The story is the narrative not the science.

Like a good cheerleader, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor is merrily reporting the news that lakes are part of the environment and will warm as Earth’s temperatures continue to drive away from those experienced during the Little Ice Age.

Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor, is reporting on news that Lake Tahoe has warmed.  Let’s look at some of Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor’s article to see how he has chosen to frame his argument:

The world’s largest lakes, including Lake Tahoe, have been warming rapidly for 25 years as the global climate changes, NASA scientists report.

The above is a definitive statement that the world’s largest lakes have been warming rapidly for 25 years.  It leaves little to the imagination.

And a little further down Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor, makes another definitive statement:

In a report just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Philipp Schneider and Simon Hook of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena say the warming rate of all the major lakes observed by the satellites has averaged nearly a full degree Fahrenheit per decade.

And then a quote from one of the JPL scientists involved:

“This is just one of several lines of evidence that global warming is really taking place,” Hook said. “The evidence is striking and worldwide.”

Yes, we are all in agreement that the aforementioned Little Ice Age has ended, the evidence is indeed striking and worldwide.

Further down we get the obligatory answer to “why do we care”:

As lakes like Tahoe grow warmer, the regular mixing of water between the surface and the bottom slows, Schladow said. Dangerous chemicals like heavy metals and phosphorous, which normally are locked in bottom sediments, become soluble, so they pollute the entire lake.

“The result is to change the lake’s entire ecology,” he said.

And after a bit more dutiful discussion of temperature and effects, we have some interesting numbers introduced into Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor’s article:

For their report, Schneider and Hook selected 176 of the world’s 364 largest lakes and gathered measurements only at night and only from selected lake areas, far from surrounding land.

I believe myself to be a reasonable person, and from the tidbits of facts and theory presented by Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor, I come away from the article with the impression that 176 of the largest lakes in the world were studied and found to be warming by as much as 1 degree F per decade, and that this will have detrimental impacts on the local ecologies of these lakes, potentially allowing dangerous chemicals to mix in the waters and creating oxygen free dead zones in the waters after some undisclosed and apparently unexplored temperature tipping point is reached.

Very horrible, and very much what Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor has selected for his readers to believe.

Being a science journalist should require the journalist to have the mind of a scientist, but sadly there is no such requirement.

Not being a science journalist myself, but simply a layperson, I am left wondering how lakes around the world contend with the detrimental mixing of heavy metals and phosphorous producing dead zones mentioned in this scare piece? 

Why, all the lakes in Africa must be positively poisonous and rancid as they are no doubt much warmer than Lake Tahoe.  Here the United States Geologic Survey states that Lake Tahoe varies from 40-50 degrees F in winter, and 65-70 degrees F in summer (several paragraphs down).  While here are the temps for Lake Victoria in Africa, which are given in degrees Celsius, and range from 55 to 104 degrees for the max and min when converted to Fahrenheit.

So, Lake Victoria is always 5 decades of warming greater than Lake Tahoe’s winter temperature, and as much as 500 years of warming greater than Lake Tahoe’s winter during each and every summer.  Lake Victoria’s summers are as much as 300 years of warming above Lake Tahoe’s summers.  Wherever the detrimental threshold is for Lake Tahoe, it is obviously quite a long ways off as I can confidently describe Lake Victoria as “flourishing”.  300-500 years has produced very many interesting changes in the climate as chronicled by Tony Brown at Climate Reason here.

Is Lake Victoria a particularly warm or hot lake?  I have no idea, I simply thought of it first.

Perhaps during their last eco-jaunt around the world to raise awareness for why not to jaunt around the world, the JPL scientists discovered Pitch Lake on Trinidad and Tobago?  Surely the IPCC has destined there?  Any Douglas Adams fans in the readership?  Remember the party that continuously circled the planet leaving trash and waste everywhere?  That’s the IPCC.

