The polar sea ice in both hemispheres is setting records so far this January.
The record being set is low ice extent.
January is a summer month in the Southern Hemisphere (Fig. 1), but it is a winter month in the Northern Hemisphere (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2
Those two graphs are made from datasets that record the ice extent through January 26.
The current ice extent trend is obviously less January sea ice.
That is the same trend that November and December (2016) had:
Sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic set record low extents every day in December, continuing the pattern that began in November. Warm atmospheric conditions persisted over the Arctic Ocean, notably in the far northern Atlantic and the northern Bering Sea. Air temperatures near the Antarctic sea ice edge were near average. For the year 2016, sea ice extent in both polar regions was at levels well below what is typical of the past several decades.
(NSIDC, 1/5/17). The trend seems slow, but the year when the once-fabled polar Arctic ice-free sea route opens up is approaching.
In the first post of this series, posted in March of 2016, I pointed out how the establishment Republicans and opposing establishment Democrats had been the subjects of the research taking place within the discipline of Agnotology.
The first sentence of the post was: "I have to give V.P. Biden credit for, from his political perspective, answering the question "what do you think of the Republican primary?" with the answer "It is a gift from the lord."
As it turns out (Awe Topsy, 2, 3) Joe may now say "de debil did it" rather than "it was a gift for the lord" (and for a while the Lord GOP whole heartedly agreed).
But now as it all turns out, Russia is lordly (shhhh ...) and the GOP is all trumped up on The Donald University.
In other words, we can say that the mask on the state has changed.
But, along with that, we must ask: "has the state changed?"
Or, was "the change" only something that took place inside those sixty some odd million Americans who voted for his Trumpness?
I am referring to those in the vast alternateness who have now in effect been given the special honorary degree from The Donald University (TDU)?
I am speaking of the honorary degree known as "Doctor of State, a.k.a. Doctor of Definity" (once unique to The Lord GOP University) ... you know, those doctors who are "making the state well again."
The remedy of those doctors would entail, among other things, wall building, health care removal, deficit continuum, the neo Conway, pollution, and denial of anything and everything that would render a contrary diagnosis and treatment.
They have now chosen to revive "Americanism" in the same manner as they chose, from afar, to revive another one of their patients: Terri Schiavo.
Thus, as the video below indicates, it becomes less and less imaginary to say "it's getting to the point where I'm no one anymore" (CSNY, Suite Judy Blue Eyes).
Meanwhile, the TDU doctors seem to still have YAH syndrome, in terms of being lost in space (You Are Here).
The previous post in this series is here.
Professor Wilkerson:
05:30 "Where is it written in history that any Empire has survived" 08:30 "the [American] empire is in deep, deep, trouble ... as all empires throughout human history have been near their end" 11:32 "empires concentrate, at the end, on military force as the end all and be all of power" 42:00 QUESTION / ANSWER SESSION BEGINS
In this series I have been challenging the, IMO, fallacy that thermal expansion of ocean water is the primary factor or even a major factor of sea level rise (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
Generally, conventional science, which has been applied going back a long time, indicates that "layering" in the oceans prevents the warming (from sunlight) upper level from generally reaching the deep ocean (Open Ocean Convection, Washington Edu).
Exceptions to the general rule that were discovered in the more distant past were called "deep ocean penetrating plumes."
As in most cases of scientific research, new discoveries have been made recently that have found some far more intense mechanisms for mixing ocean layers (mixing the ocean water's chemical contents as well as temperatures):
The chaos from skyscraper-tall waves breaking deep underwater has been captured for the first time, researchers say.
Fig. 2 Ocean Temperatures
Turbulence from these waves can generate thousands of times more mixing in the deep ocean than previously thought and, in turn, potentially require a critical rethinking of global models of climate and the oceans, the scientists who got a look at the phenomenon added.
Waves on the surface of the ocean generally can only grow up to a few dozen feet tall at most before collapsing, because water is so much heavier than air. However, underwater waves are made of deep, cold, dense water rising into layers of shallower, warmer, lighter water, and therefore, can reach titanic sizes.
"These waves can reach just huge sizes of about 200 meters [650 feet] — that's taller than a 60-story building," said researcher Matthew Alford, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. ...
These mammoth "internal waves" are thought to play a crucial role in mixing heat and chemicals across layers of the ocean that ordinarily never mingle — key factors that global models of the ocean and climate need to take into account.
In another Dredd Blog series I have been looking at temperatures at deep ocean depths from data recorded in the WOD database (link @ Fig. 1), so I am not surprised at the results shown in Fig. 2.
