"We are spirits in the material world"

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 2:17 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Tuesday 05 August 2014 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2014/08/tell-you-what-why-dont-you-just-trust.html


"Tell you what - why don't you just trust in the Lord?"



I can recall back in the year 1995 when I watched an interesting and alarmist television program. The program was fictional but it was based on reality. I mean, sure, everything is real. Hollywood makes movies during the daytime and well, the Sun is definitely real.

So anyway, I forget the name of that television production but it was something about the global climate and the story itself was fiction.

But the ending I still recall well.

At the ending, the breathless narrator described dramatically the news from scientists: The global ocean conveyor belt had stopped.

Whether I recall the details from that production or I recall the details from similar productions later I read or watched what that meant to me was that global warming caused enough ice to melt so that fresh water flooded the oceans in certain parts and that decreased salt content stopped a kind of conveyor belt that runs through the ocean deep below the surface. The function of that so-called conveyor is to balance out extremes, as far as I know. The result is that no region gets too hot and no region gets too cold. Of course there are regions that get very hot and regions that get very cold but they could be worse.

So what that condition could lead to is another global ice age. The waters of the ocean stop circulating and the cold and heat become trapped in extremes.










http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2014/07/31/taking-planets-temperature-best-done-ocean/

AGU Blogosphere


31 July 2014

Taking The Planets Temperature Is Best Done In Ocean

Posted by Dan Satterfield

Your filling the backyard pool for summer, and the kids are asking how long it will take to fill up. Now, you could just use simple math (using the gallons per minute you are adding to the pool divided by the total volume) and get an answer, but lets say you forgot to ask what it was and the internet is down, so you can’t look it up. Well, you could go out and measure how fast the water level is rising, but you suspect you might have a leak, and it’s also a windy day. Still, it’s your best bet, so out you go and you take a measurement followed by another twenty minutes later. Let’s assume the second measurement shows NO RISE in water level. Do you have a leak? Maybe, but the wind was making waves in the water, and the dog had just jumped into the pool as you were taking the measurement, so the water could be sloshing a few inches and you are uncertain. Trust me, you have every right to be!

Measuring the Earth’s temperature is in many ways very similar to the problem our back yard Dad is facing. The increasing greenhouse gases are trapping more and more heat, and we can actually do the math and come up with a very close estimate of how much. The problem is that there are natural oscillations in the atmosphere and oceans that affect the global temperature, so looking at the temperature from month to month or even year to year is going to show you the combination of all of these mixed in along with the rise from greenhouse warming. This is why you should always turn on alarm bells when you see a graph of the Earth’s temperature over a period of a few years, or even a couple of decades, because It’s showing you a mix of natural and anthropogenic oscillations.

I still see these graphs frequently on false science websites claiming climate change is a hoax, or that “global warming has stopped” etc. It’s actually very possible for the surface temperature to hold steady or even drop, as the earth’s outgoing radiation drops compared to what is coming in. Climate simulations have shown that even as temps rise over a century by several degrees celsius, there are period of steady and even declining temperatures over periods of up to a decade.










http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossby_wave


Rossby wave

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Atmospheric Rossby waves are giant meanders in high-altitude winds with major influence on weather. Rossby waves are associated with pressure systems and the jet stream. Oceanic Rossby waves move along the thermocline: that is, the boundary between the warm upper layer of the ocean and the cold deeper part of the ocean. Rossby waves are a subset of inertial waves.


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 05 August 2014 excerpt ends]










JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 11:14 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Thursday 11 December 2014 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-final-countdown.html


The Final Countdown


http://pauldouglasweather.com/whiff-el-nino-50f-weekend/

PAUL DOUGLAS

WEATHER SERVICES


Whiff of El Nino – 50F This Weekend?

by Paul Douglas on December 11, 2014 in Blog


Scientists Find Early Warning Signs of Changing Ocean Circulation. Rapid melting of polar regions is flushing more fresh water into the North Atlantic, which may (over time) impact a global conveyor belt of moving water around the planet. Here’s a clip from UPI: “The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short, is the large-scale flow of water — driven by temperature and salinity gradients — specific to the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers say they’ve located signs that it and other portions of Earth’s oceanic conveyor belt are slowing. The global conveyor belt doesn’t just move water, it moves heat too — delivering it (in the case of the AMOC) from the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere to the North Atlantic. It is a vital component of climate as we know it. Should it continue to slow and become disrupted, it could spell drastic and abrupt climate change…”