Maybe Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor was just being lazy, after all here is NASA’s press piece on the same study.  About the same information Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor supplied in his article.

Maybe Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor’s boss simply permits Dave to paraphrase NASA press releases?

What point am I driving home here?  That the story is the narrative not the science.  The science is not the story, only carrying water for the AGW crowd is the story.

Here is what I mean.  When I first read this story I was on MSNBC who chose to include more information than Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor chose to include.  MSNBC’s article is one by Seth Borenstein from the Associated Press who includes the following important information from the JPL scientest Simon Hook quoted above:

Overall, 41 lakes increased temperatures in a statistically significant way, with another 59 individually warming but not enough to be considered significant. Only four showed temperature drops, but not significantly, Hook said.

It turns out that only 41 lakes showed significant warming which is a far cry from the 176 reported by Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor.  By significant we have to remember that Simon Hook is a scientist, and he is therefore referring to statistical significance, meaning a clear trend, which is why Simon Hook, actual scientist and not a chronicle science editor, states that 59 did warm but it wasn’t significant.  And Simon Hook, actual scientist and not a chronicle science editor states that four lakes actually cooled.

Let’s check Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor’s math.  Dave Perlman, Chronicle Scientist Editor reports that 176 lakes warmed by up to 1 degree F per decade over the last 25 years.  The actual author of the paper Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor was paraphrasing states 41 lakes warmed in a statistically meaningful way and 59 others showed measurable but insignificant warming.  176 >> 41 + 59  (Dave that means 176 is “very much greater than” the sum of 41 and 59 (which by the way is only 100)).  And in actuality, only 41 warmed not 176, and a far cry from the opening paragraph which hints that all of the largest 364 lakes would show statistically significant warming, but that only 176 were sampled.

Why would some not be sampled?  This was conducted by satellite after all.  Surely, the remaining 188 large lakes could be easily sampled?  Why were these 188 large lakes not chosen for sampling?  Does this hint at Simon Hook’s strange word choice when he states that “only” four lakes cooled?  Were the 188 ignored based on the probability they had likely cooled, and the remaining minority of 176 were chosen because they likely warmed, and the JPL scientists were “only” wrong about four?  Any actual journalists alive anymore?

And, of course, Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor fails to mention the four lakes cooled in a statistically meaningful way.  That is, almost one tenth of the lakes cherry picked for this study showing a statistically measurable cooling trend.

Given the facts absent in the NASA press release, can I forgive Dave Perlman’s story (it’s now a story as it no longer can be considered an article)?  Only if one or more of the following are true:

• Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor only plagiarizes or paraphrases
• Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor has no journalistic skills
• Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor has no knowledge of the scientific method

Otherwise, Dave Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor is simply carrying water for the alarmist crowd that seems to populate the comments section on so many of the San Francisco Chronicle pseudo-articles that make it to the front pages of the news aggregation sites I read.

NASA is a national embarrassment for putting out press releases that allow shills like Dave Perlman to regurgitate rhetoric, disseminating half truths wrapped in folklore to perpetuate this religion of the Cult of the Carbon Cow.

Google currently shows 73,300 results for “nasa lake tahoe warming”, most of which on the first four pages are from shills like Dave Perlman.

If this rant seems familiar to the good reader, I’ve covered ridiculous reporting such as this before during the recent Peterman ice shelf calving scare.

Returning to the Associated Press article by Seth Borenstein and reported by MSNBC, we have this passage:

“It fits with what we see with air temperature measurements,” Hook said. “We were surprised that in some places the lakes appear to be warming more than the air temperature.”

The next question to look at is why the lakes seem to be warming faster than the air or land, Hook said. One reason could be the way lakes warm — in a more gradual manner than land but also slower to cool.

None of our science reporters seem to pick up on these interesting statements by Simon Hook.

The first interesting statement is that the lakes are warming faster than the air surrounding them, thermodynamics tells us then that the air cannot be warming the lakes.