Thermal expansion becomes thermal contraction when the warm & cold waters mix to change or equalize temperatures (warm flows to cold, expansion diminishes, contraction increases until they, if possible, equalize in temperature according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
The "thermal expansion is the main factor in sea level rise in the 19th and 20th centuries" hypothesis is no longer credible,
Even when one or the other happens to be the bottom line measurement, thermal expansion and contraction are both minor players in global sea level change (ibid).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
Thus, they would also probably expect that the published peer-reviewed paper with the title "The melting of floating ice raises the ocean level" would catch my eye.
It is probably because I like to search out common myths in science, both ancient and modern, and remind myself and others that we are not immune from being utterly devoid of understanding an issue at any point in time (What Is Pseudo Science?).
II. Yet Another Common Scientific Myth
The part of the paper that hooked me up was this statement:
The melting of floating ice in a global warming will cause the ocean to rise.
...
Common lore (Warrick et al. 1996; Church et al. 2001; Miller & Douglas 2004; Oppenheimer 2004; Spokes 2004; Wadhams & Munk 2004; Williams 2004; Weart 2005; Kolbert 2005) holds that, due to Archimedes’ Principle (Archimedes, ca. 220BC), the melting of floating ice will not change the global mean sea level. The melting of ice was heretofore believed to raise the sea level only when the ice is supported by land (‘grounded ice’). This supposition is implicit in analyses of sea level rise that omit floating ice from the fluid budget (Meier & Wahr 2002) and explicit in Munk (2003), as well as Antonov et al. (2002), who directly state that the melting of floating ice is to be excluded in calculating sea level rise.
Anyway, this interesting paper we are considering did not mention the relocation in any meaningful context, nor did the refer to Woodward 1888 or Mitrovica 1998, 2001, 2011 etc. concerning ice sheet gravity dynamics.
Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States
This report describes the output from a set of subtasks of the overall Task Force effort—specifically, developing updated scenarios of GMSL rise, and then regionalizing these global scenarios for the entire U.S. coastline, to serve as inputs into assessments of potential vulnerabilities and risks in the coastal environment. In addition to supporting the longer-term Task Force goals, this new set of products will also be a key input into the USGCRP Sustained Assessment process and the upcoming Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), due in 2018, including serving as a technical input to the in-progress USGCRP Climate Science Special Report (CSSR).
(NOAA Report SLC, Jan 2017, PDF). Get your free copy now, before the fact munchers get hold of it and make "alternate facts" out of it.
Anyway, it does mention Mitrovica several times, but does not seem to fully comprehend what he said or meant.
The bottom line was that there could be an 8 foot sea level rise by 2100, although they were not specific because they did get a glimpse of the point that global mean sea level (GMSL) is another episode of common lore.
The reality is that coastal area regional planners need to find out what their sea level rise at their location is going to be, not what it will be out in the middle of the ocean.
IV. Conclusion
Take care, put your lab coats on, and pitch in to thwart common lore, myth, ignorance, and the "alternate fact zone" as things heat up (Hansen et al. 2016).
Fig. 1 Ocean temperature &
thermal/density factors
In this series we have looked into the dynamic spread of ignorance by isolating and identifying some of the sources of that ignorance (Dr. Robert N. Proctor coined the word Agnotology, the scientific study of ignorance).
The growth of what we call "knowledge" is very much like the growth of what we call "ignorance" in one important aspect; for example, I have observed that one important aspect in the gathering of what we call knowledge is "faith" and "trust" (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).
It is strange that knowledge and ignorance are engendered and spread by the same essence of "faith and trust."
If we have faith or trust in a source, we are more likely to call the ignorance coming from that source "knowledge."
That leads us to "a Recognition" (especially in our era of divided ideology, where one person's knowledge is another person's ignorance) to wit:
"We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.
Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance." - Thomas Pynchon, 1984
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' ” ~ Isaac Asimov
Dr. Proctor, the author of the book Agnotology (linked-to up-thread), has some very astute comments to add to those introductory observations of Asimov and Pynchon:
"A whole field is devoted to reflection on the topic [of knowlege], with product tie-ins to professorships and weighty conferences. Epistemology is serious business, taught in academies the world over ... What is remarkable, though, is how little we know about ignorance. There is not even a well-known word for its study (though our hope is to change that ... no fancy conferences or polished websites. This is particularly remarkable, given (a) how much ignorance there is, (b) how many kinds there are, and (c) how consequential ignorance is in our lives."
(Agnotology, Chapter 1, PDF). In today's world, one of the most dangerous sources of ignorance is Oil-Qaeda, a private empire responsible for, among other things, global warming ignorance (Humble Oil-Qaeda).
Today, I want to focus on a subject set forth in one other sentence from the Agnotology book:
"Ignorance can be made or unmade, and science can be complicit in either process."
(ibid, Agnotology, p. 3). So, let's start with a case where science is complicit in spreading some ignorance, while it is also spreading some knowledge.
