Sadly I'm not a betting man.  I'm guessing that I would have got fairly good odds on the Arctic Ice Area dropping below 1M SQ KM this summer.  Even if it is way below any analysts projections even today.

 

Today I can't get odds for even that wild supposition.  Way, Way too much melt going on.

 

So what does that tell you?

 

Things are much worse than they seem would be my take!

 

 So this is what wordle does to my last half year.  The previous half year would have been somewhat different.  Although it looks a little trashed in preview.

 

 

It’s been a really cold winter you know, colder than for a very, very long time.  It means GW must be a hoax, look at all that extra ice out there in the Arctic!  Look China, India, the Middle East and Turkey have all had incredibly cold winters with much snow.

 

The Heartland institute tell us it’s because the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming, or to make it longer, “Us who are warming this planet up”), stories are a plant to get more taxes out of us.

 

It’s not warming up.  Noooo, It’s getting colder.  Can’t you tell it was a super cold winter.

 

Somebody find me a sickbucket.

 

Why, oh why, does the weather of the world have to correspond to the observations of the US.  Yes it was a cold winter.  Exactly that, One Cold Winter.

 

So what was happening in the rest of the world whilst America, China and the Middle East were deluged in Snow and Ice?

 

Well I suppose the Scandinavian countries would not be of interest?  Nor far north western Russia?  Or most of Europe?  I guess not.

 

Why?

 

Because Scandinavia didn’t have a winter this year!

 

Run that by me again?

 

Norway, Sweden, findland, the Baltic states and most of Western Russia simply didn’t have much of a winter.  France and Poland had the warmest winters since records began.

 

If we go further north and west and up to the northwest passage, the heartland of the “Cold Winter” country, the Arctic Ice around Banks Island was open for hundreds of KM.  Yes open water in the middle of the coldest winter since “way back when”.

 

OK, so when we stop cherrypicking the results we want o see, what happened?

 

Well it seems that the Eastern North Atlantic, this winter, was 3 DegC warmer than usual.

 

OK, so what caused that?

 

Well we don’t know right now, but if you cast your mind back to the very late re-formation of ice last year; you will note that the reason stated was that the sea was circa 3 DegC warmer than usual at that time.

 

It would appear that the crust of Ice on top of the sea only kept the energy locked in and it has migrated over the winter to keep Northern Europe warm.

This would then lend credence to the IPCC position that Arctic warming will replace the Gulf Stream as the warming factor for Britain and Northern Europe during the winter.  In fact it seems to be doing a better job overall.

 

Personally I wouldn’t want to be a shareholder in a winter tyre company in Europe right now.

 

So what is the Ice doing in the Arctic now?

 

Well the heartland institute would have you believe that it’s thicker, stronger and more extensive than at any time on the last decade.

 

Is this true?

 

Of course not.  The current ice is thinner than at any time since our records began.  Except, or course, inbetween Greenland and Canada.  There it is approximately 20CM thicker.  What does that mean?   Absolutely zip because that Ice melts Every Year and so it will be lost in this years summer melt.

 

Another 30% of the thicker Old Ice was flushed out last winter leaving a very thin rear guard of Ice to cope with the 2008 summer.  We are talking 2-6M ice being replaced with 40-60cm ice.  A little bigger difference than the relatively small growth of 20cm extra annual Ice.

 

And what is it doing?  Well you need to understand the difference between:

 

Extent

Area

Volume

 

The main figures are given in Extent.  It is the main marker and is used extensively.  Ice Extent is considered to be any area of the sea covered by 15% or more Ice.

 

Sometimes the figures are given in Area.  Area is only the Ice with ALL sea areas taken out.  So when the Extent figures were given in 2007, they stated 4.0M SQ KM.  YET the Area figures were 2.9M SQ KM.  Given all the focus on albedo (the ability of Ice to reflect sunlight and the open sea to absorb it), I would have thought that only Area would have been used.

 

Almost never until this month have I seen a Volume figure.  The volume is the Area x tickness.

 

So what is happening?

 

Well the Extent is reaching back to 2000 levels.  Yes I said 2000, not 1997 or some such other figures.  Not that you would guess that from the heartland institute.

 

The Area is falling fast although it did recover to 2004 levels.

 

The Volume is falling even faster as the thick Ice is flushed.  Also right now the concentration of the Ice over nearly 50% of the Arctic is less than 100% with huge leads of open water and massive “patches” (thousands of SQKM) of mixed broken ice and open water.

 

What does this mean in real mans terms?

