Link Gumbo - Weather, The Future, and An Adventure

What's the difference between sleet and freezing rain?  I'll start with this, given we may well see both of these today in the Chicago area.  Angela Fritz, atmospheric scientist, explains.


Permafrost is melting all across the northern reaches of the globe.  Researchers in Alaska found the remains of "Bison Bob," a 40,000-year-old steppe bison, in a thawing river bank.  Here's the story.


The World Economic Forum occurred recently at Davos, Switzerland.  Here's a brief summary of some predictions for the future. 


I write fiction, as do many of my friends and readers.  We paint images with words.  Here's a short animated film that is only images, no words!  There are fantasy adventure tropes galore as well as a wonderful, satisfying ending. 

Stay warm!  I'm going to make another mocha and do some editing. 


UPDATE:  We have sleet!  (In case you're wondering, sleet and hail are almost the same.  Sleet happens in winter, hail happens in summer and is often larger than sleet.)

I can hear the little balls pinging off the windows.

Thanksgiving Day and Reminisces

I’m grateful for living now, for the advancements and changes that I’ve seen over the past half century.  Reduced discrimination, increased opportunities, amazing technology. 

Distance from events changes our perspective.  I can even be grateful for those people in my life when I was young who told me “girls can’t do that” and “college is wasted on girls, especially you.”  Those statements hurt, but gave me the drive to prove them wrong.  Pushed me right into an A average and advanced degree in oceanography.  

As an undergraduate I had several classes where I was either the only woman or one of two women, and I went to a large state school (FSU).  In graduate school I was one of three women students in the department.  We had one woman professor.  One!  A woman of awesomeness, a full professor with a PhD in physics who held a joint appointment in Oceanography and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. (*waves*  Hi, Ruby, if you ever see this.)  There were cruises where I was the only woman on board. 

There was discrimination.  The professor who graded the women lower for the same answers as the men.  We ended up in the department chair’s office over that one.  :)   The chief scientist on a cruise who gave me the 2 to 4 watch (that’s 2 pm to 4 pm AND 2 am to 4 am - the absolute worst shift) and ‘joked’ it would put me in my place and teach me women didn’t belong at sea.  That was my first deep water cruise and my first as the only woman in the scientific party.  A hurricane formed over our sample site (Anita) and we ran for port at the same speed the storm was building.  Sitting in the galley with my life jacket after a 4 am shift, along with more than half the crew, I was told I needed to get a knife before my next cruise (they assumed I’d be back; they were right) and a lively discussion ensued on the merits of fixed blade vs switch blade which included demonstrations.  I was quizzed on how to determine where I was relative to the door if we capsized.  Fifty knot winds, 10 meter seas (on a 100 meter vessel) for two days, chugging along at 13 knots was a hell of an initiation.  The wooden fruit bowl in a macramé hanger near the entrance to the galley was swinging to within a foot of the ceiling.

I bought a knife.  Not the type recommended, but one I was comfortable carrying.  It lived in the pocket of my jeans whenever I was at sea. 

I am grateful for all the people who encouraged me over the years, the folks who still encourage me when I tackle tasks I’m not sure I can manage.  Who remind me my toolbox is deep, my knowledge base broad. 

Attitudes have changed.  What was once not even considered as realistic (women firefighters, multiracial marriage, same sex marriage) is now either mainstream or moving in that direction.  

There are still challenges.  Discrimination isn’t gone.  Climate change has been ignored by policy makers for too long - drought killed more civilizations than wars ever did.

We can’t let those with small imaginations and limited ideas prevent us from following our dreams and accomplishing our goals.  I'm grateful I learned that lesson early. 

News from the Climate Change Front

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group, generally considered to be climate change skeptics, funded a project to investigate global temperatures over the last fifty years.  Guess what?  Their results confirm what so many scientists have been saying!  Well, duh.  Facts is facts.  Temperatures have increased by 1.5 °F over the past fifty years and "essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases." 

It’s wonderful to see they went at this with an open mind, ready to accept whatever the data showed them.

 ~ ~ ~ :: ~ ~ ~

Way south, a huge, mile-deep rift valley was found under the ice in West Antarctica. It's about the size of the Grand Canyon:

That's a trace generated by ice-penetrating radar towed by a team of scientists on snowmobiles.  It’s thought this deep canyon may be channeling warmer ocean water to the bottom of the near-by Pine Island Glacier.  This can lubricate the underside, speeding its flow and hastening its melting.  This glacier is poised to calf a large chunk soon: 

The picture is from November, 2011.  The crack was about 19 miles (30 kilometers) long, 260 feet (80 meters) wide and 195 feet (60 meters) deep back then.  The giant iceberg that will result will cover about 350 square miles (900 square kilometers).  Yikes!

