Tag Archives: Greenland

This Explains A Lot

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Yesterday The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about one of the causes of the rise of sea level in Greenland.

The article reports:

Melting of ice in central Greenland is being accelerated by the heat of molten rocks rising from the core–mantle boundary, adding to sea-level rise, a study has found.

Researchers from Japan mapped out the extent and branches of the so-called ‘Greenland plume’ — the rising flow of molten rock ascending beneath the island.

Geothermal activity is abundant in the North Atlantic region. Iceland and the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen have active volcanoes with their own mantle plumes.

Iceland gets its electricity from the geothermal energy underneath the island and by using dams to capture glacial meltwater. Because energy is abundant and cheap there, it is one of the major places in the world where aluminum is made.

The article includes the following illustration:

The article concludes:

With their initial study complete, the researchers are hoping to examine the thermal process in greater detail.

‘This study revealed the larger picture, so examining the plumes at a more localized level will reveal more information,’ said Professor Toyokuni.

The full findings of the study were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Solid Earth. 

When you put something warm under ice, the ice melts. That is not man-made global warming. The existence of the molten rocks explains a lot.

When Global Warming Just Doesn’t Work

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The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about what seems to be a recurring event.

The article reports:

Arctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago, halfway between Norway and North Pole. The ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice. All 16 Climate Change warriors were evacuated by helicopter in challenging conditions, all are safe. 7 crew remains on board, waiting for Coast Guard ship assistance.

The article reminds us of previous incidents:

In May 2009 two global warming activists were hoping to reach Greenland’s polar ice cap in a solar and wind powered yacht.

Unfortunately, they ran into cold and stormy weather and had to be rescued by an oil tanker.

In December 2013 a Russian expedition ship carrying global warming scientists got stuck in ice. And a Chinese ice breaker sent to rescue the scientists got stuck in the ice just miles away.

I love the irony.

The climate is always changing. There are plant fossils under the ice in Greenland, an indication that the climate there was much warmer in a previous period of the earth’s history. There are sea fossils under the American southwest deserts, indicating that the area was under water at some point. There is an area in eastern North Carolina that is a great place to collect fossilized shark teeth, indicating that at some point it was under water. The planet is always changing. It is pure ego for man to believe that he is important enough to be in charge of weather. We have an obligation to keep the planet as clean as possible, but we also have an obligation to balance that obligation with the well being of the people who live on the planet.

A New Dimension Of Insanity

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Om Wednesday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the latest protest by a group of climate activists. I don’t claim to be a scientist and I don’t claim to be a climate expert, but there are a few facts that I learned in school that have not changed. There is a difference between weather and climate. Climate is cyclical. The climate we are living with is always changing. Generally significant change takes a long time. Scientists have found plant fossils under the ice in Greenland. That indicates that at some point that part of the earth was much warmer. Right now you can’t grow much in Greenland. During the Middle Ages there was a period of global warming. There were no SUV’s. Generally speaking, there is a lot involved in climate science that we simply cannot explain.

The article reports:

When group members (of Extinction Rebellion) planned to glue themselves to the Capitol in early July, providence prevented them. Earlier in the day, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Earl Blumenauer (D., Ore.) introduced legislation to declare a national state of climate emergency. It was one of the group’s primary demands, and nullified the need for drastic action.

But these climatistas had to do something. So instead of glue, on July 9 they marched on the Capitol armed with chalk to commit offenses that were “only slightly against the law,” according to spokeswoman Kaela Bamberger. Capitol Hill police prevented them from even approaching the building—much to their disappointment.

Two weeks passed, and Sanders’s legislation went nowhere. Extinction Rebellion leaders decided Tuesday was their chance for arrest. It was time to cover themselves in glue.

A few days before the big event, the group sent out a mass email advertising dramatic “action.” Journalists were contacted over encrypted messaging apps with vague instructions about when and where to arrive outside the Capitol.

Upon our arrival, Extinction Rebellion members shepherd us downstairs to the Cannon rotunda, where an underground passage leads into Capitol offices.

