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#25271 04/02/08 02:18 AM
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Hi everyone,

I found a video on the homepage from one of Canuk's links. (Thanks, Canuk) I've made a few interesting observations and would like to hear everyone's opinion. This is a 40mb QuickTime compilation of satellite images from a static camera, which shows a different aspect to the circulation patterns of our atmosphere.

Right click and select "save target as" for the fastest way to download.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/multiyear.ice.quikscat.mov


In this video, you can see black clouds of pollution originating from the Middle East. The pollution seem to fill up the atmosphere and spiral towards the Arctic, until (what appears to be) a high pressure system forces the pollution over the Arctic, where it descends and appears to melt the Arctic.

My question...Could soot from the war in Iraq, or increased oil production, be the cause of the record melt last year?

I've made a number of observations in this video, but this one is obvious. Am I seeing a ghost here, or are we seeing the cause of the Arctic melt? It becomes more obvious when you play the video in high speed. I would like some feedback before mentioning my other observations.

Please watch the video before commenting.
Thanks

Last edited by Max; 04/02/08 02:20 AM.
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Max #25279 04/02/08 07:48 AM
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I haven't watched the video yet, but I've seen similar ones.
It is neat how at different speeds you can see different relationships.

I do know that soot is a major factor in Arctic Melting.
Soot and many pollutants tend to migrate poleward.
...Remember the first Gulf War's burning oil wells?
Cutting CO2 won't solve the ice melting problem that soot causes.

...have a good day!
wink


Pyrolysis creates reduced carbon! ...Time for the next step in our evolutionary symbiosis with fire.
samwik #25280 04/02/08 01:31 PM
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Samwik,
Thanks for your reply. Of course, I agree with everything you said..."soot is a major factor in Arctic melting...soot and many pollutants tend to migrate poleward...Cutting CO2 won't solve the ice melting problem".

For those who wish to end the speculation as to what caused the record melt last year, please watch the video. I have posted this on another forum (non-science) and was verbally attacked by a group of angry alarmists who refused to watch the video. lol.

Allow me to rephrase the question...

After watching the video, do you agree that soot from the Middle East was the cause of the record Arctic melt last year?

Once we get past this stage, we can move forward and discuss my other observations.

Thanks

Max #25301 04/04/08 05:44 AM
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I havent watched the video either but will tomorow.

there are what looks like oil fires all over the mideast and northern africa.

these can be seen in google earth.
I suppose that this oil is oozing up through the ground.
at least that is what it looks like.



3/4 inch of dust build up on the moon in 4.527 billion years,LOL and QM is fantasy science.
paul #25303 04/04/08 01:32 PM
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G'day,

An interesting point. The melt of Greenland needs a bit of clarification first. To be a record you need data that has a timeframe and prior periods all of which are less than the data being declared to be a record. Greenland is especially probematic because there has been very little good data on greenland's ice coverege until very recently. Even with satellites, the greenland ice coverage was not specifically measured and even today there is still significant problems with giving an actual measurement of the coverage. For instance, you need to know the exact position of the structure below the ice before you can meause the thickness of the ice. Even with the antarctic this is a problem. About the only area where this problem does not occur is measurements of ocean sea ice in the Arctic or Antarctic.

So we will leave that aside for the time being.

Max, you have made a very valid point and done something that all scientists should do regularly, speculate. Now I don't mean make press announcements on your speculation or worse still put speculation into a scientific paper, except in those areas of the paper where it is very clearly declared it is speculation, for instance, to suggest areas where further study might be warranted.

Newton didn't just think of gravity and, presto, a scientific theory was born. Actually, he speculated about what held things to the earth, why the moon actually seemed to stay with the earth, and if you believe the story, why an apple fell from a tree. All that was speculation until he started to try and put scientific reasoning to it. Then he went further and looked at the mathematics that might be involved and continued until he had what was a very long way from speculation indeed, but the speculation part was essential in the whole process.