That subject is the ongoing incorrect teaching that thermal expansion is "the main cause" of sea level rise.
The IPCC is primarily the originating source for the thermal expansion ignorance, even as it spreads volumes of knowledge:
"As the ocean warms, the density decreases and thus even at constant mass the volume of the ocean increases. This thermal expansion (or steric sea level rise) occurs at all ocean temperatures and is one of the major contributors to sea level changes during the 20th and 21st centuries. Water at higher temperature or under greater pressure (i.e., at greater depth) expands more for a given heat input, so the global average expansion is affected by the distribution of heat within the ocean. Salinity changes within the ocean also have a significant impact on the local density and thus local sea level, but have little effect on global average sea level change."
(IPCC, emphasis added). This demonstrably false assertion is a slice of ignorance in an otherwise huge body of knowledge.
As Dr. Proctor pointed out above ("Ignorance can be made or unmade, and science can be complicit in either process"), sometimes ignorance unwittingly gets spread by scientists (On Thermal Expansion & Thermal Contraction, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
The graph at Fig. 1 depicts ocean water temperatures that were taken over a span of six decades (1956 - 2016) at all depths in zones 7516, 7517, 7602, 7603, 7605, 7701, 7705, 7706, 7707, 7710, 7711, 7712, 7713, 7714, 7715, 7716, 7801, 7802, 7803, 7804, 7805, 7806, 7807, 7808, 7809, 7810, 7811, 7812, 7813, 7814, 7815, and 7816, and then recorded in the World Oceans Database (WOD).
Those are zones in the area where water flows north from the Pacific / Bering Sea through the Bering Straits, then once it reaches the Chukchi Sea area, it flows east through the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Ocean, then further east towards Greenland, where it then flows towards and through the Fram Strait, and/or south toward the Labrador Sea (Fig. 2, Fig. 3).
Anyway, Fig. 1 shows that the ocean temperatures in the subject area, following the circa 1970 spike to 8.6 C, tend to stay within a narrow temperature range below 4 deg C.
The "thermal expansion is the main factor in sea level rise" believing folks would say that sea level rose circa 1970 because the ocean temperature at the depths from 200-400m increased to 8.60453 C, the depths from 400-600m increased to 8.46916 C, the depths from 600-800m increased to 8.11504 C, and the depths from 800-1000m increased to 7.38596 C because "molecules are moving apart" (Beckwith).
What about when the temperature went back down to less than 4 deg. C ... did those molecules "move closer together," and the sea level fell?
Concerning all of the other temperatures ("This thermal expansion (or steric sea level rise) occurs at all ocean temperatures" - IPCC quote above), in all cases when the temperature went up did sea level go up, and then come down as the temperature dropped?
The scientific answer is that it depends on the temperature at the time of the addition of heat, because at some temperatures water will condense, shrink, lose volume, when heat is added.
That is, if fresh water is below 4 deg. C (39.2 deg F) when you add heat to it there will be contraction (shrinkage, molecules moving closer together, loss of volume, or however you want to say it, that water at that temperature will NOT expand).
Once it reaches exactly 4 deg. C, if you make it either colder or warmer by adding or removing heat, it will expand (it can not get any denser once it is at max. density, it can only expand if the temperature changes).
The same thing is true for salty water, except that the max. density temperature is lower, depending on the amount of salinity (i.e. degree of saltiness).
This dynamic is in constant flux, constant change, temperature and density going up and down all the time (expansion and contraction going on all the time).
The ignorance has been to assume that the growth of an ocean is like the politician explaining the growth of an economy ... it is always growing.
Both are myth.
To avoid spreading ignorance or myth, scientists need to deal with it scientifically.
This means first, that the IPCC falsehood ("This thermal expansion (or steric sea level rise) occurs at all ocean temperatures") must be rejected, and secondly it means that the datasets must be examined professionally, and finally it means that the laws of thermodynamics must be acknowledged:
"In physics, the second law of thermodynamics says that heat flows naturally from an object at a higher temperature to an object at a lower temperature, and heat doesn’t flow in the opposite direction [cold to warm] of its own accord."
(Dummies, emphasis added). Thus, since about 90 some odd percent of the warmth from the Sun that enters our world makes its way into the oceans, entering at the surface, it should tend to flow from there downward into "the vast colderness."
The ocean is a vast heat sink which can absorb vast quantities of heat from the Sun and atmosphere.
As Fig. 1 shows, that heat is going to generally tend to flow downwards in accord with the second law of thermodynamics (the from-hot-to-cold direction).
Whether that heat flow causes expansion or contraction depends on the temperature of the water at the time the heat flows from the warmer water into that cooler water.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
Myth Busters:
