Thread: What lousy weather!!!!!!

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Just reporting from central Virginia. Temp. is below 20 F but much colder with wind chill below 10 F. Last night I stayed with a science program on global warming about how the ice sheet on Greeland may melt and photographic evidence of very large melts on the Antartic ice shelf. As a scientist I try to understand the data and they keep showing continuing increase in atmospheric CO2 along with small increases in the ocean temperatures at the poles. Still it seems like the winters are as severe or more so than usual. A simple experiment I have used in Chemistry lectures is to put a thermometer in a glass of ice water and making a graph of the temperature over about one hour. The interesting thing is that the temperature of the water does not rise until all the ice is gone, so as long as we have polar ice caps, the overall temperature of the oceans and the mean air temperature will remain roughly constant as long as there is ice at the polar caps. Still, something is driving the melting of glaciers and the ice at Antartica and Greenland even though the mean temperatures are roughly constant. That is what is fooling us into thinking there is no change going on. Then there are coral deposits at some places that show the sea level was as much as 100 feet higher long ago and other evidence that at several times in the past there was a "snowball Earth" where ice covered almost the entire surface of the Earth. But the main thing I learned is that there are changes in the Earth orbit over thousands of years going from a near circular orbit which lessens seasonal differences to a more elliptical orbit where there are greater differences between seasons. I may be wrong but I got the idea that this shift between circular and elliptical orbits changes about every 128,000 years. So in trying to understand this stuff it does seem that the Earth has a wide variation in sea levels over thousands of years and the level does cycle. So the folks who say it is all natural have a good point. The catch is that the Al Gore team says humankind is accelerating the cycle with artifical release of CO2 so that by about 2040 the sea level will rise by ten feet or even more. I also did not remember that in 1984 a Nor-Easter storm on the east coast flooded the subway system in New York. Thus New York City, London and the tip of Florida as well as many east coast vacation sites will be under water in 30-50 years. For the west coast folks note that the west coast has prevailing winds west-to-east so has mostly rocky coasts with fairly narrow beaches while the east coast is the "lee side" of the US and most of the coastal vacation sites are typically on sand bars with the Intercoastal Waterway between the beaches and the mainland. Such sites may be under water in 50 years if trends continue. The data does show the trend in this direction. The Al Gore team seems to think that we can reverse or slow this trend if we just would give up burning all fossil fuels asap! OK so how are we supposed to heat homes and continue transportation? The latest ideas say that wind and solar energy will provide enough electricity to switch to all-electricity for all forms of energy including cars. My professional opinion is that wind and solar sources are not enough but let them build as much as they can and then come back to a realization that nuclear power is the only way to provide enough power for cloudy days with calm air.

Summary:

1. There are natural cycles of climate change on Earth with sea levels rising and falling over periods of hundreds of thousands of years; yes there are natural cycles of climate change (did I forget Sunspots?).

2. There is good evidence of an enormous increase in CO2 due to consumption of fossil fuels from 1800 on.

3. Ocean temperatures at the poles are slowly increasing and glaciers are melting.

4. We cannot simply stop making fire in any form unless we increase power from nuclear sources. I don't think solar and wind will be enough.

Conclusion: We need more nuclear power plants! France depends on nuclear power plants for over 70% of it's power! It looks to me that electric cars are coming and the future hot rodders will be folks who have more batteries and larger electric motors. Hot Rodding will survive but may shift to souped up Chevy Volts?

Sorry about the long post, I am just rambling trying to understand this myself. Hey I want to go back to gas for $0.259/gallon and buy a restored Pontiac 389 (I missed out on that the first time) but it's not going to happen.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder