• My own worst enemy

    This week I started a bold fitness initiative. I moved my trash can to the other side of my office. I’m thinking it’ll be good for me to get out of my chair every once and a while. That, or my short jumper will improve.

  • Hey, what’s your volume?

    This is not a good post. I’m mostly venting a little frustration from this evening (and not all of it from the subject of this entry).

    I couldn’t avoid references to an article in the CS Monitor today. I must have come across half a dozen of them.

    AS ARCTIC ICE MELTS, SOUTH POLE ICE GROWS

    Over the past 20 years, southern sea ice has expanded, in contrast to the Arctic’s decline, and researchers want to understand why. Many climate-model experiments show the Arctic responding more rapidly than Antarctica as global warming kicks in. But after looking at the latest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Arctic sea ice is well ahead of the models, and Antarctic sea ice is well behind what the models project,” says Stephen Ackley, a polar scientist at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

    Two things immediately jump out for global warming skeptics (as I’ve seen already): the expansion of sea ice in the southern hemisphere, and observations that don’t precisely fit climate model predictions. These tid-bits are juicy for obvious reasons, even if I think they’re misleading. The article actually addresses findings that are worrisome, but they’re harder to grasp or explain than “south pole ice grows.”

    Two things from the article jumped out at me: they were talking about SEA ice, and they seemed to be referencing the amount of AREA covered by ice.

    Maybe I’m way off base here – that or I’ve completely misunderstood the article, but if they’re just talking about sea ice, that’s just one piece of the puzzle – and the least worrisome. As I’ve referenced before, NASA has surveyed Antarctic ice as a WHOLE (ice accumulated on land as well as at sea), and determined that as a whole it’s diminishing (not growing, as the title of the Monitor article perhaps misleadingly suggests). Don’t get me wrong, the amount of sea ice in the south is interesting, but it’s half of the story (or less).

    Sea ice is generally at sea. If it’s just an accumulation of frozen precipitation from water evaporating from oceans – or more directly, frozen sea water – there’s not as much change in ocean levels. You’re just changing it’s state from liquid to solid. (I think this may actually increase it’s volume a little, but not a lot. I think ice is less dense than water – which is why it floats – and why it expands when it freezes.) The much bigger problem is the land ice, which we very much want to stay on land – and not decrease in mass – given where the shedded mass likely goes.

    So if the Antarctic ice is covering more area, how can their be less of it? As it happens, matter often can be measured in three dimensions: length, width, and height (or thickness). Area is a two dimensional measurement, but ice can be measured in three. Antarctic ice could simultaneously be spreading out – and therefore take up more area, but thin out sufficiently to take up less volume, and have less mass.

    It’ll be interesting to see if there’s much chatter about this online, and see where the discussions go.

    Well, it’ll be interesting to me anyway. If nothing else, I may find out how much crap I’m full of.

  • Is it ever enough?

    Now that Iowa and New Hampshire have had their say, it seems to me they’ve cancelled each other out. The Democratic front runners are still the co-front runners, Romney got his “silvers,” and the Iowa Republicans made their typical wing-nut choice, who’ll hopefully go away now, with his hard earned footnote to history in hand. (Although it didn’t work out so well last time.)

    I wish I’d remembered to post this earlier because I can’t remember the source now. Something on NPR this morning sparked my memory. A little while back there was a story** about an interesting poll of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, asking them about their own unique status during primary season. Those wacky Iowans had a unique take on their status as first in line. When asked about how much influence they had over the Presidential selection process, on average Iowans answered, “not enough,” as in, “we don’t have ENOUGH influence over Presidential politics.”

    Wow! Maybe they’d like to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict too, because we’re obviously not taking full advantage of their wisdom. When I think about it, just asking them choose our President seems kind of selfish. Maybe other countries should ask them to choose their leaders too. “Outsourcing democracy” has a nice ring to it, right? Hell, we’re practically doing that in some places anyway. Why not just make it official, leaving the fate of the world in the hands of our most gifted voters – our precious Iowans – our gift to the world?

    **Note: for all I know this could have been a joke I heard. I can’t find a reference to the story anywhere via google, but I still kind of like the post.