St. Croix Live

screw it, i'll post it.

but if it freezes, it's on yall

http://www.vaguesdudiamant.com/webcam-les-trois-ilets-martinique.aspx

On 8/22/2017 at 8:05 PM, WinterWxLuvr said:

That would likely be the death of us all.

I dunno. It could help at times as well.

Like if they dropped a few million tons of ice cubes in the Gulf ahead of Harvey right now.  Otherwise that thing is gonna go to town.  88 degree water temps in it's path.

On 8/21/2017 at 10:30 AM, Weatherdude88 said:

We are currently in an unprecedented slow down in this melting season. Looking at JAXA sea ice extent data for the past 5 days (8.14-8.20), here is how this year compares to previous years. All of this in a time frame were weather was considered unfavorable by most. Where is the heat? 

 

 

It's called bio-engineering to the rescue.

next week's system (980's) could be an ice ripper.   approaching from the warm nose.

long range looks pretty mild. 

http://news.trust.org/item/20170726060325-colqn

Scientists dim sunlight, suck up carbon dioxide to cool planet

OSLO, July 26 (Reuters) - Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun's rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet.

Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.

The United Nations says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions for example from factories or cars - particularly after U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.

They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down.

In the countryside near Zurich, Swiss company Climeworks began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air in May with giant fans and filters in a $23 million project that it calls the world's first "commercial carbon dioxide capture plant".

Worldwide, "direct air capture" research by a handful of companies such as Climeworks has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.

If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air would help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris Agreement.

Climeworks reckons it now costs about $600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant's full capacity due by the end of 2017 is only 900 tonnes a year. That's equivalent to the annual emissions of only 45 Americans.

And Climeworks sells the gas, at a loss, to nearby greenhouses as a fertiliser to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and has a partnership with carmaker Audi, which hopes to use carbon in greener fuels.

Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, says the company has planet-altering ambitions by cutting costs to about $100 a tonne and capturing one percent of global man-made carbon emissions a year by 2025.

"Since the Paris Agreement, the business substantially changed," he said, with a shift in investor and shareholder interest away from industrial uses of carbon to curbing climate change.

But penalties for factories, power plants and cars to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are low or non-existent. It costs 5 euros ($5.82) a tonne in the European Union.

And isolating carbon dioxide is complex because the gas makes up just 0.04 percent of the air. Pure carbon dioxide delivered by trucks, for use in greenhouses or to make drinks fizzy, costs up to about $300 a tonne in Switzerland.

Other companies involved in direct air capture include Carbon Engineering in Canada, Global Thermostat in the United States and Skytree in the Netherlands, a spinoff of the European Space Agency originally set up to find ways to filter out carbon dioxide breathed out by astronauts in spacecrafts.

NOT SCIENCE FICTION

The Paris Agreement seeks to limit a rise in world temperatures this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial times.

But U.N. data show that current plans for cuts in emissions will be insufficient, especially without the United States, and that the world will have to switch to net "negative emissions" this century by extracting carbon from nature.

Riskier "geo-engineering" solutions could be a backstop, such as dimming the world's sunshine, dumping iron into the oceans to soak up carbon, or trying to create clouds.

Among new university research, a Harvard geo-engineering project into dimming sunlight to cool the planet set up in 2016 has raised $7.5 million from private donors. It plans a first outdoor experiment in 2018 above Arizona.

"If you want to be confident to get to 1.5 degrees you need to have solar geo-engineering," said David Keith, of Harvard.

Keith's team aims to release about 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) of sun dimming material, perhaps calcium carbonate, from a high-altitude balloon above Arizona next year in a tiny experiment to see how it affects the microphysics of the stratosphere.

"I don't think it's science fiction ... to me it's normal atmospheric science," he said.

Some research has suggested that geo-engineering with sun-dimming chemicals, for instance, could affect global weather patterns and disrupt vital Monsoons.

And many experts fear that pinning hopes on any technology to fix climate change is a distraction from cuts in emissions blamed for heating the planet.

"Relying on big future deployments of carbon removal technologies is like eating lots of dessert today, with great hopes for liposuction tomorrow," Christopher Field, a Stanford University professor of climate change, wrote in May.

Jim Thomas of ETC Group in Canada, which opposes climate engineering, said direct air capture could create "the illusion of a fix that can be used cynically or naively to entertain policy ideas such as 'overshoot'" of the Paris goals.

But governments face a dilemma. Average surface temperatures are already about 1C (1.8F) above pre-industrial levels and hit record highs last year.

"We're in trouble," said Janos Pasztor, head of the new Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Project. "The question is not whether or not there will be an overshoot but by how many degrees and for how many decades."

Faced with hard choices, many experts say that extracting carbon from the atmosphere is among the less risky options. Leaders of major economies, except Trump, said at a summit in Germany this month that the Paris accord was "irreversible."

"BARKING MAD

Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at Oxford University, said solar geo-engineering projects seemed "barking mad".

By contrast, he said "carbon dioxide removal is challenging technologically, but deserves investment and trial."

The most natural way to extract carbon from the air is to plant forests that absorb the gas as they grow, but that would divert vast tracts of land from farming. Another option is to build power plants that burn wood and bury the carbon dioxide released.

Carbon Engineering, set up in 2009 with support from Gates and Murray Edwards, chairman of oil and gas group Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, has raised about $40 million and extracts about a tonne of carbon dioxide a day with turbines and filters.

"We're mainly looking to synthesise fuels" for markets such as California with high carbon prices, said Geoffrey Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering.

But he added that "the Paris Agreement helps" with longer-term options of sucking large amounts from the air.

Among other possible geo-engineering techniques are to create clouds that reflect sunlight back into space, perhaps by using a mist of sea spray.

