Is the ocean broken?

-Will (Dragonfly)

 

Yes, climate change means more extreme weather. As air heats up it can carry more humidity meaning it has a higher capacity for rainstorms as well as changing rainfall patterns by not raining.

So even if you're only concerned about your own advantage don't count on this being positive for you personally. But it certainly won't be a positive for millions of other people who will suffer.

 

climate change doesn't mean more extreme weather, as panic mongers continuously preach. it only means a change. it could be a change to a milder climate and milder weather. Like tropical.

 

Seriously, last year's dry Winter and Summer has lead to a change in the water table. Where I always had a slightly high iron content in my well water, now I also have manganese. It stains black. I just had a new filtration system to get rid of it put in our rental house next door. I'll live with it at my house because it's not as bad here. I can't have our renters looking at the toilette and thinking it's not clean, though.

It's even dryer this Spring than last Spring. No Spring run-off.

-Will (Dragonfly)

 

Don't worry. There are no survivors.

 

Drought-plagued California and western U.S. may see another devastating fire season

• Last year brought 5 of the 6 largest fires in California's modern history
• Conditions are worse now than they were at this time last year, with exceptional and extreme drought now found throughout the region.
  
• The current water year is now tied for the third driest on record.
  
• In Northern California, many of the wettest, forested regions have missed over 20 inches of precipitation
  
• Statewide mountain snowpack is currently at less than 50 percent of normal
  
• 2020 was Colorado’s biggest wildfire season on record, beginning in August and continuing through October.
• The probability of getting enough precipitation this spring and summer to mitigate wildfire risk has gone to almost zero

 

Catch the arsonists and you'll have fewer fires. Watch the roads. Last year the fires were set along roads.
And harvest the trees.

 

Global Warming Is 'Fundamentally' Changing The Structure of Our World's Oceans

• Climate change is making major changes to ocean stability faster than previously thought
  
• What is being disrupted is ocean mixing, a process that helps store away most of the world's excess heat and a significant proportion of CO2
  
• Global warming is creating a warmer layer of surface water that is mixing less efficiently with the underlying ocean
  
• Likewise, melting of freshwater glaciers is lowering the salinity of the upper layer and further reducing its density
  
• This barrier layer separating the ocean surface and the deep layers had strengthened world-wide at a rate six times previous thought
  
• By stabilizing the layers, the ocean's role to buffer climate change is made harder as it is made more difficult for the ocean to absorb vast amounts of heat and carbon

The research was published in the journal Nature

 

What? Excess heat doesn't get radiated off into space? How does a closed system store excess heat without heating up?

Makes sense except a previous post about the Gulf Stream and another one about Deepwater ice shelf melt, makes it sound like warming in deep water currents are causing more melt than previously thought.

Since I believe there is more affect from geothermal activity than the climate community is giving credence to, I have been interested in the connections to warming trends under the ice caps with the surface warming above. I am incline to believe we are going through a cycle of geothermal surface heating.

The news about increasing continental drift, a moving magnetic pole, some recent volcanic events, and suggestions that the poles are in a process of switching, leads me to believe that there is much more going on than AGW.

-Will (Dragonfly)

 

The surface of the Earth is heating up. Why do you think it isn't? But part of the surface heat is being swept into the deep oceans, where it doesn't bother us so much, or so quickly. Hurricanes, for instance, are driven by the temperatures of the ocean's surface, not by the temperature of the ocean's depths. So if the surface heat is not being buried as quickly as it might, it will leave more energy available to fuel cyclones.

I would have to see the post you are referring to to be sure, but it seems to me that even the coldest ocean current is warmer than ice, and if it is flowing against an ice shelf, then that ice will be apt to melt.

Why do you think that there "is more affect from geothermal activity than the climate community is giving credence to," and do you think they are intentionally or unintentionally overlooking it?

If you think they are intentionally overlooking geothermal activity, why do you think they would do that?

If you think they are unintentionally overlooking geothermal activity, why do you think you are the only person smart enough to have thought of it?

Why do you "believe we are going through a cycle of geothermal surface heating?" Do you have data, or is this just wishful thinking?