 

It’s melting, pretty damned fast and dramatically, but we can’t see it in the stats yet because the extent was so large this year.  But it is melting in places where it was solid at the end of last summer.

 

This happened in 2005/6.  I had a very pessimistic stance on this blog last year at this time.  Why was that?  Because I had taken the overheads from the 2005 minimum ice and the 2006 minimum ice.  I overlaid them and noticed that some 1.5msq km of ice had (changed places) and the perennial ice which melted in 2005 was replaced by annual ice for the 2006 season and new areas of perennial ice had melted in 2006.  So although, technically, 2006 was a lower melt year than 2005, in actual fact the Amount of ice (volume), lost was significantly more.

 

So where are we going?

 

Well I was beaten to the post this time by a Norwegian climate scientist.

 

Where we are going is here:

 

IF we have a summer of equivalent heat and radiance (low clouds) as we did in 2007, in the arctic this year, then we will functionally (I don’t count less than 1mSQ KM), lose all summer ice in the Arctic this year.

 

I shall be watching.

Last week has to be a fairly all time low.  Better half takes me to the train station. We decide I’ll not go to work on Monday as it’s Easter Monady and I can do the meetings from home anyway.  So we get the tickets for Wife and I (she was picking the Grandson up from the airport on the 31^st), then come home.

 

Day1: 4am up and back with the tickets.  I have changed my ticket to 05:06 on Tuesday so it’ll be up early tomorrow.

 

I complete some of the Ceiling work I’m doing with plasterboard and we have a fairly relaxing evening.

 

Day2:  Up at 3am, climb on the bike with the gear and head for the station.  Get about half way, start to lay the bike down for the 3^rd wet roundabout and the front wheel goes flying off down the road taking me and the rest of the bike with it.

 

Bastard, bastard, bastard.  To add insult to injury the sodding bike won’t start.

 

To cut a long story short, after discarding the totally destroyed bike suit and trying for an hour to get the bike going, I have to wake up the better half and yowl for help.  She picks me up and I finally warm up on the way to Poitiers to get jump leads.  Why?  Because the bloody jump starter is flat again even though it has never been used since it was last charged.  When we head off to Poitiers I see the line of Diesel fuel on the roundabout....  Did I mention that bikers hate truckers who overfill their fuel tanks?

 

So I get the jump leads and still nothing.  Eventually I determine that there is no spark.  I find a screwdriver kit in the boot of the car (thank god I put that here) and open up the (worse for wear) headlight enclosure.

 

I fiddle with all the wires and connections and get nothing but one short start.

 

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

 

In the end back inside the light casing and pull all the connector blocks out.  Magic, it runs.

 

So I put the lights back together whilst it’s running and aim to head off for a later train (I have a fully flexible ticket).

 

I decide to stop the bike and start it again just in case.  I turn the key off and, hey presto, the engine continues to run.  The kill switch won’t run either.

 

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

 

 

Back home.  Work from home.

 

Day 3:

 

Better half takes me to the train station for the 05:06 train and leaves me there, another 3am start.  There is no 05:06 train!  Bloody French, can’t you run a timetable?  Probably but not the one I want.

 

So I’m stuck waiting for the train, I go down onto the platform and get into one of the heated rest areas until the station opens.

 

When the station opens, I put my ticket into the machine to change it.  The machine eats it and then asks for my ticket.

 

I remonstrate with the train staff at the station, but they can do nothing.  I have to wait till the ticket office opens and the boss arrives.  07:30, after the second train and I’m not going to make it to work till after Lunch.

 

Sod it, can it get any worse?  Another €90 lost.

 

Get to work, go to the hotel and check in feeling the worse for wear.

 

Day4:

 

12 hours sleep.  Almost human.  Have a Cold.

 

OK which god’s daughter did I rape??????

 

Day5:

 

Work all day, back to the train station wife picks me up.  Cold is now out of control.

 

Day6:

 

Son is here with Girlfriend it looks good so we go out to Monkey Valley for the day.  I feel like crap, can’t stop coughing and sneezing.  My chest is beginning to hurt and my stomach muscles too.  Will this day never end?

 

Day7:

 

Recovery is at hand.  The cold is dying out.  Things are getting better.  It’s Monday tomorrow, time to get up at 04:30 and take a train again….

So I go do my usual perusal bit and over the last two weeks, what do I find?

 

Well you see the whole planet is getting colder.