That might be used locally, for instance, to protect the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, said Kelly Wanser, principal director of the U.S.-based Marine Cloud Brightening Project.

Among new ideas, Wurzbacher at Climeworks is sounding out investors on what he says is the first offer to capture and bury 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, for $500 a tonne.

That might appeal to a company wanting to be on forefront of a new green technology, he said, even though it makes no apparent economic sense. ($1 = 0.9538 Swiss francs) ($1 = 0.8593 euros)

sea levels falling?

https://www.iceagenow.info/sea-levels-are-falling/

maybe explains why new islands are forming near north carolina.

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/new-island-north-carolina/index.html

funny too how the arctic flip occurred right after the election.  considering how severe the ice melt was during the beginning / middle of last winter, we 'should' be much lower by now.  Even ORH seemed perplexed from the flip.   (few pages back)

If there ever was a secret project to save the arctic ,we'd never hear about it anyway.  (too many would complain / troll about chemtrail or other experimental programs)

wouldn't be surprised to see a cooler than expected outcome by years end.  

we have a Republican in office now, Geo-engineering for the win.   It's much easier to artificially cool a small area (like the north pole), than it would be other larger regions. 

and aerosols aren't the only option.  no population out there, so they can play around all they want. 

the extent analog from 2006 looks similar to what's currently going on. 

the doom mongerers need to stay on pause for now.  

worst max extent in history....yet Republicans will still find some crazy data excuse somewhere, to say ice is increasing.  

lets see what the coo-coo birds humor us with next. 

heatwave incoming

nice post.

yea most noobies in the NYC forum are crying rain, and nothing but rain...when they don't realize temperatures of just a few degrees is all it takes now.

actually, I think their slowly coming around this morning...from rain to sleet.   eventually they'll get there.  

but yea, this Mississippi stuff this morning got my attention as well. 

8 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

Some temporary declines in January have occurred in the past. Statistically, it is almost improbable that we have already reached the peak Arctic sea ice extent figure (>4.5 sigma event). During the 2003-16 period, the earliest peak was February 15 (2015). The latest was March 31 (2003 and 2010). The mean and median dates were March 10.

true, but this has been a very odd / mild season.  

if wrong, I doubt i'll be wrong by much. 

 looking at long range forecasts... we may of reached the yearly peak already. 

All these ice gains the last few weeks, seems a little sketchy.  during a relatively mild arctic pattern.  

is it just me, or is this continued pattern over Siberia looking catastrophic ...even 7+ days from now ?

sometimes you have to think outside the box, and look at data from outside the box.  

everything going on with the planet, isn't always going to be handed over on a silver platter.   Public data is only a piece of the puzzle. 

This year alone has been exceptional (record breaking) in terms of both Coronal Holes and Ice Melt.    Shouldn't take much processing to connect the dots. 

4 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

Do you have a source of data that indicates the current coronal holes are largely unprecedented?

From monitoring coronal hole data for decades, it is 'not' normal.   The size of these holes.  Even during solar minimums in the past.

12 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

Coronal holes have been observed since the 1950s (https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~scranmer/Preprints/eaaa_holes.pdf). If coronal holes were largely responsible for the current low ice conditions in the Arctic and Antarctic regions

Yes,  but it's the unusually large size and consistency of these very large coronal holes that we haven't seen ever (so many) occur back to back in a year's time.

I don't even see 1 other person mentioning the 'possibility' of this being the issue...anywhere.  95% of the horde are all caught up in climate change this and that.    Somewhat seems like their 'scared' to mention the sun as the culprit.  

I guess if there's no politics involved, they can't mention it as the problem...since there's no silver bullet to fix the sun.

^from spaceweather.com

The large coronal hole to effect earth again...the next few days. 

and for those that think it's ridiculous to compare the 2. 

Quote

Traveling across freezing space should suck all the heat from the plasma by the time it nears Earth, but the solar waves detected near our planet are still hot. Scientists think something is happening within the plasma to generate heat.

http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2015/01/05/measuring-temperature-solar-winds/

It's BOTH poles that are taking hits currently.   When solar wind / coronal holes unleash....the Poles take the biggest hits.

Dunno why i'm the only one correctly identifying this...while others are blaming global warming or some other nonsense.  What's going on at both the north and south poles currently is unprecedented .  

3 hours ago, Jonger said:

Something happened to him in his life I believe. He checked in and said he didn't have time for this anymore.

MIB ?   all in all, I hope he's well ..   It was fun seeing him and ORH go at it at times, over the years.    Guess I gotta take over and keep the pressure on now.  (jk) 

I learned a lot from both him and ORH regarding the arctic...and others here.    

Quote

This departure from normal in global sea ice has really blown up on social media and I'd expect the mainstream media to pick it up really soon. 

when pigs fly.  Mainstream media is so owned by the Republican agenda, so I highly doubt it.   We'll have to wait until ALL ice is gone , or once things start looking like this.  

then maybe...just maybe there'll be a story or 2. 

9 hours ago, stadiumwave said:

Anyone know where GlobalWarmer poster is? I figured he'd be all over this.  Kind of concerns me he's not posting.

9 minutes ago, chubbs said:

Currently Antarctic sea ice is even more unusual.

good thing Trump isn't president yet , gives him some more time to flip-flop.

article from 16 years ago.  

and as common knowledge, anomalies from the sun effect the Poles the most. 

We've had several , unusually large coronal hole incidents this year alone.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000315080417.htm

Holes In Sun's Corona Linked To Atmospheric Temperature Changes On Earth

An unusual interdisciplinary study by astronomers and climatologists has found a striking correlation between holes in the outermost layer of the sun--or the corona--and the globally averaged temperature of the Earth, suggesting that the Earth's atmospheric temperature may be strongly linked to solar magnetism changes over months or years.