The current rate of ice loss from West Antarctica is thought to contribute about 10% to global sea level rise, currently at about 3.3 millimeters per year and increasing.  If the ice sheet there (West Antarctica, not the entire continent's ice) were to completely melt, sea level would go up by several meters.  Greenland losing its ice would add another couple meters. 

 ~ ~ ~ :: ~ ~ ~

That's it for now.  Don't go buying any beach-front property!

It's been so hot that ...

My new air conditioner is handling our record-breaking heat with aplomb. 

(No, I didn't resort to the Synonym Finder for that last word.  It just popped in my head.  But I used the SF to be sure it meant what I thought it meant ... Can't trust the ol' brain in this heat.)

Dots - Red and Blue

You’ve probably heard through various news outlets that last month was one of the warmest Aprils on record.  Where it stands in the stats depends on what region you consider:  5th warmest globally, 4th warmest for the US.  Land surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were 1.7°C (3.1°F) above the 20th century average.

(Click on the map to see an enlarged version.)

I like these pictures NOAA does because they give a visual of what goes into creating a statistic like a global average.  What’s happening at “your house” might be near that global average, or wildly divergent from it. 

Some people who work hard at denying the earth is warming will point out that glaciers in the Himalayas and some parts of Antarctica are growing.  Look at the map above and you’ll see blue dots in those areas.  Eastern Greenland even has a blue dot.  Yes, there are areas that are cooler than average, but talking only about them is cherry-picking data. 

There are very few blue dots on the land.  Very few.  And the land is where we live.

It's Scary Hot

Well, this heat wave is just beginning, and here are yesterday's numbers:

Chicago, Illinois hit 81°F; the warmest it's ever been this early in the year, going back to 1872, and 35°F above average. This ties the record set on March 12, 1990.

Evansville, Indiana hit 82°F, the warmest it's ever been this early in the year, going back to 1871, and 25°F above average. This ties the record of 82°F set on March 10, 1990.


Traverse City, Michigan hit 81°F, the warmest it's ever been this early in the year, going back to 1897, and 42°F above average. Previous record: 77°F on March 7, 2000.

Dubuque, Iowa hit 75°F, the warmest it's ever been this early in the year, going back to 1874, and 37°F above average. This ties the 75°F reading of March 12, 1990.

Madison, Wisconsin hit 78°F, the warmest it's ever been this early in the year, going back to 1869, and was 36°F above average. Previous record: 77°F on March 8, 2000. 

(More information here , at Dr. Masters' Blog.)

Ah, Madison - a place I lived during a January in which the air temperature never went above 0°F and we had wind chills around -50°F on a regular basis.  It may be a looonnnggg time before that kind of winter happens again.

I think I'd better start collecting estimates for my new air conditioner.  If our summer temperatures get 35° above normal, I won't survive without one.

The Weather - we'd better do something about it

Here’s a link to a very complete overview of the weather during 2010:

Dr. Jeff Masters' blog of June 24, 2011

He says, “It is quite possible that 2010 was the most extreme weather year globally since 1816.”  That year, following the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, was called the Year Without Summer. 

2010 has the distinction of  (1) being the hottest year on record since the late 1800s, (2) having the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record (3) being the third year in a row in which the fabled Northwest Passage was actually open (the other two years were 2009 and 2008), (4) record ice melting in Greenland, (5) second worse coral bleaching year, (6) wettest over land since 1900, (7)  the Amazon basin experienced it’s second 100 year drought in 5 years, (8) Tennessee had a 1 in 1000 year flood.  There’s more, too, that Dr. Masters discusses in this blog post.

He concludes, “The pace of extreme weather events has remained remarkably high during 2011, giving rise to the question--is the "Global Weirding" of 2010 and 2011 the new normal? Has human-caused climate change destabilized the climate, bringing these extreme, unprecedented weather events? Any one of the extreme weather events of 2010 or 2011 could have occurred naturally sometime during the past 1,000 years. But it is highly improbable that the remarkable extreme weather events of 2010 and 2011 could have all happened in such a short period of time without some powerful climate-altering force at work. The best science we have right now maintains that human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases like CO2 are the most likely cause of such a climate-altering force.” (emphasis his)

It’s real.  It’s not going away.  It’s very scary because too many people won’t accept this reality and they put convenience and profit ahead of saving the only world we have to live in. 

Feeling kinda down today.