 

Really how do they work that out?  I see, they take the US temperature for January 2008 and see that it's the coldest since 1966.  So the entire warming of the planet is wiped out because the US and canada are having some seriously cold weather in winter.  Then there is the stat being put about that Jan 2007 to Jan 2008 was so cold it wiped out the entire temperature gain from the entire last century.

 

 

OK, but never mind the fact that Alaska is seeing seriously warm weather.  Never mind the fact that Northern Europe didn't have a winter. I guess the forest fires and sweltering temperatures which killed tens of thousands last summer were a figment of our imagionation.  Also I guess that someone forgot to tell the Arctic that it was colder last summer???

 

Then there is the "Cherry pick the reports" scenario.

 

Did you know that "some" OF THE ICE IN THE ARCTIC (note the sizings), is getting thicker than the last few years.  OR even that the overheads show the ice has recovered to "near normal" levels this winter.

 

Well no I didn't and yes I did.  I know that the Ice between Canada and Greenland is up to 20cm thicker than the previous few years.  But then it melts Every year so, "so what?".  Also I know that the perrennial Ice at the mouth of the northwest passage around Banks Island was simply not there in January and early february.  In fact instead or 5M thick Ice there was actually 100 KM wide swathes of open sea.  But I do know the "Extent" is near pre 2000 levels.  But you need to know the difference between Area and Extent.  One is close to 2000 levels.  The other is close to 2006/7 levels.

 

Guess I'm worrying about all the wrong things though cause guess what guys.  It's getting cooler, because the Americans are feeling it when they open the window.

 

Now I always knew that the US was the centre of the Economic world.  However I wasn't aware it was the ONLY measure by which we judge the temperature of the planet.

 

Ah yes I missed a bit.  The Middle East China and Southern Europe have snow.

 

Well yes, they got snow in 2006/7 too and look what happened to the Ice in the Arctic in 2007.  OK so they didn't get so much snow, however maybe we'll see even more melt this year because that snow didn't fall on the Arctic, it fell everywhere else.

 

And why was Northern Europe warmer this year?

 

Because the North Atlantic is some 3DegC warmer than normal.  Almost exactly the same rasie in temperature that was seen in the Arctic due to the huge melting last year.

 

Food for thougth.  I look forward to another bumper Arctic melt in 2008.  The Ice concentration maps are showing that the Northwest passage never really recovered much Ice this winter.  It should open in May.  It closed early last year after openening more than ever before.  I wonder what 5 solid months of sunlight can do to that patch of sea?

 

We shall observe and report.....

 

What I do see is more whacky weather coming to a "country near you" this coming year.

So I have a 26 year old honda 250 superdream.  I changed the engine for one with 8.5k miles on it and it has only done 4k miles since then.

 

It was getting a little noisy so I checked out the Haynes manual and did the requisite service interval tasks.  Seemed to work.  However it's been being a pain and getting slower by the week so I had a look at the balance shaft tensioner again.  I loosen the locking nut and, hey presto, nothing happens.

 

Hmm

 

So I look the manual up.  The bloody spring tensioner is buried righ inside the engine.

 

Bugger.

 

Looks like a spare engine but just about nobody wants to part with them except for silly money.

 

I think I'll have to send mum & dad to hull to pick up two £30 one's on offer.....

 

Ah well.

It's been a while since I blogged about the state of the Cryosphere.  However it's been an interesting time.  Virtually NO ice in the Swedish Baltic Arctic Circle.  Basically No winter for Stockhom.  I do mean NO winter.  They don't count the odd day at -1 and the odd flurry of snow as "Winter".  They talk about 5 months with below 0 temperatures and lots of -15 to -20.  So no winter this year.

 

The reports from the Arctic have been varied and interesting.  Bering straights with 100km open ice polynias.  Old Ice moving at high speed and flushing out of the Arctic.  Vary sparse cover with many areas less than 100% Ice.  Relatively warm temps (-17 to -24 instead of -40) which mean the ice is not thickening in the same way.

 

We still have the March high point to come, but we are moving into the Feb meltback right now and I wonder what March will bring?

 

All good clean fun.  After all, if you don't know it's coming then you can't prepare.

 

Oh and on that point, the scientists recorded a 1.5 meter loss of Ice in Greenland during the melt last year.  Which is somewhat "significant" but you won't hear them talking about it too much right now.  Not till they can prove a trend.  But the thing is, by the time you can see the trend, you are already so far in the shit you can't do much about it.

 

Oh well, as any married man will tell you, it's only the depth that varies....

Well it's been a long time. But I'm sitting here at 20 minutes past midnight waiting for a bunch of files to copy from my laptop to my desktop.  So I guess that I have some time to blog.