Cruise Ships Dump 1 Billion Gallons of Sewage Into The Ocean Every Year. So please don’t play in the ocean anytime soon. Quartz has the horrific details; here’s an excerpt: “Some 20 million people board cruise ships every year. And while they might return to land with fond memories of umbrella drinks and shuffleboard, they leave a lot at sea. About a billion gallons (3.8 billion liters) of sewage (pdf), in fact. That’s according to Friends of the Earth, a non-governmental environmental group, which used US Environmental Protection Agency data to calculate arrive at that gross figure...”


Editorial: Human Nature vs. Global Warming. Humans Are Winning, And That’s Bad News. Here’s an excerpt of an Op-Ed at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “You’d almost think the world has no intention of fixing this problem. In which assumption you would be at least partially correct. If the world could fix its greenhouse gas problems painlessly, it would have been done long ago. But this is a problem that — if you address it seriously — would require significant lifestyle changes on the part of every human being living in even modestly developed nations. No politician who wants to keep his or her job is going to do that by preaching sacrifice…”


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 11 December 2014 excerpt ends]










http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/03/a-hypothesis-about-the-cold-winter-in-eastern-north-america/

RealClimate


A hypothesis about the cold winter in eastern North America + Update

Filed under: Climate impacts Climate Science Oceans — stefan @ 30 March 2015

The past winter was globally the warmest on record. At the same time it set a new cold record in the subpolar North Atlantic – and it was very cold in the eastern parts of North America. Are these things related?

Two weeks ago NOAA published the following map of temperature anomalies for the past December-January-February (i.e. the Northern Hemisphere winter). One week ago, we published a paper in Nature Climate Change (which had been in the works for a few years) arguing that the cold in the subpolar North Atlantic is indicative of an AMOC slowdown (as discussed in my last post). Immediately our readers started to ask (as we indeed had been asking ourselves): does the cold winter in eastern North America (culminating in the Inhofe snowball incident) have anything to do with what is going on in the Atlantic?

Winter15NOAAFig. 1 Temperature anomaly map for the past december-january-february, from NOAA.

Here is a hypothesis for how they may indeed be linked. This is somewhat speculative – I have not investigated this with any special data analysis, I am just connecting the dots of some articles in the published literature, hoping this post might stimulate further investigation. The proposed mechanism has three simple steps, as follows.

1. The AMOC slows down – see my previous post.

2. The slowdown not only leads to a cold patch out in the Atlantic subpolar gyre, but also to warm sea surface temperature anomalies along the east coast of North America. This dipole response was found in the EOF analysis of observed sea surface temperatures by Dima and Lohmann (2011) (Fig.2). An EOF analysis is a standard statistical tool to decompose changes in space and time into a set of characteristic fixed spatial patterns, each of which follows a particular time evolution. That makes sense when a particular physical mechanism of change (such as an AMOC slowdown) has a characteristic spatial pattern. The pattern shown in Fig. 2 is the one identified by Dima and Lohman with the gradual AMOC decline over the 20th Century. (Note you have to reverse colours – as shown in the graph it corresponds to an AMOC increase, because this pattern is then multiplied with a negative time evolution).

Dima_Lohmann_Fig2d

Fig. 2 Temperature pattern EOF2 in the HadISST data set, as analysed by Dima and Lohmann and identified with a gradual AMOC decline. Note that in this (and the following) graph the sign is reversed; an AMOC weakening comes with a cold patch south of Greenland and warming along the North American east coast.

Dima and Lohmann also show a second pattern (Fig. 3) associated with the sudden AMOC decline in the 1970s which we also see in the AMOC index in our paper.

Dima_Lohmann_Fig3b

Fig. 3 Temperature pattern derived from a correlation analysis and identified by Dima and Lohmann with a rapid 1970s AMOC weakening.