It seems to me a pretty trivial problem to stick thermometers in the ground all around the earth and measure its heat loss, and to see if it is changing over time.

I doubt that anyone would deny "that there is much more going on than AGW." But why do you think you are able to imagine relevant, even crucial, details that no one else has thought of?

Earth's internal heat budget | Wikipedia

Earth's internal heat budget is fundamental to the thermal history of the Earth. The flow of heat from Earth's interior to the surface is estimated at 47±2 terawatts (TW)[1] and comes from two main sources in roughly equal amounts: the radiogenic heat produced by the radioactive decay of isotopes in the mantle and crust, and the primordial heat left over from the formation of Earth.[2]

Earth's internal heat powers most geological processes[3] and drives plate tectonics.[2] Despite its geological significance, this heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation.[4] The insolation that eventually, after reflection, reaches the surface penetrates only several tens of centimeters on the daily cycle and only several tens of meters on the annual cycle. This renders solar radiation minimally relevant for internal processes.[5]​

 

I'm not denying that.

No. The oceans are a dynamic, but finite mass. They can absorb heat, just like anything else, but there is a limit before any added energy, in this case Solar energy, would simply warm everything up and the oceans would give back at the same rate that it came in. If you are suggesting that millions of years of solar energy can still be hidden away from the surface at a faster rate than the oceans release it back, than your earlier posts arguing that the core is cooling, not warming wouldn't work.

Perhaps I should have written 'have been' some recent discoveries are finding warming in deeper waters than previously believed.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/growing-underwater-heat-blob-speeds-demise-arctic-sea-ice
"Strengthening currents and waves are pulverizing the ice. And a study published last week suggests deep heat in the Arctic Ocean has risen and is now melting the ice from below."

I don't know if it has been unintentional or not, but I believe the fervor around Global Warming has the scientific community focusing too narrowly on greenhouse gasses.

Since I'm not addressing the scientific community as some kind of authority in anything, I feel my casual speculations are enough. I offer my statement, tell you why I think, suspect or just plain speculate and understand that I won't be in danger of being taken seriously enough to feel like I need to go out and plans sea floor thermometers to prove a point I'm not really trying to make. My goal is to expand thinking to include more possible answers.

I think I am very smart, but I recognize there are plenty of people smarter than I. That by no means means I can't have an original idea. I am a professional artist. I make an effort to be original, despite my only slightly above average intellect. If living in a world where one thinks, "My idea can't be better than what has already been thought of by others smarter than I am." is the way you think it should be done, I'm sorry, you must throw a lot of good thinking in the trash because you want to be humble. I recommend living in a state of question because there are a lot of great contributions made by people who were not any smarter the You or I are.

-Will (Dragonfly)

 

Yes, I agree. But that point of thermal equilibrium is a long way from being reached.

At this point in time, the deep oceans can still absorb a huge amount of solar energy. But to do so that energy needs to be transported to the ocean depths via currents (conduction is way too slow). The article I posted suggested that the natural processes that drive those currents which can transport energy from the surface to the depths may be slowing down. If true, that implies that the surface will heat even faster than it would had the transport-to-depth process continued unabated.

You lost me...

Not sure what you are saying about "millions of years of solar energy can still be hidden away from the surface," and I'm also lost about "the core is cooling."

Well, if you read the article it is not saying "warming in deeper waters than previously believed." It is saying that (relatively) warm water, which they already knew existed, and which has atypically stayed deep in the Arctic Ocean (compared to what happens in other oceans), is slowly migrating upwards, which could cause the Arctic sea ice to melt even faster.

Ice has kept its grip on the Arctic with the help of an unusual temperature inversion in the underlying waters. Unlike the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, the Arctic gets warmer as it gets deeper. Bitter winters and chilly, buoyant freshwater from Eurasian rivers cool its surface layers, which helps preserve the underside of the ice. But at greater depths sits a warm blob of salty Atlantic water, thought to be safely separated from the sea ice.