Alternatively, as suggested by the second statement, the lakes are warmer than the surrounding air due to the fact that heat capacitance of water is greater than that of air, and as the air around the lakes has cooled, the waters are slowly following the trend.  But, it can’t be cooling, right?  I don’t think it is, only four lakes showed statistical cooling trends, and after all these 176 100 41 lakes have shown a warming trend.  Or, I assume they have.

Has anyone actually read Simon Hook’s paper yet?  Oh yeah, the story is the narrative not the science.

Ocean acidification is a call-to-alarmism phrase for the eco-loons as of late.  We’ve discussed it here and here.  Other sites have discussed it much better no doubt.

While surfing the tubes, I ran across this article regarding the oldest shrimp yet discovered.  Here he is in a Kent State pic:

Doesn’t look much different than what I’m currently feeding my blue ribbon eel and Atlantic lionfish.

I’ve discussed my salt water fish/reef keeping hobby several times on this site and would wish that every climatologist be required to take up the hobby and demonstrate proficiency before allowed any further grant monies.

What I believe the climatologists could learn from the salt water fish/reef hobby include:

• temperature swings of several degrees don’t matter that much
• temperature differentials do not cause currents in water
• lighting is the most important quality to the success of the creatures
• limestone buffers the effects of CO2
• pH changes are daily occurrences

If ocean acidification is such a threat, one would have to wonder about this quote from the tale of our shrimp friend up there:

“When the animal died, it came to rest on the seafloor,” he said. “The muscles then were preserved by a combination of acidic waters and a low oxygen content as the animal was buried rapidly.”

The shrimp apparently lived and thrived in water that was actually acidic, not alkaline as the “ocean acidification” scare cautions us about.

Now, would I suggest dropping the pH of a reef tank?  Of course not, the creatures populating the reefs today have evolved under the conditions that have persisted over the last many generations of their kind.  However, the article linked does prove conclusively that actually acidic water will not prevent shrimps from growing shells.  And given that so many of today’s species were evolving back when our shrimp friend was, it seems that metabolic processes can counter pH changes.  Just like in my tanks today.

And just in case there is some concern that perhaps this one shrimp species was unique, the article concludes:

The shrimp lived in deeper waters of the ocean where currents were too weak to destroy it. Other animals that were found in the same rock include the extinct ammonites, nautiloids, brachiopods and sponges.

The above pic was tweeted to Earth by astronaut Douglas Wheelock.  It’s interesting to see the channels that ocean currents have carved through the Great Barrier Reef like a river carving channels through earth.

More Earth pics can be found here (CAUTION: NSFW pics in sidebar).

Another plausible explanation: A reader has commented that the most likely explanation for the tributary like nature of the channels is that they are in fact tributaries of a river that existed in this area during the last ice age when the sea levels were much lower.  That seems reasonable.  Thanks, David for the insight.

It’s fun to make models.  I remember as a kid building first snap-together models, then models that required glue, and then going on to making my own with balsa wood.

Modeling is fun.

Modeling by so called professional scientists who’s models are almost always wrong is boring.

Case in point: as NOAA once again insists this year will be the ‘worstest ever’ for hurricanes and danger and bodily harm and destruction to life, family, and loved ones, and loss of pristine shore line, and whatever else NOAA harps on about these days while never mentioning the Argo buoy data, Florida State University has chosen not to model but to make actual observations.

And what have they seen?

They’ve seen ups and downs, same as we see in temperature and climate readings, and like we’re seeing in the temperature readings recently: there sure does seem to be a lot less energy in the Earth’s atomosphere and oceans.

Too bad NOAA doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the role the Sun obviously plays in the temperature of the atmosphere, too bad NASA/NOAA/GISS have hitched themselves to the carbon dioxide global warming train, otherwise we’d have an easy explanation for a decrease in cyclonic activity in an age of increased CO2 output.