When several young people arrive and begin their work about half an hour later, it’s a bit underwhelming. Gluing oneself to a building sounds dramatic—just short of self-immolation—but in practice, it’s an unceremonious affair. The two climate warriors closest to me dump Gorilla Glue into their palms and plaster them to the open doors of the passageway. To make their roadblock complete, they glue their two free hands together, human chain style. If I had not seen the whole process, I would have thought they were overly romantic tourists.

The article concludes:

After about 15 more minutes of shouting, singing, and a few tears from the climatistas, the police decide they’ve had enough. They clear the hallway and remove everyone from the doors, leading them out of the Capitol building. According to Extinction Rebellion spokespeople, 13 people were placed under arrest.

But there is no photo-op. Any arrests that occur happen away from the reach of cameras; the arrest-hungry climatistas get a pyrrhic victory.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Bamberger (Extinction Rebellion spokeswoman Kaela Bamberger) sighs to me as we exit the scene.

Because our schools and colleges are indoctrinating rather than teaching the scientific method, we can expect to see more of this.-

 

I Guess We Really Don’t Have All The Answers

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A website called The Watchers posted an article yesterday about the Jakobshavn Glacier in western Greenland, Greenland’s largest glacier.

The article reports:

Data collected in March 2019 confirm that the glacier has grown for the third year in a row, and scientists attribute the change to cool ocean waters, Kathryn Hansen of NASA’s Earth Observatory reports.

“The third straight year of thickening of Greenland’s biggest glacier supports our conclusion that the ocean is the culprit,” said Josh Willis, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission.

The maps below show how the glacier’s height changed between March 2016 and 2017 (top); March 2017 and 2018 (middle); and March 2018 and 2019 (bottom). The elevation data come from a radar altimeter that has been flown on research airplanes each spring as part of OMG. Blue areas represent where the glacier’s height has increased, in some areas by as much as 30 m (98 feet) per year.

These are the maps:

The article concludes:

The change is particularly striking at the glacier’s front (solid blue area on the left) between 2016 and 2017. That’s when the glacier advanced the most, replacing open water and sea ice with towering glacial ice. The glacier has not advanced as much since then, but it continues to slow and thicken.

Willis and colleagues think the glacier is reacting to a shift in a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation, which has brought cold water northward along Greenland’s west coast. Measurements of the temperatures collected by the OMG team show that the cold water has persisted.

The team will go back to Greenland in August.

Obviously we do not understand as much about how earth works as we think we do.

The Problems With The Climate-Change Report

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The Daily Signal posted an article today about the new Climate Report presented to President Trump.

These are the four areas of the report that are questionable at best:

1. It wildly exaggerates economic costs.

2. It assumes the most extreme (and least likely)climate scenario.

3. It cherry-picks science on extreme weather and misrepresents timelines and causality.

4. Energy taxes are a costly non-solution.

The article notes that the study was partially funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer’s organization. How is this supposed to be an objective study?

The article further notes how the study came up with the economic costs:

The study…calculates these costs on the assumption that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That temperature projection is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.

The article notes that the climate trajectory used in the study is not realistic. The article states:

Despite what the National Climate Assessment says, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 is not a likely scenario. It estimates nearly impossible levels of coal consumption, fails to take into account the massive increase in natural gas production from the shale revolution, and ignores technological innovations that continue to occur in nuclear and renewable technologies.

When taking a more realistic view of the future of conventional fuel use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the doomsday scenarios vanish. Climatologist Judith Curry recently wrote, “Many ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change don’t really kick at the lower CO2 concentrations, and [Representative Concentration Pathway] then becomes useful as a ‘scare’ tactic.”

The article explains how some of the data in the study is being manipulated:

Another sleight of hand in the National Climate Assessment is where certain graph timelines begin and end. For example, the framing of heat wave data from the 1960s to today makes it appear that there have been more heat waves in recent years. Framing wildfire data from 1985 until today makes it appear as though wildfires have been increasing in number.