As the reflective ice melts, however, it is replaced by darker water, which absorbs more of the Sun’s energy and warms. Those warming surface waters are likely migrating down into the blob, which robotic temperature probes, moorings, and oceanographic surveys show is steadily warming and growing. With enough heat to melt the Arctic’s ice three to four times over, the blob could devour the ice from below if the barrier of the cold surface layers ever dissipates.​

Why? Scientists have spent the last 50 years examining all possible causes for global warming, natural and man-made. This includes variations in solar intensity, increase in volcanic activity, ocean cycles, jet contrails, soot from forest fires, etc, etc. Every possible cause has either been excluded as irrelevant, or included into the climate models. And what scientists have determined is that human-emitted greenhouse gasses are the straw that's breaking the camel's back.

Questions are good. But as I tried to suggest in an earlier post, asking questions without making a serious attempt to understand the answers is not so good.

When a scientist has an idea for a research project, one of their first tasks is to search the scientific literature to see if their question has already been answered?

I think that many of your questions have been at least partially answered, but I'm not seeing much effort on your part to find out if they have or haven't.

So which is it? Are you "very smart" or do you have "only slightly above average intellect?" <laugh>

I'm pretty smart too, if IQ tests mean anything (which is questionable). But I think it is entirely appropriate to be humble when asking questions outside of one's own field of expertise. There is no way that even the world's smartest person can master more than a small portion of the world's knowledge. To make any progress at all we have to rely on the intelligence, wisdom, efforts, and good will of others.

I absolutely agree. I know little about how the art world works, but in the scientific world it's extremely rare for a new discovery to be made in a particular field independent of all the previous knowledge in that field. That's why most scientists have their PhD, which means they have spent a lot of time getting up to speed in one particular field that they've chosen to specialize in. And often a field is so broad and complex that no single person can learn enough, fast enough, on their own. So teams of scientists, from a number of different disciplines, have to work together to make any new discoveries.

Climate science is a particularly complex field. Many disciples are involved, from space physics to hydrology, and chemistry to biology. Hundreds of thousands of some of the smartest people in the world are working on various aspects of the question. And their research is consistently pointing
pointing to the conclusion that AGW is real and serious, but, possibly, controllable.

 

Proof their fraudulent "facts" are adjusted to agree with their AGW narrative.

 

On multiple occasions we've been advised to "follow the money."

Willie Soon | Wikipedia

Willie Wei-Hock Soon (born 1966)[1] is a Malaysian astrophysicist[2] and aerospace engineer[3] employed as a part-time externally funded researcher at the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.[4][5]

Soon is a climate change denier,[4][6] disputing the scientific understanding of climate change, and contends that most global warming is caused by solar variation rather than by human activity.[7][8] He co-wrote a paper whose methodology was widely criticised by the scientific community.[9] Climate scientists such as Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies have refuted Soon's arguments, and the Smithsonian does not support his conclusions. He is nonetheless frequently cited by politicians opposed to climate-change legislation.[4][6]

Soon co-authored The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun–Earth Connection with Steven H. Yaskell. The book treats historical and proxy records of climate change coinciding with the Maunder Minimum, a period from 1645 to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare.[10]

From 2005 to 2015, Soon had received over $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry, while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his work.[11][...]

2015: Disclosure violations
Soon, as a researcher at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution, a government agency covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).[4] Greenpeace worker Kert Davies made a succession of FOIA requests for Soon's correspondence and grant arrangements and in 2014 was given documents disclosing arrangements both Soon and the CfA had with funders. Later in 2014, Davies left Greenpeace to become executive director of a newly founded non-profit, Climate Investigations Center.[39]

