away from the Pole, and call that the “new center” of the above diagram. But the problem is that sometimes there are two, three or four high pressure areas, and they actually seem to be parading around the low pressure at the Pole, as if the above diagram needs a fourth circulation and a fourth cell, (to the left of the polar cell) called the “super-polar cell”, for at times the theoretical “high pressure at the Pole” has a hole of low pressure in the middle, like a doughnut.

Other times I think that towards the Pole the Coriolis effect is different, and the atmosphere can’t be bothered parading around in circles. If it has a job to do, it takes the shortest route. If it has El Nino heat to be rid of, it just heads to the Pole and gets rid of it, and to hell with the textbooks.

The current map has a bit of the “doughnut” look, with a ridge of high pressure being pumped across the northmost North Atlantic behind the polar swirl, though the storm will not linger at the Pole long. The “swirl” shows up nicely in the temperature map.

Be that as it may, everything is about to change. Even before we have figured out what happened we’ll be busy figuring out a new thing that is happening. First, we are approaching a very small window of time when the Pole isn’t constantly losing heat, but briefly gains heat from 24 hour sunshine, (and winds have to alter to get rid of the extra heat, for a few midsummer weeks). Second, the El Nino is no more, and a La Nina is rapidly appearing, which will greatly decrease the amount of heat the atmosphere has to get rid of, by sending it north to the Pole. If less heat heads north, what might the effects be?

In other words, the swirl we are seeing may be the last one. One feels a certain melancholy, as if saying goodbye to an old friend.

As this low swings up to loop near the Pole and then falls away towards Siberia I’d like to point out a few things Alarmists seem to miss, in their joy over El Nino effects. (They are pleased because the meridienal flow brings warm air up to the Pole, and slightly decreases the extent of sea ice at the edges. This seemingly, and perhaps only briefly, verifies their theory that the Pole is warming, is in a “Death Spiral”, and the Arctic Ocean will be ice free and absorb so much sunshine that we’ll all suffer terrible consequences.  Why this pleases them I don’t know, but it does.) (Maybe “misery loves company”.)

The problem is that a meridienal flow doesn’t just bring warmth north, but also brings cold south.  There have been snows in places that don’t see much snow, such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico, the past winter. And even when such places melt away the snow in a single day, the “albedo” of snow is particularly gigantic in southerly places where the sunlight is intense. In fact Saudi Arabia reflected more sunshine back to outer space in five minutes last January than the entire North Pole did in the months of December and  January. When this data was plugged into an Alarmist computer model, the government threatened to cut off their funding, (or so I have concluded, perhaps unfairly.)

This last fling of the fading El Nino, with its final low at the Pole, seems to not only be bringing snows to France in April, but even to me, here in New Hampshire in North America. Even if the snow only whitens the landscape for an hour, the amount of sunshine reflected as it melts will make all the “albedo” models change their conclusions, or they would change their conclusions, if the people plugging in the data were allowed to include all the data.

For what its worth, here’s the radar shot of the  snow and sleet  over New Hampshire this morning.

And here’s a forecast map of the frost (pink) over Britain, France and Germany tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.

The simple fact of the matter is our planet has myriad ways of balancing things out.

The meridienal pattern has also made the arctic stormy, and winds have shifted the sea-ice about and caused much cracking of the ice. Open water has appeared even when temperatures were down at midwinter depths, approaching -40°.  Alarmists like this, as they assume this shows the ice is weak, and will melt more easily in the summer. In actual fact exposing the sea to the cold may warm the midwinter air, but it cools the sea, and also creates more sea-ice.  You see, a lead five miles wide cannot form without piling up five miles of ice at some other spot in the arctic, and at the same time exposing sea-water to freezing, forming five miles of new ice in an area which, if it was protected by a roof of ice, would have formed far less ice. In actual fact, in the past we have seen that a lot of lead-formation (which seems to prefer the Beaufort Sea), actually creates so much extra ice and so cools the waters that the summer melt is reduced, not increased.