But going back further tells a different story on both counts, as Pielke Jr. has explained in testimony.

Moreover, correlation is not causality. Western wildfires have been particularly bad over the past decade, but it’s hard to say to what extent these are directly owing to hotter and drier temperatures. It’s even more difficult to pin down how much man-made warming is to blame.

Yet the narrative of the National Climate Assessment is that climate change is directly responsible for the increase in economic and environmental destruction of western wildfires. Dismissing the complexity of factors that contribute to a changing climate and how they affect certain areas of the country is irresponsible.

The article explains why carbon taxes are not the answer:

Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposed a carbon tax of between $135 and $5,500 by the year 2030. An energy tax of that magnitude would bankrupt families and businesses, and undoubtedly catapult the world into economic despair.

These policies would simply divert resources away from more valuable use, such as investing in more robust infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or investing in new technologies that make Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 even more of an afterthought than it already should be.

Climate change has been with us as long as the earth has existed–they found plant fossils under the ice in Greenland. The question is, “How much impact does man have on climate, and do we have the ability to impact climate in a positive way?” Considering some of the mistakes we have made in the past when tampering with nature, I truly believe we need to attempt to keep our air and water as clean as possible and leave the rest to nature.

The Proof Of A Prediction Is Whether Or Not It Comes True

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On Sunday, Gateway Pundit posted an article about global warming predictions made by ABC News in 2009. The predictions stated that because of global warming, by 2015 New York City would be under water.

Further predictions included:

…Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015.

Climate change is read–the climate of earth has been changing since long before man arrived on the planet. Greenland used to grow things, there was global warming in the Middle Ages, and according to some scientists, we are entering a mini ice age. The frightening global warming predictions are being made by people who can’t even tell you whether or not to bring your umbrella to work! None of the computer models that predict global warming have proven to be accurate. We need to do what we can to keep the earth clean; however, we don’t have to cripple the earth’s economy to do it.

 

Why Science Should Never Be Considered “Settled”

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Yesterday Giz Magazine posted an article about Greenland‘s ice sheet. In recent years, conventional wisdom has been that Greenland’s ice sheet is getting darker due to soot from fossil fuel and/or forest first, possibly resulting in accelerated melting of the ice. Recently, Dartmouth College has come up with a new theory.

The article reports:

Now, however, researchers from Dartmouth College believe that the ice may still still be relatively clean, and that its darkness in the photos could just be due to faulty sensors on the satellites.

Ordinarily, untainted ice sheets reflect much of the sunlight that hits them back up into the sky, limiting how much solar heat is absorbed by the ice. With the Greenland ice sheet, the concern has been that dark carbon particles in the ice are allowing it to absorb more heat, speeding up the process at which the ice will ultimately melt away for good.

Led by Prof. Chris Polashenski, Dartmouth scientists analyzed dozens of snow samples taken from the ice sheet between 2012 and 2014, and compared them to samples taken over the prior 60 years. They reportedly found no significant difference in the amount of black carbon particles or mineral dust in the samples. Additionally, they ruled out algae as the culprit.

The researches have suggested that the degradation of sensors in NASA’s MODIS(Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellites could be making the ice look darker in the photos.

The bottom line here is very simple–we don’t control the climate. I believe that as the inhabitants of planet earth we have a responsibility to keep the planet as clean as possible. I also believe that we need to do that in a way that does not hamper our economic growth. Statistically, the countries doing the least polluting are the countries with free market economies and relatively free societies. No company operating in a free market environment wants to kill off its customers. We don’t need to give a world government control of the world’s economy in the name of controlling global warming–individual free countries are quite capable of managing both pollution and their economies.

 

Whoops! I Guess They Were Wrong Again

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Three Polar bears approach the USS Honolulu, 2...

Image via Wikipedia

The Register, a British website, reported today that scientists have now discovered that the increasing amount of fresh water being added to the Arctic Sea is not due to glaciers melting but to an eastward shift in the path of the Russian runoff through the Arctic Ocean.