I spend some years developing a paper on the mechanics of flips from a glacial period to an interglacial period because a professor wanted to shake up a class I was in, the vast majority very much very conservative in their views and at that time openly scoffing at the "global cooling" that was then the rage. They were almost all totally convinced that the transition to an interglacial period took between three and five thousand years, as was the very intrenched thinking at the time. So my professor set us a task. He stated: "The transition to a full blown interglacial period took seven years!". Now his intent was for us to prove him wrong. The trouble was that all those that seriously tried could not and the more diverse our enquiries and data that we collected, the worse our position was.

It is known that the first Iraqi conflict caused significant effects to weather around at least a narrow band of the world for about 18 months. It is suggested, with good evidence, to support it, that it effect the weather of Europe for several months, although short term climate can be effected by so many things it is rather dificult to tell if a drop in temperatures, or a change in rain patterns can be attributed to one thing.

As I have mentioned on this site many times, the last seven out of ten flips between glacial and interglacial periods in this Ice Age have been occupanied by increased volcanic activity.

In 1833 a Volcano erupted in Iceland. Now it wasn't a really big eruption. It killed a few hundred people is Iceland at the time and was the largest Icleandic eruption in about 1,000 years but Krakatoa left it for dead, as did a number of other eruptions in the last millenia or so. However, over the next year the temperatures over Europe dropped because a strange cloud or sometimes a "fog" turned up and stuck around for a pretty long time. While the residents of Europe did not know it at the time, this cloud or fog came from the eruption in Iceland. It was very often described as having a sulphur smell and many many people declared it was the work of the devil, sulphurous fumes being closely related to medieaval belief in hell.

This "soot" or small particles in the air changed the climate of at least Europe of one year and killed between 100,000 and 500,000 people in Europe. The numbers are impossible to work out precisely because most countries, with the exception of Britain, did not keep good death records. The deaths were normally those of fit healthy people that were required to do manual activity such as farm labourers. The death tolls are extrapolated from the English records and these indicates that the death toll was around 5% of the population of the towns where records were well kept.

Now in 1816 the whole world (actually all of the Northern Hemisphere, the effect on the Southern Hemisphere was either nil or records were not kept well enough to establish any effect), experienced what was called "the Year without a Summer". Actually the climate changes seemed to have also occured to a much smaller extent in 1815 and to a still marked effect in 1817 and 1818.

It is pretty clear that the reason for the lack of a summer in 1816 was due to upper atmosphere particles, as it coincided with amazing sunsets, well recorded in various places and celebrated in paintings such as those of Turner. So while we do not have evidence in the form of atmospheric readings of particle dispersement and quantity, the evidence that we do have, indirect as it is, is still pretty darn conclusive that the climate change was directly related to the high particle "pollution" in the air. If it was a murder trial the particles would certainly be found guilty of alteration of climates to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and for the purposes of this type of discussion, that's good enough for me.

Most people think that the lost summer was caused by the massive eruption in the Dutch East Indies in 1815 but actually it was probably a combination of a number of eruptions of a somewhat leasser scale but scattered from the equator and well up into the Northern Hemisphere latitudes.

So your comments relating to the Middle East, imho, are very probably well worth a post here and for those interested in Climatology are worth serious consideration.

The pollution from the Middle East isn't just the Iraqi problems. There are all sorts of soot and pollutants that the oil producers in the Mid East are creating, as well as many countries in that region, have little consideration for the environment. You might have Dubai that builds the world in Islands and refuses to use concrete or steel because it might have damaged the eco-system seriously, but you also countries that generate enormous polution without even very cheap preventative measures from all manner of heavy industry that may be there for ideological reasons rather than because of economics. As one that has lived in the Middle East for a time, the think that amazed me was even in the very wealthy countries have little they seemed to care about the environment.


Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
RicS #25304 04/04/08 01:46 PM
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G'day again,

AN EXPLANATION FOR POOR POSTS - COMPLETELY OFF TOPIC

For those that read my posts are apology both for past and future mistakes. You will probably find a great many gramatical errors in my posts. I'd like to keep on posting here, at least for a while, while there are interesting discussions going on. Unfortunately my brain is being squished - literally! So while I'm not going senile, I can read and re-read a post and not notice the use of the wrong words, the improper positioning of commas etc. If it gets too bad, please feel free to express the view that the posts are too difficult to read but I do hope for a while at least whatt I am able to write is written well enough that the basic idea comes through and is of interest to at least somebody.

Sympathy I don't need. The explanation is nso you don't automatically think I'm an idiot or worse lazy because of poor grammer, spelling etc. I'm pretty sure my brain is still expressing the views I want to express in the way I wish to do it. Oh, it also explains why the posts are completely absent references etc. That, currently is something, I am having great difficulty with, although strangely enough my ability to recall very obscure facts such as weird dates or that the eruption was Tambora not Krakatoa that many confuse it with seems to remain as annoying as ever. Good for trivial pursuit, although I think that went out of fashion a long time ago.


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
RicS #25307 04/04/08 05:17 PM
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RicS,
Thank you for your comments.

Oh gosh! Not the dreaded speech on records! LOL! :-)

I would call it an observation, not speculation. It would be speculating to suggest that ocean currents, or salinity caused the melt. Here, we have video evidence of the cause. I am speculating that a high pressure system forced the clouds over the Arctic, however, the disruption of the counterclockwise into a clockwise rotation does support my observation. There is no "presto" magic in my observations. Of course, samples should be taken and analyzed before we reach a conclusion. I've made a number of observations in the video, and there are known studies to support my observations.

Example: You mentioned the effects of volcanic particle emissions. This can be observed in the video as the high altitude soot clouds pass over the Great Lakes.

Please watch the video. You might observe the soot clouds descending on Greenland, with a devastating impact on the west coast.

Hold the press! lol! :-)


Max #25319 04/05/08 06:07 AM
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G'day Max,

Me, I'll stay with speculation. You took one event, an observed distribution of pollution (which almost certainly is not that at all) and linked that with the yearly melting of the Arctic.

Climate has a bad habit of creaping up and biting those that suggest because one thing occurred and at the same time another thing occurred the two are somehow related.

Firstly, the Arctic melts every single year! That has nothing to do with pollutants and everything to do with the earth's tilt.

FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE "POLLUTION" seems to be cloud cover. This movie was made from a long series of snapshots from a satellite. It would appear the snapshots were black and white. Cloud cover over ocean often appears much darker or has a darker halo in a space black and white photo.

All the video seems to be showing in relation to anything other than Arctic ice, is that clouds move. Given the sequence of photos seems to be taken at intervals so that they do not show the actual movement of clouds at all, NOTHING can be read into the movement of the clouds. The video does what it was meant to do. Show the expansion and contraction of the ice sheet with the seasons. Whether this is a record contraction would require comparison with other photos over many years.

Now I very much wish I had looked at the video first. While the comments were relevant to the known effect particles can have on climate, especially after volcanic eruptions, they were not relevant to the video at all. My apologies to those that like to keep the posts on track.

Oh and Max, the "dreaded speech on records" was a pretty short comment but that doesn't make it invalid. And the fact that I might have said similar things before or that you might not like the idea that records could be so useless, it does not make the comments any less relevant or important. As my professor said "Prove me wrong".


Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
RicS #25320 04/05/08 08:15 AM
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Originally Posted By: First Things First!
Originally Posted By: RicS
...Firstly, the Arctic melts every single year! That has nothing to do with pollutants and everything to do with the earth's tilt.

Hey! I know the tilt, etc. does run the cycle of melt/refreeze; but you can't say pollution (soot) has no effect. It has been widely and strongly demonstrated to be a significant factor in change of albedo as well as melting of ice worldwide.
Right?

...okay, now back on topic....

