Thin Ice

As young males we were told that a certain private activity could cause warts on your hands and/or blindness. That appears not to have been accurate.

However, I have since learned that ideology and politics can cause blindness. Blindness has become pandemic across the country.

Those that suffer from this form of blindness also seem to have language difficulties. They can’t seem to appreciate the differences between the meanings of climate and weather.

It snowed, so Al Gore is proven wrong. Yeah, sure.

Well, DC did have three blizzards around last Christmas, didn’t it? Yes.

Heat is a form of energy. Warmer air can carry more moisture. More energy plus more moisture equals more precipitation. It only has to be freezing for that precipitation to come in the form of snow.

Winters may not be as cold as in my youth but I still but on a jacket when going outside in December. It does not have to be a record cold to produce snow in the northern climes. The temperatures in DC last December were considerably warmer than its record low.

These blind people love to pretend to be basing their position either on science or the fact that there is still some question. The question, surprisingly, is based almost exclusively on ideology and politics, not science.

This little graphic is what the blind people are missing. Most people look at this and estimate that, since 1979 (the red line), a bit more than 20% of the ice cap has disappeared. That is strange since they seem to include Greenland in their computations but not withing the red perimeter.

Both the Polar Ice Cap and the ice on Greenland are receding, but at very different paces. The ice of Greenland is on land. The Polar Ice Cap is on water. The factors involved are very different on land and on sea. Based on just the Ice Cap itself, there is an obvious receding of about one-third.

There is one positive in all of this, at least for some corporations. They will soon be able to save a few millions on the voyage of large ships between certain important ports. It is the fabled Northwest Passage. Yes, it will become a reality.

Rotterdam, the Netherlands is the busiest port in Europe. Yokohama is the busiest port in Asia. We in the US don’t generally pay much attention to such places and the commerce between them but it is very sizable.

The melting is opening up a route between these two ports that reduces the trip from 11,200 miles to 6,500. For a large container ship, that could mean a savings of $3.5 million. The savings would be even larger for ships too large for the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. They presently take the scenic route around the Cape of Good Hope.

Sense About Science

Even the most rabid of deniers acknowledge that global temperatures have been rising over the past couple of decades. What they argue is that temperatures go up and down and that there have been warmer periods in human history. There was no industrial factor in those earlier periods so it cannot be caused by humans. Therefore, humans should continue doing as they please. In other words, ego reigns supreme. I want do to what I want to do and nothing else matters.

Have you ever seen something coming out of a smokestack? Most of it does come down, low enough where you can breathe it.

Back in the 1970s the FAA required jet aircraft to install what we called tin cans. These were devices that significantly reduced the black smoke that used to be seen when jets took off. The airlines decided on first retrofitting one engine at a time on each plane. Even though it meant having to take that same plane out of service again to retrofit the other engine(s), they had their reasons.

Watching a plane take off with one engine spouting out obvious pollution while the other appeared clean was thought to be a good public relations. There was just one small problem. The tin cans reduced the big, visible particles. There remained the invisible particles, including the ones created by the devices. So, there were more particles staying airborne much longer. People in the area didn’t receive much if any real benefit from those “cleaner” engine. The impact of science is not always grasped at first glance or upon superficial observation.

It is undeniable that humans produce pollutants, lots of them. It is undeniable that lots of those pollutants stay airborne for long periods. It is undeniable that those pollutants have an effect on the amount of heat that is retained by the hothouse effect. It is impossible to visualize the amount of tonnage of pollutants known to be put into the atmosphere on a daily basis.

There are differences between now and earlier historic periods of higher temperatures. This time the change is much faster. This time our dependency on technology and our vastly increased population leave us more vulnerable. It is the old analogy: taking out the bridges of Hanoi meant that the people put their bicycles over their heads and waded across, while taking out the bridges to Manhattan would create massive chaos.

Most of the major cities of the world are on water. Just imagine the results of all that melting ice. Consider if desertification moved north. The Midwest, the core of our agriculture, the source of the bulk of our exports, would be another, but much longer, dust bowl. Canada and Siberia would become the world’s breadbasket. I am very hopeful that curling will not become the national past-time nor borscht replace the Big Mac.

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Tagged as: airborne, al gore, blindness, blizzard, borscht, canada, cape of good hope, christmas, climate, container ship, curling, dc, greenland, hanoi, ideology, jet, manhattan, northwest passage, panama canal, plane, polar ice cap, Politics, pollution, precipitation, rotterdam netherlands, science, siberia, smokestack, snow, suez canal, temperature, tin can, warts, washington, weather, yokohama