In either case the anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic is associated with an opposite anomaly along the North American east coast.

This dipole response to an AMOC slowdown is also found in models, as shown by Zhang (2008) – in her paper she presented the schematic shown in Fig. 4. Note you also need to reverse the colors in the diagram of Zhang – she chose to show the effect of an increase, not a slowdown of the AMOC, because she was looking at the increase after 1990 which we also find in our index. Zhang derived this pattern for the subsurface temperatures, so I asked her whether she also found a similar dipole in sea surface temperatures. She responded: “The dipole pattern shown in the subsurface is indeed also expressed in the SST, I use subsurface temperature because it is less noisy than SST.”

Zhang08_1

Fig. 4 Dipole induced by strengthening the AMOC – for a weakening of the AMOC the reverse response is expected. From Zhang 2008.

Was this warm anomaly along the American east coast present last winter? Definitely – I happen to have saved two snapshots of SST anomalies on my hard disk, shown below.

SST_anom_12dec14 GFS-025deg_NH-SAT1_SST_anom_11Feb15

Fig. 5 SST anomalies for 12 December and 11 February. Note the cold patch in the subpolar Atlantic and the very warm SSTs along the North American east coast. Source: Climate Reanalyzer.

3. Warm SST along the American east coast creates a cold anomaly in the eastern parts of North America by radiating groups of Rossby waves. This was shown in a very elegant paper by Kaspi and Schneider (2011). They set out to explain why the eastern parts of the northern continents are in general much colder than the rest of the hemisphere. They took an idealized climate model, with no continents or other distractions (an “aquaplanet”), and simply pumped a heat anomaly into one small ocean region to mimic the effect of the Gulf Stream. Voila: upstream of this heat anomaly they got a big cold anomaly.

They also performed a clever, fun experiment: they increased the rotation rate of their planet and showed that the size of that cold patch increases in proportion. The theory of Rossby wave propagation explains this.

Kaspi fig 2

Fig. 6 Temperature anomalies that result from adding an ocean heat anomaly in the triangular region on an aquaplanet. This triangular heating region is to mimic warm sea surface temperatures (which provide a strong heat source to the atmosphere) along the North American coast. Note the cold anomaly that develops upstream. Left panel shows normal, right panel doubled rotation rate of the Earth.

They conclude in their paper:

The anomalous winter cold of eastern continental boundaries can result at least in part from radiation of nearly stationary Rossby wave groups off the regions of large surface heat fluxes over the warm waters in oceanic western boundary currents.

(They say “in part” because there are other factors like topography – but these don’t change over time, so don’t come into play when explaining why the last winter was colder than usual.)

Of course we need to be cautious – theirs is an idealised experiment which isolates and demonstrates this mechanisms in principle, but does not prove how strong it is in the real world. Certainly, changes in heating from the Gulf Stream will not be the only thing that influences winter weather along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, so we can’t expect a one-to-one relation. But I think this connection is worthy of further investigation.

By the way, this 3-step explanation of the cold of the past winter is not an alternative to the “jet stream meander” or “polar vortex” explanations – rather, it may simply help to explain why there was this persistent strong southward inflow of polar air into the eastern parts of North America. It might just have been helped along by the very warm waters along the coast – and those may well be related to the AMOC slowdown.










http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F14.html

Homer the Smithers [ The Simpsons ]

Original Airdate in N.A.: 25-Feb-96


Later that day...

Burns: [from his office] Simpson? Simpson? [walks into Smithers' office] Did you get that report on the accounting department?

Homer: Yes sir, I did. [reads] "The accounting department is located on the 3rd floor. Its hours are 9am to 5pm. The head of this department is a Mr. Johnson or Johnstone."


Yet a little later...

Homer: Here are your messages:

"You have 30 minutes to move your car",

"You have 10 minutes",

"Your car has been impounded",

"Your car has been crushed into a cube",

"You have 30 minutes to move your cube".

[phone ringing]

Homer: [answers] Yello, Mr. Burns' office.

Burns: Is it about my cube?



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 8:18 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 01 April 2015