Cool video. I had to go to the site to get it to work (I just got a solid green screen from your above link) -but I didn't 'right-click.'
I've looked at it for about 50 times (couldn't change its speed though), throughout the day, and it is intriguing -fun --mesmerizing. smile

Your talking primarily about the big black blob that "comes in" from the Russian side of the Bearing Strait; and settles on the clockwise gyre, north of the Alaska-Canada border, in the Beaufort Sea?

That thing just seems to materialize out of "thin air" (probably literally).

I noticed that the clockwise (high pressure) area deposits the soot onto the ice and then, as the ice breaks up, a brief counter-clockwise rotation develops and a large pulse of moist(?) air comes out of this area of broken ice to spread over the whole Arctic. Notice what happens as this pulse travels over Greenland.

Greenland seems to be covered with the sooty cloud throughout the year (except when snow from the SE covers eastern Greenland), but with (and following) the pulse, western Greenland gets much whiter for a spell.

wink[Darn, you beat me to these neat observation (rotation & Greenland): p.s. (I just read the newer posts)].

Don't the dark clouds trailing E-SE from the NW coast of Greenland look as if they are formed as clouds form on the leeward side of mountain peaks?

I'm wondering if these "sooty clouds" form under only certain circumstances of pressure/humidity/temp. combinations.

I certainly (well, provisionally) don't think there is any link to between this soot and volcanic activity). Richards comments about volcanoes are true, but this stuff is low-level soot (if it's anything other than a photo-artifact). I strongly object to the way Richard "equated" soot with volcanic effects; but I think he's already added something about a distinction between the two, anyway (buried somewhere in those prodigious posts).
...Thanks Richard for the neat history of 19th century volcanoes!

As Richard points out, care must be taken interpreting "observations" based on a series of snapshots (and records). As wheels can appear to turn backwards when filmed (strobe effect), these patterns and movements may be illusions (not observations). They may be, but I think they represent something fairly true.

I worry more about the "sooty cloud" observations. Is this real; or some other effect of solar angle, shading by rows of clouds, time of day, temperature or particle size of the clouds, or even something else, eh?

[couple of points]: ["originating from the Middle East"] & [Great Lakes? --Hudson Bay was about as far South as my frame showed]?
--Soot from China maybe?

One (speculative) insight that came to me, was that air pressure (descending, clockwise high-pressure), or change in air pressure (ascending, counterclockwise low-pressure) may deform the ice enough to cause "breakup," both with directional winds, and with local changes in sea-level (as with hurricanes).

Questions:
Is that sooty snow, snowing onto Greenland, sooty clouds over Greenland, or just shadows?
Is soot just adsorbing onto the cold high plateau of Greenland?
Is there any time reference? I thought it seemed like about July (when the blob descended in the Beaufort).
Is there any info on number of frames/day, week, etc., to make this "film?"
Have you googled around to see if anyone else notices or explains this "ghost?"

Think how lucky we are to be able to see, or even be aware of this, in our world. ...and then to wonder and speculate.
Thanks Max!
...lots of catching up to do; brb....
smile



Pyrolysis creates reduced carbon! ...Time for the next step in our evolutionary symbiosis with fire.
samwik #25329 04/06/08 09:44 AM
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G'day Samwik,

I have to disagree with a great deal of your comments. The "prodigious" comment I can live with and is certainly accurate. As I've often said, I type fast and it is only when I am able to have to the time to proof what I've written that I can get it down to better sizes.

But I think you need to look at the video again. This is not a video but stop motion animation made up from photographs. It is much more obvious what the "soot clouds" or whatever you'd like to call them are when you look at the video frame by frame. They are clearly clouds. But the photos used are not close enough together in time to actually show the tracking of the clouds. So you get a snapshot of a darkish mass over the lower reaches of Russia and then another mass a bit further north. By this time the weather system may still exist by the clouds have broken up, reformed, become much thicker, thinned out, etc, etc.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but the movement of everything but the ice expansion and retreat, is of no value for anything at all. At least we must think somewhat alike. I was going to mention the apparent reversing of wheels but, hey, the post was already too long.

