It's that past, present, and future thingy ("Scientists have discovered that 'the present' has always existed, but some of them are not sure about 'the past' and 'the future'." -Dredd).
This scene is part of the "DNA" of civilizations, including our own:
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." ...
"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority."
(How To Identify The Despotic Minority). There is the proverb "where there is no vision the people perish" which addresses the notion of "vision" in the sense of being able to conceive of and "feel" what the future will be by analyzing what is or is not being done in the present (The Thursday Thought).
We don't have to "let it all hang out" because we don't have ultimate "let" power ... if we "wait to see what happens".
We have to know the implications of present actions and know what "knowledge" is composed of if we are to say "we have vision" (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
Ode to the vision of the U.S. gummit (it's their thing) ...
In today's post I want to continue consideration of the benefit of applying quantum physics to a popular topic these days, which is "ocean heat content" (In Search Of Ocean Heat, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).
The gist of it is that infrared photons make up what oceanographers call "potential enthalpy", which is another way of saying "ocean heat".
Let's review that concept in its most modern form:
"The quest in this work is to derive a variable that is conservative, independent of adiabatic changes in pressure, and whose conservation equation is the oceanic version of the first law of thermodynamics. That is, we seek a variable whose advection and diffusion can be interpreted as the advection and diffusion of ‘heat.’ In other words, we seek to answer the question, ‘what is heat’ in the ocean? ...
Fig. 2 Pelagic depths
The variable that is currently used for this purpose in ocean models is potential temperature referenced to the sea surface, θ, but it does not accurately represent the conservation of heat because of (i) the variation of specific heat with salinity and (ii) the dependence of the total differential of enthalpy on variations of salinity. ... For example, an increase in pressure of 107 Pa (1000 dbar), without exchange of heat or salt, causes a change in enthalpy that is equivalent to about 2.5ЊC. We show in this paper that in contrast to enthalpy, potential enthalpy does have the desired properties to embody the meaning of the first law. ... Present treatment of oceanic heat fluxes is clearly inconsistent. Ocean models treat potential temperature as a conservative variable and calculate the heat flux across oceanic sections using a constant value of heat capacity. By contrast, heat flux through sections of observed data is often calculated using a variable specific heat multiplying the flux of potential temperature per unit area (Bryan 1962; Macdonald et al. 1994; Saunders 1995; Bacon and Fofonoff 1996). Here it is shown that the theoretical justification of this second approach is flawed on three counts. While the errors involved are small, it is clearly less than satisfactory to have conflicting practices in the observational and modeling parts of physical oceanography, particularly as an accurate and convenient solution can be found. ... it is perfectly valid to talk of potential enthalpy, h0, as the 'heat content' ...”
(In Search Of Ocean Heat, quoting McDougal 2003). That Dredd Blog post which used Dr. McDougal's 2003 published paper, discussed the TEOS-10 functions for deriving the quantity of potential enthalpy in a kilogram of seawater.
I have taken it further in more recent posts, in the sense of identifying the main component of potential enthalpy as photons, the quanta of electromagnetic radiation, at their infrared energy level.
This way of looking at it transcends the limited notions of ocean heat transfer by noting that electromagnetic radiation obeys the laws of thermodynamics in that "hot flows spontaneously to cold", and that photons in such a flow can travel through space ... from atom to atom or molecule to molecule.
Much if not most of the oceanography focusing on ocean heat content does not touch upon the quantum mechanics of photons as a part of the composition of ocean heat content.
Thus, the natural lack of constraint on photon flow is overlooked, so that the ease in which ocean heat can move through seawater isn't adequately considered.
That heat movement is historically attributed to ocean water currents rather than the radiation of photons (spontaneous photon currents).
That historical hang-up may be a factor in the continual "worse than previously thought" statements we see in news reports, which establishment science's overly conservative estimates of glacial melting tend to produce.
In times past I have blogged about the thermal proportions shown in the matching patterns of the TEOS-10 constructs, such as Conservative Temperature and potential enthalpy.
In other words I have hypothesized that they have the same "genes" if you will (meaning they are composed of photon energy).
The graphs in many posts here on Dredd Blog have pointed out those thermodynamic structural patterns (e.g. In Search Of Ocean Heat - 8).
I did those graphs "back in the day" with SciDavis software.
To do that with SciDavis software required four-pane graphs which do not adequately render or expose the intensity of those thermodynamic structural similarities.
So, today I have produced some graphs that really scream out the intensity of the thermodynamic likeness between photons and Conservative Temperature.
To fully do so I had to emulate a kind of "Revised Local Reference (RLR)" like the folks over at the "Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL)" have done.
It is a way to take a close look at things with orders of magnitude of difference and sameness ... by isolating the sameness.
