Thursday, February 19, 2009

Climate realism from biologist and polar researcher Bernard Stonehouse

'Antarctic temperatures more resistant to global warming'-Interviews-Opinion-The Times of India
...The evidence present in ice cores does suggest that there have been wide changes in temperatures. So while in the peninsular region there has been increase in daily temperatures, this has not been the case in the plateaus. I expect temperatures in Antarctica to be more resistant to warming effects than those of tropical regions because there is so much accumulated cold here. The Antarctic is much colder than the Arctic, for instance. So the Antarctic is not the first place to look for evidence of global warming.

[Q] What do you think of climate change naysayers?

Well, it is easy to frighten people, especially when alarmist stories are widely reported in the media. The other thing is that scientists who are desperate for research funds might find that generating fear is a good way to generate funds for further research in these areas. I would say that even if there is no definite evidence of accelerating climate change, it is beneficial to be cautious and take care of the environment. I have no evidence of the impact of climate change on species, of whether plant growth is increasing or penguins are moving to other areas.

In the 60 years i've worked in the Antarctic, i have found that some stocks of penguin have disappeared from particular places, only to increase in numbers elsewhere...

5 comments:

John M Reynolds said...

"...accumulated cold..."

Ha ha. There is no such thing! Cold is simply the lack of heat.

Anonymous said...

Whoa there JMR, "When ice melts, it absorbs as much heat energy (the heat of fusion) as it would take to heat an equivalent mass of water by 80 °C, while its temperature remains a constant 0 °C." - wikipedia on ice

"When you heat a material, you are adding kinetic energy to its molecules and usually raising its temperature. The only exception is when the material reaches its melting or boiling points. At those two temperatures, the heat energy goes into changing the state of the material. After the state has changed, the temperature will rise again with added heat. The rate temperature changes is the specific heat of the material. The amount of heat required to melt the material is called the latent heat of melting." - Ron Kurtus

It takes a lot of energy to melt ice. Melting the antarctic will take a huge amount of energy.

Anonymous said...

I was going to add that someone might want to calculate how much energy it would take to melt the ice caps... and then found that a number of people have done this for us.

Will the Ice Caps Melt?(pdf) By Jerome J. Schmitt.

"There is considerable debate over whether the "greenhouse gas" effect will raise the temperature of the atmosphere by between 1−5°C over the next 100 years. But even if you grant for the sake of argument the Warmist claim that the earth's atmosphere will go up a full five degrees Centigrade in temperature, Al Gore's claim that ocean levels will rise 20 feet thanks to global warming seems to ignore the laws of thermodynamics. I am no climatologist, but I do know about physics."
...
"Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 5° C: ~2.5 x 10^19 kJ"

"Heat necessary to melt ice to achieve 20−foot sea−level rise: ~2 x 10^30 kJ"

"There is a difference of over ten orders of magnitude between these two figures (10^10 = 10 billion). Even if I am wrong by an order of magnitude or more, there is still an enormous difference. This does NOT mean that ice caps have not melted in the distant past nor that ice−age glaciers have not grown to cover much of the northern hemisphere; it simply means that the time scales involved to move sufficient quantities of heat to effect such melting or freezing occur over what we scientists commonly call "geological" time scales, i.e. hundreds of thousands and millions of years."
...
"Even if sufficient heat is trapped in the atmosphere to raise it the maximum value predicted by anthropogenic "global warming" [AWG] alarmists (5°C) over the next 100 years, hundreds of millions or billions of times more heat energy must be imparted into the ice−caps to melt sufficient ice to raise sea−levels the catastrophic levels prophesied by Al Gore. I humbly submit that this might constitute a flaw in his equations."

The full article (linked to above) is worth reading JMR and others fearful of Al Gore's disaster scenarios. "The Day After Tomorrow" was a good movie as was "The Core", but we're dealing with objective reality, not fantasies such as Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" work of art [of persuasion] and fantasy passed off as accurate science.

At least you can conduct the experiments in your own HOME (of all places) to verify that the linked to calculations are correct or not. Get your ice cubes thermometers out and give it a try! Gotta love experiments that can be done at home!

Now how can we test the notions of CO2 used in the AWG models at home to prove or falsify the claims? Anyone?

Anonymous said...

I also found this interesting observation.

"Temperatures have a difficulty warming significantly on days when there is surface snow cover. The melting and evaporation from the snow continuously cools the air." - Jeff Haby, Meteorologist

His article on Latent Heat is very interesting and relevant as well.

I'm learning a lot by looking into things people say. While the "climate science" seems to have few actual experiments that can be done to prove the wild doomsayers soothsaying there are some simple experiments and understandings that clearly are basic science that can be verified and PROVEN over and over by just about anyone. The energy of ice melting is one of these that is directly related to the real or imagined threat of AWG - especially if false or mostly false AWG, can be a massive danger as humans begin to intentionally and consciously terraform the Earth without knowing the consequences. Well if we mess it up there's always Mars, ah, oh, strike Mars off the list, wait another planet, oh, no place else other than Earth. Precious Earth.

Anonymous said...

Ok, a fun comment...

Could we melt the antarctic and arctic poles if we wanted to and how?

Nukes of course! They are the answer to every mega engineering problem.

Wikipedia informs us that approximately 2,100,000 TJ (2.1 * 10^6 terajoules) of energy has been released by all the nukes ever tested by humans. Converting terajoules to kilojoules is done by multiplying by 10^9, that's then ~2.1 x 10^15 kJ of energy from all nukes detonated on, above or in the Earth/Ocean.

This would suggest that ~10,000 times (19-15 = 10^4) as much energy as all the nuke testing ever done would be needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere by 5 degrees (per the calculations above). It looks like we could do that intentionally if we needed to since we have the nukes or could built them.

Ok, what about the full melt? Could we melt all the ice on Earth, well at least as much to raise the ocean levels by ~20 feet, with nukes?

We'd need to generate about 10,000 billion times or 10 Trillion times as much energy than all the nukes ever detonated on Earth to do that job!

Can we really build enough nukes to generate that? Is there even enough fissile material on Earth? Is there enough material to make the fusion bombs that would be part of that energy? I wonder.

Anyone care to improve the accuracy, correct, verify or refute these numbers, calculations, or assumptions and carry the computation further?