Actual FSU article here

Sea sponges are some of the oldest forms of animal life known.  They may seem completely different from us, and many of us would like to believe there is no association at all between humans and immobile sea sponges, but DNA tells a different story.

Arguing that all animals, and indeed all life on Earth, is not sexually related is pointless.

I remember reading a few years ago (I have no reference nor inclination to find one) regarding a fire in a Jewish girl’s school in Israel.  The firefighters were men, and they were not permitted to save the young ladies for fear that the men’s hands would touch the skin of the young women, and that would be impure.

The local religious leaders chose instead to allow the girls to burn to death.

Seems like a very primitive mindset to me.

China’s Three Gorges Dam is threatened with clogging due to all of the trash that apparently is culturally acceptable to throw into rivers: here.

I really don’t get it.  I recognize that land fills aren’t a perfect solution, but simply floating your trash away is stupid.

The reader is asked to look at the following pic first shown on my post Water Purifying Concrete:

Why do this to yourself? And why be such jerks and do it to all the rest of us?

At least the Chinese will have to deal with trash collection now rather than letting their debris contribute to the Pacific Gyre.

No doubt some would argue that their waste is a result of manufacturing to meet our interests, so it is our responsibility and obligation to clean up their waste, to which I would reply, “We’re paying them what they consider to be a fair price for their labor, any trash cleanup attributable to that process is part of the cost of doing business.”

China has been a closed society for so long, it’s obviously ingrained in the population that downstream neighbors are irrelevant. Disgusting. I hate to imagine what industrial wastes are dumped into the Pacific Ocean each year from China given that household waste is simply tossed in the water.

This is irresponsible and revolting behavior.

I believe the ongoing mess in the Gulf is simply indicative of the fact that British Petroleum (BP) is attempting to recoup lost oil to offset costs and liabilities.

BP is calculating the trade off between the loss in the value to the company’s stock with the loss in cash reserves of addressing the problem.  BP wants to sell the oil its collected, and to gather as much as possible regardless the consequence of the oil that cannot be collected.

Our government is letting them, no doubt Big Oil has the ear of the President.

The solution in my opinion is quite simple when you look at the situation: pinch the straw.

What we have is a hole drilled through 5000 feet of rock 5000 feet below the ocean’s surface punching into a large oil reserve.  Sure, this is a very expensive hole, and the sunk cost of drilling that hole is being protected by the administration to the detriment of all except BP.

What we have here is a 5000 foot long straw.  On the top end is the Gulf, on the bottom the oil reservoir.  The reservoir is under considerable pressure which is why the oil will flow against the pull of gravity.  This pressure is produced due to magmatic heat expanding the petroleum, and petroleum being lighter than water.  PV/T and all that.  Everything expands as its heated, see my post below on my Biscuit Earth Proposal which I readily acknowledge is simply a modification of Warren Casey’s Expanding Earth Theory.

Pinch the straw.

I’m talking serious explosives placed as far into the hole as possible, or at interval along the entire length of the hole we can reasonably reach, and detonated.  No plug can be forced in against the pressure, a cap only allows BP to continue to profit.  Pinch the straw.  5000 feet of rubble will either stop the leak entirely or reduce it to a trickle.

Sorry BP, you should lose your hole.  You drilled it very well, but you didn’t deal with capping the top correctly, we the American people should intercede in your business rights and clog the hole.

Just not that hard from my opinion…

Those of you who know me understand posts are few and far between at this time as I’ve moved and am currently occupied with the construction of my reef tank.

I’ll talk the talk and walk the walk, I’m sparing no expense in providing my creatures what they need.  My “sump” (lol) is three 135 gallon aquariums!

Rest assured dear reader, I prefer tank raised fish and hobbyist farmed inverts and corals, and my system will cater to the every need of these exquisite animals.

Does this make me an environmental hypocrit?  That is of course at the discretion of the reader to decide.  However, the glass alone for my “sump” was a small fortune, so I’m obviously one of those who’ll invest what it takes for species(‘(?)) preservation.

Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute to those who are successfully raising the more popular organisms and trade them at reef tank gatherings so we limit the amount of native reef occupants taken for the hobby.

And, I fully believe there are species being successfully reared by hobbyists that may indeed one day repopulate the reefs…or I just tell myself this to justify my interest in the hobby…

Perspective obviously biases the observer.  Take for instance, the assertion that there is not much to worry about regarding the recent accident in the Gulf by the British Petroleum chief executive Tony Hayward, paraphrased from the Guardian by Foxnews:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

So, from the perspective of the BP CEO, oil gushing at the predicted rate of 5000 barrels or 210,000 gallons a day in the Gulf is a tiny concern.  No doubt Tony Hayward would say it will only affect a tiny percentage of sea life, and impact a tiny percentage of the world’s shore lines.

So far, BP has been trying to recover as much oil as possible, first by way of the failed attempt to put a large concrete siphon over the top, and second to cap it with essentially a drinking straw and lid.  BP seems to be taking it casually, after all, only 5000 barrels per day are leaking out according to estimates by the US government, which BP is happy to accept.

5000 barrels per day.  A barrel is a 55 gallon drum and wiki.answers gives the dimensions of a steel 55 gallon drum as 24 x 34.5 inches.  Applying the formula for the volume of a cylinder to calculate cubic inches of volume (volume = pi times the square of the radius times the height) we get 3.14159 x 144 x 34.5 = 15,607 cubic inches per barrel.

With 5000 barrels per day leaking for the past 26 days, we would have 5000 x 26 x 15,607 = 2,028,910,000 cubic inches leaked total to date.  Just over 2 billion cubic inches approximately, according to the perspective of the US government and BP.

BP has been taking time with attempts to recover as much oil as possible, rather than taking time to permanently seal the leak.  BP is allowing the oil to spill while they devise a plan to harvest the oil, because only 5000 barrels a day are spilling, a tiny amount compared to the waters of the Gulf.

The NY Times is reporting that under the water, the oil is gathering into layered plumes along the one mile path to the surface.  One such plume is estimated to be 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and up to 300 feet thick in spots.  How many cubic inches is that?

5280 feet per mile times 12 inches per foot equals 63,360 inches per mile.  If we take the above estimate for this one plume’s maximum volume, we would have in length times width times height: (10 x 63,360) x ( 3 x 63,360) x (300 x 12) = (633,600) x (190,080) x (3600) = 433,564,876,800,000 cubic inches.

From my perspective that’s an awfully large number!  And that’s cubic inches, while it only takes a thin sheen of oil to coat wildlife and cause problems.  Each cubic inch of oil spreads into quite a mess.

This one plume, in its estimated size, is 214,000 times as much oil as BP says has leaked to date.  And, this one plume is a subset of the oil in the Gulf described by Samantha Joye from the University of Georgia:

“There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

This is a very substantial leak from my perspective.

The pollution of waters in Asia is a well established ecological and health concern.

Now, Marubeni Corp has come up with a brilliant idea for solving the problem: concrete that purifies water.

The blocks are impregnated with soybean bacteria, which consume pollution as they progress through their life cycle, presumably reproducing as well, as the concrete is described as working indefinitely.

This raises the thought of simply dropping globs of this concrete every few feet in the worst polluted riverways, in addition to the likely intended purpose of building retaining walls and other waterward structures made of the concrete.

One of the central premises of tCotCC is that we are focusing our green resources (energy, attention, money, concern) poorly.  Rather than worry about taxing trace gases, we should concern ourselves with pollution, species preservation, and habitat protection.

The Mother Nature Network is reporting on the autopsy of a gray whale that died after stranding on a beach.

Found in its stomach among natural foods were: pants, a golf ball, 20 plastic bags, towels, duct tape, and surgical gloves.