The two appendices today (Appendix A, html tables and Appendix B, graphs) are a step in that direction.
The HTML tables have the actual values of in situ measurements taken from the WOD and SOCCOM, averaged, then placed in my SQL server.
I use the Conservative Temperature (CT) and photon moles column at three depths shown in the HTML tables (Appendix A).
The RLR part of it is to add the CT and photon mol values as follows: 1) the CT values are used as is for the first graph line, 2) since the mol values are small in comparison to the CT values, for the second graph line I add the CT and mol value together (Appendix B) (an example of the 4-pane SciDavis type graph is included at the end of the Appendix B graphs).
The result of the "RLR-like" technique is that the two lines (one CT the other CT+MOL) are only a very small distance apart making it easy to see how closely the "thermodynamic pattern" of the one matches with the other.
This is done for each of the three depths (Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, and Bathypelagic depth levels) that are relevant along the grounding line of Antarctica's Tidewater Glaciers.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
I use the word "fog" because the fear-based denial enveloping the minds of many of us covers up the origin of the new outer layers of sea level change emerging one after the other.
The new source of the onion layers is Antarctica, a place that doesn't seem to be wanted, and doesn't seem to be "ours."
II. Make The Data Ours
The number one cause of the spread of global warming induced climate change denial is propaganda created and promoted by the fossil fuel industry's funding of various institutions in both hidden and in open for all to see ways (EOS, AGU).
In fact, today and a few days ago the following comments of mine (made on one of their blogs) were deleted:
"The important fact finding mission, where the researchers drilled down to the grounding line, was classic. The new reality they discovered, confirming previous hypotheses (the "warmer" water is deep) is fundamental now. Using the TEOS-10 (teos-10.org) tools suggested that this was the case. But more than that, it suggests that this is the case all around the coast of Antarctica where there are grounding lines (The Ghost Plumes - 12)"
...
"Eos could help by not censoring comments. The Ghost Plumes - 12"
So, encourage your institutions of all kinds to stop it because it skews the research and does damage to what is "ours."
III. The Honest Data
Regular readers know that here on Dredd Blog the facts rule the day, not Oil-Qaeda propaganda.
So, true to fashion readers will be given data analysis free of charge, data which comes from the World Ocean Database (WOD).
It is then deciphered and converted into an SQL-server database (WOD Update).
The graphs made for today's post are supported with HTML tables containing the details in the database.
The relevant information is provided in the appendices to today's post, which features the Antarctica Ice Sheet's interaction with the ocean all along the grounding line of Antarctica's Tidewater Glaciers.
IV. General Details About The Data In The Appendices
The appendices are organized according to the melting process at the grounding lines: first comes melt conditions (ambient water containing a sufficient number of infrared photons), then comes ice melting into seawater, and finally plumes are caused by the differences in the density of the glacial melt water compared to the denser ambient seawater.
So, Appendix A&B feature data concerning melt conditions, presented in HTML tables (Appendix A) and graphs based on that HTML data (Appendix B).
The top lines show the temperatures of the seawater, while the lower lines show the temperature at which ice will melt there in those conditions.
As long as the seawater temperature is above the temperature at which the Tidewater Glacier's ice will melt, there will be plumes.
The graph lines are color coded as to depth and temperature (a legend on each graph explains that).
The glacial ice melt dynamics concept is likewise presented in two appendices (C&D).
One is in the format of HTML tables (Appendix C), and the other is in the format of graphs (Appendix D).
Finally, the plume flow dynamics concept is presented in the same two formats, HTML (Appendix E) and graphs (Appendix F).
NOTE: the glacial ice and plume flow quantities are estimates.
Currently the distribution between above sea level basal melt (on land) and calving, compared to below sea level (under water along and above the grounding line) is 32% (above) / 68% (below).
This ratio is only an estimate because we do not know exactly, but it is being made more accurate as time goes on (the total ice mass loss for Antarctica, i.e. both above and below sea level, is detailed here).
The temperatures in the sea water data presentations are made from actual in situ measurements downloaded from the WOD database, then averaged.
The temperatures at which ice will melt are calculated with the TEOS-10 toolbox, using the actual in situ measurements just mentioned.
V. Closing Comments
When added up the subtotals don't always match the totals for some areas because the graphing software requires some "smoothing."
That is, there are gaps in the in situ measurement record, so when data gaps take place, and when possible, the gaps are filled in by the software (by averaging the closest numbers to the gaps).
The bottom line is that the trend of the disintegration of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is not an estimate, but how fast the degeneration will accelerate is an estimate.
The trend is crystal clear.
The ice sheet disintegration into seawater has increased about six-fold over the time span shown in the appendices (detailed by glaciologists here).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