Lastly, Alarmists seem to rejoice when north winds flush sea-ice south into the warm tendrils of the Gulf Stream that enter the arctic either side of Svalbard. They are happy because you can see the sea-ice melt very quickly, with satellite views. What they do not seem to calculate is how much colder these currents become, if forsed to melt so much ice, and what effect that may have on the current’s ability to melt the bottom of the sea-ice, when the current gets farther north. Furthermore, the same north winds that bring the sea-ice south to the milder currents are bringing cold air to ruffle the top of the currents, not only chilling the top-most water, but reversing the direction of the topmost water.

Alarmists should hope for south winds between Norway and Svalbard, to hurry the tendrils of the Gulf Stream north. When those waters see north winds, as are blowing now, the Gulf Stream is not being assisted. Its waters are being chilled, and the topmost part of the current is actually blown south, which creates all sorts of interesting turbulence between south-moving surface waters and north-moving depths.  It is not a situation conducive to hurrying warmth north and speeding the melt of sea-ice.

In Conclusion, I’d say the effects of the El Nino are nowhere near as simple as some make them out to be. Already I’ve been proven wrong about some of my assumptions. Who would ever assume increasing the heat in the atmosphere would give Kuwait its first snowfall we have records of?

And, if increasing the heat can increase the snowfall in an ordinarily hot desert, might it not increase the sea-ice in an ordinarily cold sea? I’m not saying it will, but I am being humble and saying I’m not sure the after-effects of the El Nino will decrease the sea-ice extent this summer. In fact I’m betting my nickle that the sea-ice extent minimum will be the same as last year, next September, (and I think anyone who bets more than a nickle is a fool.)

The coming La Nina will decrease the heat. We need to be humble about our certainty (or lack of it) about the effects that will have, as well. If the atmosphere becomes more zonal, than general cooling will make sub-polar regions warmer.

By the way, O-buoy 13 shows moisture is being drawn north through Bering Strait. This will dust the black-ice of the new leads with white snow.

The moisture hasn’t made it further east to O-buoy 14, so new leads near it will still have black ice.

With black ice here and white ice there, can you imagine how difficult it would be to create an “albedo” model that was truly accurate?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARCTIC SEA ICE –North Pole Dumps On Europe–

I’ll have to be quick today, as work is overwhelming me.

The high pressure that was sitting over Beaufort Sea has shifted southeast into the Canadian Archipelago, and if you follow the isobars you can see it is now working in conjunction with a low just south of Franz Josef Land to create a cross polar flow that exports air into the North Atlantic.

If you follow the isobars backwards you notice the air is being sucked from the snow-cover of Canada, and to a lesser extent from the snow-cover of Siberia, before being exported onto the North Atlantic. Eventually this cold air continues down into Western Europe, where a large upper air trough sits.

This has brought them very cold temperatures, for late April.

And there have even been forecasts that snow will be in the air over Scotland, England, Germany and France this coming week.

To have snow in late April, even though the atmosphere has been pumped full of warmth by the (rapidly fading) El Nino, is going to put Alarmists in an embarrassing position, for it is hard to talk about Global Warming to a population that is shivering.

In actual fact the El Nino has seemed to create an imbalance, and the atmosphere is always trying to correct such imbalances, and one way it does so is to depart from a zonal flow around and around the Pole, and instead to get loopy, with a meridienal flow that at times comes right across the Pole. This may “warm the Pole”, but farmers to the south are not planting up on the icecap, and instead mutter curses to the south.

The best Alarmists can do is distract, by pointing up to the Pole and exclaiming how “warm” it is up there (though it is still well below freezing and no thawing is occurring).

The problem is that the El Nino is fading fast, and a La Nina is expected. Some models are saying it will be a big one, which will likely lower the earth’s temperatures every bit as much as the El Nino raised it.