 

Well I didn't destroy quite so much hardware as I thought.  Only the Netgear wifi card.  When I removed it and replace it with the Belkin card, the machine began to behave itself.  Small mercies.  However the Library is further on in it's build stage now so the PC has had to move further away from the wifi box.  So I ran a long ethernet cable and linked it via a netgear router I have and hey presto, I have high speed network again... <Sigh>.

 

I guess I'll just have to use that 500 gig external drive I bought to back up my Raid0 volume before putting a new board in for something else.  I suppose I could find *something* for it to do.  Beside being backup which is what it is today....

Oracle "Unbreakable Computing"

MAC Community "Get a MAC and forget about viruses"

 

Oracle seem to have weathered the wholly inappropriate Unbreakable Computing claim and now it seems normal that they issue as many security patches as anyone else.

 

Just recently we have seen a new Trojan which attacks both MACs and Windows.  One wonders how well Apple will respond to the increasingly hostile Internet world out there?  We may find that Microsoft, with much longer experience, does a much better job.

 

Also I saw a comment from a Domino friend of mine that some script kiddie had inserted some javascript into his comments and taken over his entire website.  So the myth of Domino being completely impervious to attacks comes crashing down...  The Domino Blog template was touted as totally secure....

 

The reality of the situation is that Nothing is secure and the most inviting target are the complacent.

 

My PC has suffered the odd attack from time to time, but in every case it was this two legged living breathing interface which let it in.

 

One supposes that as the PC communithy becomes more homogenous and moves away from MS domination, that there will be more ways than ever to attack systems but the security companies will have to fight on every front, diluting their benefit.

 

When the regulators have finally had their way and smashed the Microsoft monopoly (that we the user community gave to them by buying their products exclusively), we will all lose again.

 

It must be a dim dismal overcast day and I must be tired today.  (Checks outside the window, yep it's dismal, checks self, head feels like it is descending into the body, yup tired).  I need some happy vibes but I suspect that'll be a way away.

I find it highly amusing that most of the news about GW right now is about the main Northwest Passage being open.

 

Hello, is anyone in there?  It closed this week.

 

Reporters, useless. 

So last week when my laptop reported that it was out of battery, I immediately did what I have been doing for the last month and wiggled the power plug.  Except this time it was HOT.  I pulled it out and looked at the melted plastic inside it.

 

Hmmm, thinks I, was this the plug or the laptop.  So I pull out the backup power supply, plug it in and hey presto after 90 seconds I pull it out and that one is red hot and melting too.

 

Hmmm, so am I going to get an early train, go home, do some swapping of other laptop parts and then work form home on Monday?

 

Nope, I went out and bought another one.  A cheap one and not one I would have normally bought.  Was it a dual core? Yes. Did it have 2 gig ram?  Yes.  Does it go better than my old 3 gig PIV?  NO.

 

So I get a crap crushed in keyboard, even though they have acres of space around it, the same screen resolution and the same RAM.  OK I get a 160 gig drive, but it’s 5400 rpm and although Vista says it’s better, it’s slower than my old 7,200 rpm 80 gig drive.

 

OK so I can put 4 gig of ram in it and another hdd, but what I really need is a processor which is not 4 times slower than the PIV when running vmware.

 

Bugger, any TL66 chips out there?????  My TL50 is a joke at 1.6ghz.  Well I have just seen one on ebay and I have offered on it.  If I have to I’ll do a buy it now, but at £197 it’s going to be steep.

 

Oh well. 

Replacement tank, a bit of spray paint and voila, a crappy CB250N looks a little less crappy and I don't have to worry about the rust under the fibreglass patch.

 

I replaced the plugs too.  But still poor top end performance.

 

However it is running better and 98 octane fuel hels a litte too.  So we shall see.  All I need to deal with now is the ominous rubbing noise coming from the drive/chain system.....

 

Eventually I'll have a decent running bike in time to put it in the garage for the winter.....

 

Let's hope it's a warm winter then.

It's interesting to read the news on the current catastrophic melt going on up in the Arctic.  You get so many  conflicting accounts which are reported so independently that it takes a little reading through.

 

I have been reading reports today that the Ice has thinned by 50% in the Arctic because it is almost universally no thicker than 1M.  Now I know it's thinner at the borders but extensive surveying shows that it's no thicker than 1M in the perennial Ice.

 

The perennial Ice was 3M thick or more.  So we can deduce that at least 55% of the Ice Volume has gone due to thinning.