In order to be of any use in displaying the movement of clouds, polluted or not, you would need photos much closer together in time than these, probably no more than a three or four hours apart each frame. That would make the video very very large indeed.


Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
RicS #25338 04/07/08 05:31 AM
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Rics,
Thank you for your speculation and opinion. However, it is obvious that it is soot. In real life, all of the black thunderclouds in the world DO NOT originate over the Middle East and spiral counterclockwise towards the Arctic. I'm sorry, but your explanation is way off. The darkest "clouds" are not over the oceans, as you suggested. Not even the Atlantic hurricanes are as dark as the soot coming from the Middle East, in fact...They are white. The weather pattern of the northern hemisphere does not slowly cover the globe in a dingy gray cloud cover, then drop the darkest clouds over the Arctic, as seen in the video. I have considered this aspect, and expected that someone would make this argument. ;-)
LOL. No, I have never heard you mention the "dreaded speech on records" before, and have given that same speech myself. I know that most of the posters on this forum are extremely knowledgeable and have an understanding way beyond the basics. That's why I came here. I do apologize if you were offended by that comment. It was said in humor. :-) You are absolutely correct about the records, and I would never try to "prove you wrong" with that statement. So, we can skip the basics...Like, "the Arctic melts every year".

"Climate has a bad habit of creaping up and biting ...."

For the record, we are not talking about climate. We are talking about the effects of pollution, last year. ;-)

"they were not relevant to the video at all."

I wish I was there to point it out to you. I have shown this to three meteorologists who all agree with me. The Middle East is the only area on the map that produced thick, black plumes last year, and they certainly were not thunderheads. The plumes were too dark, and I sure haven't heard of any record shattering rainfall in the area.

As for your second post, well, I agree that they are clouds...soot laced clouds...Laced from the plumes of soot coming from the Middle East. They are clearly trackable. Yes, it is a video made from a compilation of satellite images, as explained in my first post. To suggest that it is spinning backwards as an illusion is simply nonsense. Every meteorologist on the planet would disagree with your statement about tracking storms. In fact, they would get a good laugh. Even the hurricane trackers would get a chuckle..lol.

Anyway, thank you kindly for your opinion piece. One vote for "seeing a ghost". LOL!

Samwik,
Cool! It looks like we were watching the same video.

The black soot clouds originate over the Middle East, disperse across the earth and migrate towards the Arctic, forming a thick ring around the Arctic...Almost as if the soot particles were magnetically attracted to the pole (pure speculation). If you focus on the center dot and play the video at high speed...It becomes clear. The pollution from the Middle East "fills up" the northern hemisphere turning it gray, and then, what appears to be a high pressure system pushes through the thick ring of pollution and forces it over the Arctic. (YES! From the Bearing Strait! Excellent observation! :-))

You might need QuickTime to watch the video in high speed. Here's a link, it's free.
http://www.download.com/QuickTime/3000-2139_4-10002208.html?tag=lst-1

A friend of mine says he sees pollution from China and India, also. I don't see it. What I do see is pollution from the Middle East blanketing China and India, and is probably a huge factor in the problems they are having there. The Middle East is the only area on the globe that is releasing thick, black plumes of pollution.

The "big black blob" is actually part of a thick ring that circles the Arctic. The "dark clouds trailing E-SE from the NW coast of Greenland" are also part of this band. All of this is becomes more than obvious when played in high speed...It screams at you.

I can get a time reference. I'll do that tomorrow...It's past my bedtime! lol.

Last edited by Max; 04/07/08 05:43 AM.
Max #25339 04/07/08 12:33 PM
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G'day Max,

If a simple stop motion video created from black and white space photographs can be interpreted the way you have, then it is extemely easy to see how the Climate debate is so difficult.

Your last post managed to misrepresent several of my comments and that is always not a good thing when having discussions such as these.