The Mother Nature Network reports the man-made items were only 1-2% of the contents of the stomach (by weight, or volume?), and likely didn’t cause the whale to strand itself on the beach.

It is however fairly disgusting that these items were available to this creature to eat.

This so close to the report of a garbage patch in the Atlantic similar to the garbage patch in the Pacific, shows how polluted the oceans are becoming.

This is an international issue, and not solely the responsibility of any one nation to clean.  It’s not clear that any one nation is more responsible than another, but American consumerism no doubt contributes a significant amount to the problem.

We need to address this issue with ships designed to sieve the seas in areas of dense garbage.  The waste collected should be burned to fuel the ships to what extent possible.  The rest, hauled ashore and dealt with appropriately.  The marine life lost during the sieving would be an acceptable loss, and I believe it would be minimal as a large ship would sufficiently announce itself and scatter the fishes.  In the long run, I expect more fish and birds would be saved than killed, and whales would no longer be found to have consumed what our specimen in the MNN article did.

 

Not good at all: the above pic is of the 755 foot long Shen Neng 1 coal ship dragging hull on the Great Barrier Reef.  The ship is leaking oil and wedged in so tight that it will take tugs to free her.

The Shen Neng 1 was traveling over 9 miles outside the approved shipping lane and hit the reef at full speed.  That would be a lot of momentum to bring to a halt, which explains how the entire ship is on the reef.

What took corals thousands of years to grow has been destroyed by one ship captain in one short event during one of the many ocean voyages such ships take each year.

Reckless.  If this is willful ignorance, then this is criminal.  The reef is a protected sanctuary.

No word yet in the articles I’ve read regarding GPS malfunction, captain negligence, incorrect sea charts, etc., however Australia has apparently recently reversed (or not voted for) a law that used to (would have) require(d) an experienced local pilot navigate through the Great Barrier Reef.

Here and here (2nd comment discusses the “no pilot necessary”), many more are easily found, but essentially have the same details at this point.

I stumbled across two very interesting articles regarding the principles behind pH, calcium and carbon dioxide today while reading on Watts Up With That.

Having been a salt water fish tank enthusiast for years, I understood the mechanics of pH in my tanks, but never really bothered to learn the exact chemical processes that occur between calcium, carbon dioxide, the water, calcium carbonate, and the limestone substrate and coral skeletons.  Shame on me, but my Purple Up and infrequent kalkwasser drippings work so well, I never really bothered with the chemical formulae.  I learned them today, and they are linked below.

The data mining excursion of today was to understand exactly what threat may be faced by a slight lowering of the pH in the oceans.  This is erroneously referred to by alarmists, such as head of NOAA Dr Jane Lubchenco whom we’ve discussed before, as “ocean acidification”.

Sounds scary, huh?  “Acid”, that’s bad, right?  You don’t want acids in sea water, and fortunately they will never be there.  This “acidification” is alarmingly referred to as a drop in the pH of the oceans from an average of 8.2 to perhaps 8.1 by the end of the century.  But neutral pH is 7.0, everything above 7.0 is “basic” not “acidic”, everything below 7.0 is acidic.  So, lowering the pH 0.1 unit is not “becoming acidic”, it is “becoming slightly less basic”.

I like how dire predictions are always made 100 years out, that way everyone who profited from the doom and gloom is long dead before it becomes obvious they were playing the public for fools.  “The End is Nigh!” and always has been for some since we crawled out of the bushes a few millions of years ago.

The pH in my tanks often varies between 8.1 and 8.4, and all my corals are fine, one has even grown perhaps two inches over the last year, thank you very much!  That’s why I stopped measuring the pH regularly, it obviously trended and therefore was subject to the specifc time and conditions under which the measurement was taken.  For instance, when did I last add supplements, how long have the lights been on, how much water has been lost to evaporation in the sump, is the venturi slightly clogged on the skimmer (reducing oxygen to the tank), etc.  Now I only measure it when I’m bored or the animals seemed stressed, and it’s always 8.1 to 8.4.

pH is a logarithmic scale, every whole number increase is a 100 fold increase in hydrogen ions (pH/acidity/alkalinity all just measure hydrogen ions), so a change from 8.1 to 8.4 in one day is significant percentage wise, but insignificant to my corals.