 

In other words, the climate is moving through a cycle. It always has and always will. CO2 has only the slightest effect. It is not worth spending billions to control weather we can’t control. However it is worth helping farmers replant when frost kills their seedlings for, after all, they feed us.

If you must worry, worry about high food prices; not about the fact sea-ice is a little below normal after a big El Nino. There is still more than twice as much sea-ice as there was six months ago. (On this date, back in 2012 when Sea-ice late reached record lows, (red line in chart below) sea-ice was at normal levels, which shows how much the extent-level matters at this early date.)

 

LOCAL VIEW –Daring the Frost–

I should be a sort of poster-child farmer for Global Warming this spring, for I’ve never had my peas up so early. Usually you “plant peas on Patriots Day” (April 19) but this year mine were up and growing by then. (Don’t complain that the rows are not straight. When you run a Farm-childcare, rows are never straight.)

Having my peas up this early (for this far north; I’m sure people in Virginia are laughing at my vanity),  doesn’t actually mean I’m smart. I’ve just been lucky. I got them in and they likely had sprouted roots, but had not stuck their heads up above the soil, when we got this:

What’s more, we got temperatures down in the single digits, (below -12.2° Celsius), and if my peas had emerged, they would not have just been discouraged. Though peas are tough, they’d be dead, dead, dead. All my work would have been wasted, and I’d have to start over from scratch. I’d be singing the blues, but that didn’t happen, so instead I’m smug, smug, smug.

Actually I threaded the needle, and the timing of planting those peas was timed perfectly. In truth you can either say I was lucky, or “to God goes the glory”,  but I so seldom have a chance to swagger that I prefer to think I did it all myself. After years of bungling and doing everything wrong, I have been so trained by misfortune that I’ve started doing things right, as a sort of intuitive reflex (which gets me off the hook of having to intellectually explain my success to scientists.)

Like a gambler “on a roll” I’ve decided to go with my instinct, and am planting other things a little early. I had to look hard to get my onions in, as they hadn’t even appeared in some stores, and in like manner I also got carrots, bulb-fennel, beets, turnips and lettuce planted this weekend.  (I might have planted potatoes, but at the hardware store they hadn’t brought them up to the showroom from the back warehouse.)

This could all be a complete disaster. This far north we can get frosts right into May. In fact, (to discredit Global Warming), we even had a frost on May 29 last spring. However I know how to handle such calamities. You wet everything down in the evening, (as it is harder to freeze wet things), (due to latent heat involved in the phase change, for you scientists), and then you put all your grass from mowing the lawn over the plants, but in a fluffy and thin manner (because the heat generated by wet hay can kill plants, if it is too thick).

The old-timers couldn’t be bothered planting early. They might plant a few things like peas on Patriots Day, but then they kicked back and waited until Memorial Day (May 31) to plant most everything else. Even though beets and carrots and turnips are hardy, and can stand a slight frost, old-timers had seen a few, late killing frosts. It wasn’t worth all the effort of planting a second time, or else rushing about wetting things down and fluffing grass over them. Why? because if you plant on April 24 your carrots take forever to sprout and then grow very slowly. Quite often, though you planted them five weeks ahead of Memorial Day, they have grown only to a height that plants planted after Memorial Day achieve in ten days. By July you can hardly tell the rows apart.  So why bother?

I suppose I bother because I seems to get slower as I get older. My garden is pretty big, and I can’t put the whole thing in on Memorial Day any more. So I pace myself, and do the same amount of work planting over weeks. In other words, I’m just as lazy as the old-timers.

Also, when you get to my age there’s not much you can do that is all that exciting. (Let’s skip the subject of sex.) (Also my finances.) Maybe I’ll drive forty when the speed limit is thirty-five, but the police officer just yawns as I speed by in my old, puttering pickup truck. Where’s the fun in that?

Therefore living-on-the-edge, for me, is to plant too early, but to get away with it.