The Smithsonian does not fund Soon, who "pursues external grants to fund his research."[40] This funding had exceeded US$1.5 million since 2001;[39] under standard CfA procedures, more than half of the $1.2 million funding since 2005 had gone towards the Smithsonian's facility operating costs, with the remainder being passed on to Soon as his salary. Other researchers there have a similar arrangement, but nearly all of their funding comes through peer-reviewed award processes from government bodies such as NASA and the National Science Foundation,[41] whereas Soon has received very little federal money.[4] Soon's funding by private interests is highly unusual at the Smithsonian. It included at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation which is associated with the oil industry and $469,560 from the Southern Company which uses coal to generate electricity. Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute also provided funding, which was later replaced by anonymous donors through the Donors Trust,[4][42] a donor-advised fund that offers anonymity to clients who do not wish to make their donations public.[43][44][45] The latter was identified by a 2013 Drexel University study as the largest single provider of money to political efforts to fight climate-change policy.[41] A 2008 contract agreed to by the CfA required the institute to notify the Southern Company before disclosing that Southern had provided funding, and both the CfA and Willie Soon to provide Southern with advance copies of any publications "for comment and input", though the company could not block publications or require changes.[39]

The Chinese Science Bulletin has a strict policy requiring disclosure of "all relationships or interests that could influence or bias the work", including "professional interests or personal beliefs that may influence your research", for example previous receipt of research grants. The Monckton et al. paper published in January 2015 included a statement by the authors, including Soon, that they had no conflict of interest, and Davies wrote to the journal about the undisclosed funding shown by the documents. On 24 January the journal replied that they would "look into the matter as appropriate". The story was published by The Boston Globe on 26 January with a statement by Monckton that allegations of failure to disclose a material conflict of interest were untrue, as the authors had not "received any funding whatsoever for our research, which was conducted in our own time". He said that the Heartland Institute had provided funding to make the paper available to the public on the journal's website.[39][46]

On February 21, publications including The Guardian and The New York Times reported that Soon had failed to disclose conflicts of interest in at least 11 papers since 2008, and alleged that Soon had violated ethical guidelines of at least eight of those journals publishing his work. Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, described the disclosure violations as "inappropriate behavior" that they would "have to handle with Dr. Soon internally".[4][6] On the same day, Nature reported that the CfA had launched an investigation into whether Soon had properly reported the funding arrangements shown in the documents. Alcock said "We want to get the facts straight. If there is evidence of failure to disclose, yes, we have a problem."[39] He said that the contract with Southern preventing disclosure of their funding "was a mistake", and in a later email reply to questions said "We will not permit similar wording in future grant agreements".[47] The Smithsonian announced that its Inspector General would investigate, and in addition there was to be a full review of the Smithsonian's ethics and disclosure policies about sponsored research,[40][48] led by former NSF director Rita R. Colwell.[49]

On March 2, 2015, The Heartland Institute conservative think tank released a statement by Soon,[50] which said he had "been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups". He described this as "a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming."[51][52] Some of the journals that had published Soon's work had begun reviewing the papers in relation to their policies requiring disclosure: Soon said he had "always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally". He would be "happy to comply" if they required further disclosure, and "would ask only that other authors—on all sides of the debate—are also required to make similar disclosures."[51]

He also requested that journalists who had reported on his actions similarly examined disclosure by other scientists.[50] An investigation by InsideClimate News could find no cases where mainstream climatologists had failed to disclose the funding of their research. Unlike Soon, who had approached private funders directly, their funding was almost entirely obtained through open competitive peer-reviewed applications to public bodies. Climate scientist Andrew Dessler said "People always acknowledge their grants, and that's not really an issue". Though it was almost certain that a disclosure issue could arise, intentionally or otherwise, no instances were known. The nearest case was raised by Steven Milloy's "Junk Science" blog when Nature Climate Change published a 2012 study by meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, who was paid a fixed amount by two companies to sit on their board. Although the companies did not fund his research, the journal then added disclosure of these board memberships. The blog raised the same concern about a paper published a year later, but Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences decided this disclosure was not required.[53]

In April 2015, a Southern Company spokesman said "Our agreement with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory expires later this year and there are no plans to renew it". It still required Soon to produce a study on "Solar Activity Variation on Multiple Timescales" by November 2015.[42]
​

 

The truncated graphs presented by AGW scientists show a huge difference in interpretation when the longer term period of the same graph is displayed. The AGW deceit isn't excused by and has nothing to do with your character attack on Dr Soon. The fraud was on the part of AGW scientists. Soon just points out their fraudulent behavior.