The article reports:

The team attributes the redistribution to an eastward shift in the path of Russian runoff through the Arctic Ocean, which is tied to an increase in the strength of the Northern Hemisphere’s west-to-east atmospheric circulation, known as the Arctic Oscillation. The resulting counterclockwise winds changed the direction of ocean circulation, diverting upper-ocean freshwater from Russian rivers away from the Arctic’s Eurasian Basin, between Russia and Greenland, to the Beaufort Sea in the Canada Basin bordered by the United States and Canada. The stronger Arctic Oscillation is associated with two decades of reduced atmospheric pressure over the Russian side of the Arctic.

This is another example of the fact that we really don’t as much as we need to know about climate science and man’s impact on climate. That is another reason to be very careful about what we do to solve a problem that we do not fully understand. All the suggested solutions to ‘global warming’ involve a major redistribution of wealth in the world–oddly enough from free countries with private property rights to dictatorships with no private property rights. To take money from countries where people are free and give it to tyrants who rule countries where people are not free does not help global warming or anything else. It does nothing to address the needs of the poorest people in the world–it simply improves the lifestyles of the crooks that lead them.

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Guess What ? Weather Changes !

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This graph is from an article by Ed Morrissey posted at Hot Air:

global warming, climate change, AGW, BEST, Al Gore

It exposes the lie in the controversial data collected by the East Anglia Project, NASA, and other organizations that have acted as advocates for action based on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The article points out:

But then look what happens in the past 11 years in the bottom chart.  Despite the fact that the world’s nations continue to spew CO2 with no significant decline (except perhaps in the Great Recession period of 2008-9), the temperature record is remarkably stable.  In fact, it looks similar to the period between 1945 and 1970 on the top chart.  If global temperature increases really correlated directly to CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t see this at all; we’d see ever-escalating rates of increase in global temperatures, which is exactly what the AGW climate models predicted at the turn of the century.  They were proven wrong.

Mr. Morrissey concludes:

Even perfect correlation doesn’t prove causation, and this is far from being perfect correlation.  AGW scientists have still failed to prove that CO2 is responsible for the moderate rise in temperatures, nor have they proven their hypothesis that the rise is irreversible, or even bad.  As I pointed out to my friend, Greenland hosted a farming community for over 200 years before getting swallowed in ice in a global-cooling period that helped spread disease, death, and starvation throughout Europe.  If Greenland once again becomes farmland, then we might be entering a somewhat more remarkable climate period in human history, but until then this is more properly referred to as weather.

The global warming movement is based on two things–many high-powered politicians in countries around the world (including America) are highly invested in ‘green energy’ and if they can convince the world to switch to green energy, they will make a bundle of money. Secondly, if you look at the Kyoto treaties and other global warming solutions, you will see that they are aimed at taking money away from countries with strong economies and giving it to countries with corruption, graft and weak economies. The major polluters of the world (India and China) are not bound by these treaties.

We all need to take care of our environment, but we need to balance taking care of the earth and taking care of the people on the earth.

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Another Global Warming Ooops

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A helicopter is taking off Greenland Ice Sheet

Image via Wikipedia

On September 17, WattsUpWithThat posted a story about the growing number of complaints about the new Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) disputes the information about Greenland given in the Atlas.

The article at WattsUpWithThat reports:

“There is no scientific evidence that the area of the Greenland ice sheet since 1999 has shrunk by 15% as the latest edition of the ‘Times Atlas shows,” says climate researcher Ruth Mottram, DMI.

The article further reports:

The error may have occurred if katograferne from the ‘Times Atlas have used satellite images of Greenland to assess ice spatial distribution.

“When I look at satellite images of Greenland, it looks real enough dark along the coast, but that does not mean that the ice has disappeared” says climate researcher and continues: “The dark color is caused by dirt, dust and volcanic ash that makes the ice dark especially in Southeast Greenland. “

I am not by any means a scientific type, but I can understand the mistake. It’s always easier to draw the conclusions that back-up your pet theory. However, when your pet theory has the potential to ruin the global economy, maybe it’s time to reconsider.

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