I would suggest you put your arguments about the "soot" movement to the producers of the video at their site and see what they say.

But before you do that, rather than watch the video at high speed try watching it single frame at a time. You get a much better picture of the photographs used.

Just to point out some fairly serious misrepresentations:

I did not state anywhere that the darkest clouds are over the oceans. I simple pointed out, accurately as it happens, that in black and white photographs taken from space clouds over ocean often have darker fringes.

I said nothing even remotely similar to the darkest clouds in the world appear from the Middle East.

If you look very carefully at this video, I find it difficult to assess the originating point of any cloud cover, "soot" pattern or whatever you wish to call it, let alone that it is coming from the Middle East.

The spinning backwards reference was to the illusion often seen in Western movies and the like, wheels in movies. At no point did I suggest that the stop motion of this video had created an illusion of the clouds or anything else going backwards.

"Every meteorologist on the planet would disagree with your statement about tracking storms. In fact, they would get a good laugh. Even the hurricane trackers would get a chuckle..lol." So not only did I mistate some obvious meteorological mechanism but it was so fundamentally a flawed error that every meterologist on the planet would disagree with it. Pity that I cannot seem to find a comment relating to tracking storms, and more to the point, this video is NOT meant as a video to show the movement or the tracking of storms. I would like you to quote the statement that is so fundamentally flawed, if you are going to make such statements.

And as a Climatologist, I would suggest that it is generally left to the person making the statement to determine whether or not the term "climate" holds true. The expansion and contraction of ice coverage in the Artic over more than a year is both a look at the weather for the region and the climate. The hypothesis that soot may be altering the pattern of ice melting and refreezing over the whole Arctic region is very much an issue relating to climate. But the argument that what was being discussed was weather rather than climate, imho, is splitting hairs, and of not productive.

Then we come to the issue of the actions of this soot. Your original statement was the soot seems to have descended and then melted the ice. Strange, but particulate pollution, as far as I know from the many studies that I have seen relating to this top, causes cooling. Just how would the "soot" melt the ice. If the soot fell to the ice and covered it so that it became very dirty ice then that could certainly explain it, but any such marked change in the Albedo of the ice, would be very big news indeed. The Albedo readings for the Artic region have been monitored for very many years now. If it stayed in the atmosphere then it if it was in the Northern Hemisphere summer then it would act to reduce the amount of solar radiation actually able to reach the earth surface, and the area would be subject to cooling.

This is why I mentioned that as speculation, the post was good. But if you want to argue it through, you would need more than what you have, and certainly need to show that what you think you are seeing, soot movevement is not simply part of the features of black and white space photography. I personally do not think you can do this. But, hey, I'm happy to listen to other's opinions.

I do not believe that the clouds are trackable from this video, mainly because the timing of the photographs.

I do hope you do not take this as being antagonistic. Unfortunately, you decided to directly attack comments made by me, and imho misrepresent what I had said and I this isn't what this site is meant to be about at all. You can disagree with my opinions all you like. I'm happy to argue the various points. But to paraphrase what I have said and seemingly do so so that the information is not what I actually said and I will comment.

If you were aiming to create a video showing the movement of weather fronts or cloud cover from the mid latitudes to the Arctic then each frame would need to be seperated by a gap considerably less than the possible development and disbursement of on weather system. Since this movie covers more than a year, and was created at 10 fps and has 376 frames I'm going to guess that each frame represents one day and the movie shows 376 days. Twenty-four hours as a rather long interval if you were studying cloud movements, or at least it seems that way to me. The other problem that I suggest would make this a difficult thing to use to interpret cloud movement is that the photographs used seem to be slices and the cloud cover in each slice does not match the slices adjacent to it.

Finally, I've looked at this video at various speeds and with various other settings changed and I just do not see what you seem to read into it. Certainly the ice sheets in the Arctic and sometimes darker and sometimes lighter but for the most part this seems to relate to the thickness of the ice sheet, excepting a priod in the middle of the movie where there seems to have been heavy cloud cover.