Wisdom’s just a chance to show you’ve learned
From all you’re bungling, and to demonstrate
Old dogs aren’t dumb. Oh sure, we still get burned,
But flinch less. We’ve seen it’s never too late
To get things right. Although all of the clocks
Say time’s running out, we drive more slowly
Than frantic youngsters. The school of hard knocks
Has shown us speed kills, but the dawdler sees
The sunrises and smells the sweet bacon.
Do old dogs waste their time chasing their tails?
No, for they once bit their tail. Forsaking
The truth they learned would mean old dogs lie.
They don’t. So, if you’ve got things to fix,
Heed the old dogs. Don’t teach them new tricks.

P.S. (For Young Poets)

Yes, it is most definitely true that the young know more about computers and cell phones, but one big solar flare might set all that technology back on its heels, and make it difficult to even start a car. At that point an old geezer with a garden might suddenly seem to have values that are more lasting.

Not that it is wrong for young poets to spend time chasing their tails. It seems to be part of the process.

One way I chased-my-tail when in my late twenties was to be so determined to write that I did so even when I should have been living life, (and thus learning things worth writing about). My writing seemed to just get worse and worse. The worse it got the harder I tried, until I recall being on my knees and pounding the floor, shouting “I will write!  I will write!”

Then, exhausted, I made a liar of myself, for rather than writing I read, and what I happened to be reading was Huxley’s novel, “Antic Hay”, and I happened to get to the part where he has a character acting very much as I just had, pounding the carpet and fiercely insisting he would write.

This made me feel I wasn’t all that special, and was behaving like a character in a comic novel. So I got a job. It didn’t last, so I got another. And another. And another.

I’ve never sat down and counted the number of different jobs I’ve held, but it is over a hundred. Often they felt like they would ruin my ability to write. They never did. They enhanced it.

Eventually you wind up an old dog who knows lots of tricks. Keep the faith.

 

 

ARCTIC SEA ICE –Barneo Politics–

After a silence we have a report from Barneo, which suggests the Norwegians made it impossible to use Svalbard as base of operations. The key sentences are these:  “Then on April, 7 we got further problems from the Norwegian authorities. Trude Petterson, The Independent Barents Observer reporter, found a threat to national security in our conventional activities.”

As best as I can tell, the Russians have had to shift to Franz Josef Land as a alternative, and will likely do so in the future, if they continue the Barneo bases. It will be rough on the economy of Svalbard to lose the tourists, I imagine. I’m not sure what has happened with the tourists this year, or heard anything about the planting of this year’s North Pole Camera.

The ice appears to be sound, though there are a lot of pressure ridges.

The Barneo site continues to drift south towards Fram Strait.

The red line at the top is the “Race Against Time” expedition, which originally was planned to travel from the Pole to Canada. Likely all the delays caused them to back out of that plan, and take an easier route. I find their site a little amusing, for they are stressing how warm the Arctic has been this winter, but describing how the ice is thicker than it was when Mark Wood crossed the same area two years ago. There are many more pressure ridges, which they describe as “boulder fields”. It is no joke hauling sleds over such barriers.

It is worthwhile to compare this years ice with last year’s. (If you open each map (link)  to a new tab you can then switch back and forth to better see the comparison.) (2015 is to the left; 2016 is to the right.)

 

It is clear that the ice is thinner in Barents and Kara seas, but largely because that ice has been exported, and crunched over to the Pole. Ordinarily a pressure ridge is too small to be seen in these satellite-derived thickness-maps, as a pressure ridge gets averaged-out, however in the above 2016 map a long curving “mountain range” of ice averaging nine feet thick curves directly over the Pole. In order for this to not be averaged-out, it must consist of  numerous smaller pressure ridges, some which obviously would be more than nine feet thick. So far I have been unable to get a good view of this feature from satellite pictures, due to clouds. It curves all the way down to the area north of Greenland’s northeast corner, and is likely bound for Fram Strait. Ice is pushed closer to the northwest corner of Svalbard this year, and likely is chilling the tendril of the Gulf Stream that enters the arctic there, as it is melted.

