Three Observations About Conversations On The Extreme Cold Weather This Week

[rangerrebew]

Dec 30, 2017 @ 08:04 AM 1,504
 
Three Observations About Conversations On The Extreme Cold Weather This Week

Marshall Shepherd , Contributor
 

Ok, let's cut to the chase. It's cold. It's extremely cold in much of the United States and Canada. It is so cold that Marina Karen and Robinson Meyer write in The Atlantic about how in some places it is colder than Mars with temperature readings from the Mars Curiosity rover at -9 degrees F on December 20th. There are even some people falling into the trap of incorrectly linking the current Arctic blast (something that does happen in winter) to false narratives about climate change. I dealt with that misconception thoroughly in my last Forbes commentary. According to The Weather Channel, record cold temperatures were set in parts of the South, Midwest, and East. It is clear that the next week or so will bring more record cold, including on New Year's Eve. I am a meteorologist, professor, and an observer of how weather-climate narratives play out in the broader public space. Three things caught my eye this week.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2017/12/30/three-observations-about-conversations-on-the-extreme-cold-weather-this-week/#56606ef961ed

[Joe Wooten]

Just another globull warming propaganda piece.

[LadyLiberty]

I wonder what caused the great snowstorm on Valentine's Day in 1895?  Houston recorded 20" of snow and Beaumont 28".  https://spacecityweather.com/houston-snow-1895-galveston/

[Joe Wooten]

I wonder what caused the great snowstorm on Valentine's Day in 1895?  Houston recorded 20" of snow and Beaumont 28".  https://spacecityweather.com/houston-snow-1895-galveston/

It was those horse drawn SUV's.......

[WingNot]

I wonder what caused the great snowstorm on Valentine's Day in 1895?  Houston recorded 20" of snow and Beaumont 28".  https://spacecityweather.com/houston-snow-1895-galveston/

Talk about an inconvenient truth. 

[Free Vulcan]

So what caused every butta** cold winter that every relative told me about, plus myself experienced, back to my great-grandma in the late 1800's?

[WingNot]

Makes me wish I was bitching about the summer heat.

[goodwithagun]

Makes me wish I was bitching about the summer heat.

Wow, somebody needs to see her esthetician!

[Suppressed]

Just another globull warming propaganda piece.

Woukd you please provide rebuttal to the points made?

[Joe Wooten]

Woukd you please provide rebuttal to the points made?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/28/record-breaking-winter-cold-dont-worry-the-climate-explainers-have-it-covered/

[bigheadfred]

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/28/record-breaking-winter-cold-dont-worry-the-climate-explainers-have-it-covered/

@Suppressed, from the same website in Joe's link.

New research shows Earth’s tilt influences climate change
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/15/new-research-shows-earths-tilt-influences-climate-change/


https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6332

NASA Study Solves Two Mysteries About Wobbling Earth
Earth does not always spin on an axis running through its poles. Instead, it wobbles irregularly over time, drifting toward North America throughout most of the 20th Century (green arrow). That direction has changed drastically due to changes in water mass on Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Larger image

Using satellite data on how water moves around Earth, NASA scientists have solved two mysteries about wobbles in the planet's rotation -- one new and one more than a century old. The research may help improve our knowledge of past and future climate.

Although a desktop globe always spins smoothly around the axis running through its north and south poles, a real planet wobbles. Earth's spin axis drifts slowly around the poles; the farthest away it has wobbled since observations began is 37 feet (12 meters). These wobbles don't affect our daily life, but they must be taken into account to get accurate results from GPS, Earth-observing satellites and observatories on the ground.

In a paper published today in Science Advances, Surendra Adhikari and Erik Ivins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, researched how the movement of water around the world contributes to Earth's rotational wobbles. Earlier studies have pinpointed many connections between processes on Earth's surface or interior and our planet's wandering ways. For example, Earth's mantle is still readjusting to the loss of ice on North America after the last ice age, and the reduced mass beneath that continent pulls the spin axis toward Canada at the rate of a few inches each year. But some motions are still puzzling.

A Sharp Turn to the East

Around the year 2000, Earth's spin axis took an abrupt turn toward the east and is now drifting almost twice as fast as before, at a rate of almost 7 inches (17 centimeters) a year. "It's no longer moving toward Hudson Bay, but instead toward the British Isles," said Adhikari. "That's a massive swing." Adhikari and Ivins set out to explain this unexpected change.

Scientists have suggested that the loss of mass from Greenland and Antarctica's rapidly melting ice sheet could be causing the eastward shift of the spin axis. The JPL scientists assessed this idea using observations from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which provide a monthly record of changes in mass around Earth. Those changes are largely caused by movements of water through everyday processes such as accumulating snowpack and groundwater depletion. They calculated how much mass was involved in water cycling between Earth's land areas and its oceans from 2003 to 2015, and the extent to which the mass losses and gains pulled and pushed on the spin axis.

Adhikari and Ivins' calculations showed that the changes in Greenland alone do not generate the gigantic amount of energy needed to pull the spin axis as far as it has shifted. In the Southern Hemisphere, ice mass loss from West Antarctica is pulling, and ice mass gain in East Antarctica is pushing, Earth's spin axis in the same direction that Greenland is pulling it from the north, but the combined effect is still not enough to explain the speedup and new direction. Something east of Greenland has to be exerting an additional pull.

The researchers found the answer in Eurasia. "The bulk of the answer is a deficit of water in Eurasia: the Indian subcontinent and the Caspian Sea area," Adhikari said.

The finding was a surprise. This region has lost water mass due to depletion of aquifers and drought, but the loss is nowhere near as great as the change in the ice sheets.

So why did the smaller loss have such a strong effect? The researchers say it's because the spin axis is very sensitive to changes occurring around 45 degrees latitude, both north and south. "This is well explained in the theory of rotating objects," Adhikari explained. "That's why changes in the Indian subcontinent, for example, are so important."

I read something about megaquakes tilting the earth beyond the norm. I'm not going to look it up now. Also other megaquakes may be aftershocks.

The speed of the earth's rotation is extremely important. There was something I read about this 5 or 6 years ago. This article is recent.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/11/20/earths-rotation-is-mysteriously-slowing-down-experts-predict-uptick-in-2018-earthquakes/