Please don't take my view as absolute in this matter. Contact the website where the movie came from or ask a meteorologist that has expertise in studying space snapshots.


Regards


Richard



Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
RicS #25340 04/07/08 12:49 PM
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G'day Max,

My apologies in advance if you didn't do this but it seems that upon reading my post relating to your prior post you then edited the prior post removing many of the comments that I specifically commented upon. That may have the impact of making my post sound ridiculous, because the quoted or paraphrased portions cannot be found in your post.

I personally do not believe that is what editing is for. It is to correct grammatical errors and the like. If you decide, if someone takes issue with a comment you have made, that the person is correct, by all means remove the comment if you believe that is the best action but it is not unreasonable to expect a comment placed where the portion of the post was removed to the effect that it was removed.

Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
RicS #25341 04/07/08 01:11 PM
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Thanks Ric,

Gosh Ric, I only edited my post to correct a spelling mistake. No, your post is what it is by your own doing. LOL!

I won't address the problems in your post, or the statements that you misunderstood. Thanks for your opinion. I wish I was there to point it out to you. I will take your advice and ask a few more meteorologists. No problem. My father is a meteorologist, credited as a pioneer in the field, and co-founder of Universal.

http://www.univ-wea.com/aviationweather/index.html

I'll let you know what they say.

Max #25342 04/07/08 01:31 PM
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Rics,

Again, please check the times. The editing occurred 2 minutes after the post was made. I see that you are resorting to attacking others for your mistakes, and falsely accusing them of editing to make your reply sound ridiculous...A very common action among climatologists. After that last barrage, I will disregard any future comments from you.

Max #25355 04/09/08 06:50 PM
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Here's the word from a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at our local college, who happens to agree with most of my observations.

"What is clearly visible in the video is pollution entering the Polar cell. This video is a gold mine of information." He was very impressed with the video and is going to use it in his classes.

It's simple. Pollution from the Middle East entering the Polar cell and decending on the Arctic.

Anyway, I've found a local outlet to discuss this topic on a more constructive level. I appreciate everyone's opinion.

Max #25694 04/25/08 08:34 AM
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Haze in Alaska


http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF9/948.html


....gee, this looks familiar.

http://www.adn.com/front/story/384167.html

Smoke from Russian fires and dust from the Gobi Desert are combining to produce the haze drifting across Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula in an image taken from NASA's Terra satellite April 22, 2008. The cloud has caused hazy conditions around Anchorage and the Matanuska and Susitna valleys.

"This year, dust is only half the problem. Massive wildfires spanning a huge swath of southern Siberia in the Russian Far East broke out last week, contributing smoke to the mix and worsening an unusually dusty spring, Albanese said. One can't smell the smoke because of its lofty position in the sky, he said.
Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported this week that more than 100 forest fires were burning in four Russian regions, including in the Far East and Siberia. Officials declared states of emergency in some districts."


Pyrolysis creates reduced carbon! ...Time for the next step in our evolutionary symbiosis with fire.
samwik #26131 05/20/08 02:24 PM
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Samwik,

Thanks for the link! Yes, the circulation pattern does look familiar. lol

I'm waiting on the results from this research...

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080407_arctichaze.html

Hmm, I wonder what they will find?

Max #26135 05/21/08 05:02 AM
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Originally Posted By: ...from the link:
April 8, 2008: Industry, transportation, and biomass burning in North America, Europe, and Asia are emitting trace gases and tiny airborne particles that are polluting the polar region, forming an “Arctic Haze” every winter and spring. Scientists suspect these pollutants are speeding up the polar melt.
"Scientists suspect these pollutants are speeding up the polar melt."

It's obvious! ...but scientists must remain objective, and equivocate, until they can quantify the acceleration of melting due to soot and other pollutants.

Thanks Max; it's nice to get some current Arctic updates.
smile


Pyrolysis creates reduced carbon! ...Time for the next step in our evolutionary symbiosis with fire.

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