The Polynya northwest of Alaska is larger this year, as are the polynyas along the North Slope coasts of Alaska and Canada. The ice missing from these areas has largely been swept over towards East Siberia, which has thick ice piled up on its coasts, and thicker-than-last-year ice out to sea. This area will likely be slower to melt this summer, especially as the Pacific seems colder. It will be interesting to watch the Laptev Sea in August, when the freshwater floods from the Lena River reach their peak, as the floods will likely be greater (and perhaps colder) this year due to deep snows inland in Siberia. These surges of fresh water have a big effect on that coast of the Arctic.

One feature I watched last summer I dubbed “The Slot”, north of Alaska. A feature-of-this-feature was “The Reef”, which formed The Slot’s southern edge. This never completely melted away, as it originally consisted of some huge pressure ridges, and I’ve watched it all winter as it was swept around all the way to 160 degrees east longitude. It likely forms a considerable pile of ice-chunks over there. The ice north of Siberia is by no means flat “baby ice”. It is a pity we lost our two O-buoy cameras that were over that way.

In order to have all the ice piled up towards Russia it needed to be exported from the Beaufort Sea, which the satellite views show as being crisscrossed by a web of leads and frozen leads, some quite wide, and some frozen-over quite thickly. That sea’s water has been losing heat all winter through these leads.

O-buoy 13 continues to be swept east north of Alaska, and pictures a cold and windswept scene, with temperatures showing a diurnal swing between -10°C and -15°C.

O-buoy 14 is further east, has finally melted its lens free. We were lucky to not lose this buoy over the winter, as a small pressure ridge grew right at its feet. Note the Mass Balance buoy tipped  (and likely not reporting) to the lower right.

This buoy’s thermometer seems more effected by sunlight, and over the past few days has shown a diurnal swing between -22°C and -7°C, with the high temperatures less high when the wind picks up. (Judging from shadows, there are some decent pressure ridges off-camera to the left and behind our left shoulder.)

This should be a very interesting summer, as the El Nino is rapidly fading, and cracks of blue, below-normal water are already showing up off the coast of South America, indicative of a La Nina coming on. The North Atlantic is cooler,  and “The Warm Blob” is largely gone from the North Pacific, (though some residual heat from the El Nino may be heading north past Japan).

There will be a “lag time” before any La Nina coolness effects the Pole, but the Scripps model is showing an absolute whopper of a La Nina. Likely it is overboard, and things will not be this extreme (for it would set records) but usually Scripps is a fairly decent model, and the situation does bear watching.

NSIDC Busted!

It is because of Tom-foolery like this that I resort to using my lying eyes. Either the old NSIDC data was wrong, or the current data is wrong. If NSIDC is going to change the data the public has been relying on to this degree, they need to explain themselves. Do they think people didn’t trust them, and use the data they made public? Now those papers or posts or articles that used their old data look, at the very least, inaccurate, and at worst, stupid. An explanation is not something they can blithely disregard offering.

Real Science

Reader Chris71 has discovered the smoking gun on the NSIDC web site. Read on.

A few weeks ago, NSIDC put out this press release, claiming that 5+ year old ice is at its smallest level on record.

ice at least 5 years or older, is at its smallest level in the satellite record, representing only 3 percent of the total ice cover

The press release included the map below. This is a new style map which they just started in week 39 2015. The map below is for week 41 2015. All of their previous  1984-2015 maps have been deleted from their archive.

March ends a most interesting winter | Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis

The good news is that Chris found one of their old style maps which had not been scrubbed from their website, and is annotated with the following text.

This graph is reloaded from ftp://ccar.colorado.edu/pub/tschudi/iceage/gifs/age${year}_${month}.gif every day and is available…

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