 

Then we read that in 2005, the Arctic lost 20% of it's ice from the norm of the previous 20 years.  This year we read that the Ice Area dropped by 27% from 2005.

 

OK so my maths is a little crap, but it goes like this.

 

Area is the square mileage of the Ice over the sea

which has thinned by 55%

and reduced in extent by 47% (2005 minimum minus the 27% drop this year)

 

47% of 55 is 26 (rounded). and 55 -26 is 29.

 

OK this is not exact because some of the ice is thinner at the edges.  However, not much nowadays and I gave it a 1Meter leeway in perennial ice lost which I didnt count.  Otherwise I would have been taking 47% from 33 which would give us 11.6% of the Ice Volume remaining.  Which is significantly scary.

 

That means that we have only 29% of the average Ice Volme that we would have expected to see in 1979.

 

Given those figures, who would be surprised to see the Arctic Ice vanish completely in the Summer of 2012?

 

Very much a case of lies damned lies and statistices in the framework of a compartmentalised scientific community.  So what do we do?  Book a cruise to the North Pole?  Sit and watch with a beer and a smile?  Or do something constructive.

 

Ah but Doing Somehting will take money and energy.  Lets just get another beer.....!

Well the old CB250N is struggling more and more these days.  OK so the engine has only done about 12k miles, but the carbs have seen 52.  Hmmm, every time I opened the throttle at lights, the first thing it tried to do was die.

 

So I bought a pair of carbs from ebay (not a chance of buying them new.....) and bought two repair kits from David Silver Spares.  It only took me a month to get the carbs and the kits together in one place and do the work, but I did in the end.

 

Now I don't know how old the carbs I bought are, but I can say that the jet sizes were *visibly* different when I checked them side by side.  So much so that I tried to fit the wrong jet twice until I looked at the other one and compared them.

 

So anyway, 1 hour on the bench to fit the kits.  30 minutes of swearing and hurting my hands to take the old pair out and put the refurb pair in.  Seemed to go better but I couldn't really check it as by that time it was 01:40  Ooops, hope the neighbors have forgiven me.

 

So the Acid test was the run into Poitiers to get the train.  Well cold it baulked as usual, but didn't seem quite so bad. But the real test was when I got to Poitiers.  The idle was rock solid at 1,300 rmp.  No racing or messing about.  Pull away was great, no dying, strangling itself or just refusing to go.

 

Fantastic.  Makes me realise just how painful it all was.

 

Now all I have to do is replace the plugs and work out why it's trying to strangle itself at higher revs.

 

Then I can get a 400n and sell it.......

 

Glutton for punishment.

Well we hear what I've been seeing for the last 9 months. The melt is unprecedented and huge. The Ice is not growing back in Winter and is melting faster and faster in the Summer.

 

So why do the scientists state that this is a combination of issues which are "unlikely to recur next year".  Did they get that much ridicule last year when the August temp cooled?

 

Was it not these same scientists who told us that the affect would be cumulative and that it would go in jumps which became self reinforcing?

 

So why, when we see a clear jump, is it put down to coincidence?

 

Do these scientists want to be taken seriously or not?  Just because this didn't happen to IPCC timescales, doesn't mean it's not happening.

 

So what has to happen now?  Does the Ice have to fail to grow back in the winter in the same scale as it is melting in summer before we hear that it is  pattern?  Does the entie polar cap have to melt *Before* the scientists "predict" it happening?

 

I dispair.....

So it occurs to me that the guy in the movie is trying to sell us a bill of goods.  Then why does he miss out all of the good bits?

 

After all, if we dol all that we need to do for GW to protect ourselves, then column A will also contain the wollowing Even IF GW isn't going to flood us out:

 

 

 

So I climb on the bike this morning and get a good soaking riding to Poitiers.  Strip off all the wet weather gear and climb on the platform.  The train is 5 minutes late, unusual but not unheard of on SNCF.

 

We get about 20 minutes out of Poitiers and the train becomes slower and slower until it stops.  Then we get the announcement, "we have a little problem, don't open the doors".  OK no sweat, this happens from time to time.

 

Then we get announcement two.  The technician is looking at the problem, but doesn't know what it is.  The time to fix is "indeterminate".....

 

We wait a little and then, in good order, the train services start to shut down.  Until we are sitting in the dark.  Slowly, one by one, the services come back on again.  The train starts again slowly and gradually builds up speed.  We have been delayed by 15 minutes.  This translates into a 10 minute late arrival.

 

So who believes that they didn't "reboot the train"???