Why?  Because the corals are alive.  They have metabolic processes that contend with changing water chemistry and cellular processes that repair damaged tissue.  When Dr Jane Lubchenco performed her third grade science exhibit before Congress she certainly understood and failed to mention the difference between chalk and a living coral.  A lie by omission is still a lie, Dr Jane, and a rigged experiment meant to elicit an emotional reaction from Congress is unbecoming of a scientist, but I did like the purple starfish pin you wore – nice touch.

So, a slight change in pH isn’t that big of a deal to a living organism evolved to live in the changing conditions of the ocean.

But what if we cross some sort of threshold where anthropogenic carbon dioxide upsets a delicate balance in the seas and runaway something-or-other happens?  It can’t.  The seas are far too large, and have far too massive a buffer in limestone to be affected by all the unburned fossil fuels in existence.  The seas already have far, far more carbon dioxide in them than would be contributed by burning everything we could set alight.

In short, ocean acidification is science fantasy.

Ready for the links?  Put on your chemistry 101 hat and read here and here.

Dr. Jane Lubchenco is the Administrator of the National Ocenanic and Atmosperic Administration, she is the administrator of NOAA.

She gave written and oral testimony to the House Select Committee hearing on the State of Climate Science, that contained the following pearls:

“This warming can be seen in increases in global-average surface air and surface and subsurface ocean temperatures“

and

“We are now seeing the effects of human-induced climate changes on our landscape, our neighborhoods, schoolyards and farms, as well as our forests, beaches and mountains.”

and

“We are able to measure this through significant advances in our observing systems over the last 20-30 years – many of which are NOAA’s responsibility and innovation”

.pdf

As administrator of NOAA, is she saying she doesn’t know about this?

Is she really suggesting she is completely unaware that Dr Josh Willis, from the JPL worked in conjunction with NOAA and determined that cooling in the oceans has occured?  Is the NOAA administrtor, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, really suggesting that she is completely unaware of the Argo Buoys deployed by NOAA in 2003 at great taxpayer expense?  Or is she saying she hasn’t yet bothered to skim over the reports her underlings surely have prepared on the subject?

Here is the link to the government website, on which the reader will find the following executive point: This summer, the world’s oceans were the warmest in NOAA’s 130 years of record-keeping.

This woman either needs to be dismissed for incompetence or prosecuted for perjury.

The Ring of Fire is the term geologists and volcanologists use to describe the edges of the Pacific tectonic plate.  The Ring of Fire contains about 75% of the world’s dormant and active volcanoes.  Worldwide, there are currently about 1500 active volcanoes.

1500 active volcanoes, 80% of which, or approximately 1200 are in the sea, and are periodically belching forth noxious sulfides, CO2 and other fumes into the world’s oceans, spewing intensely hot magma into the waters in the process.

How can we trust that the IPCC climate models accurately account for this when we just found one at a depth never explored for volcanoes before?

After viewing that I have a hard time believing the exhaust from my car is a major contributing factor to the PH of the oceans.  We just found this volcano, how long has it been erupting and how long will it continue to erupt?  During the period of this one eruption from this one volcano, how much energy is contributed to the Pacific ocean, how much noxious fumes?

Do volcanoes in the ocean tend to erupt for longer periods of time?  I ask due to the fact that the enourmous weight of water above the fracture zones and tectonic plate boundaries could conceivably create perpetual eruption locations.  These locations would be crustal spots that are pressed down to the point of spreading, which would allow magma to well up, after all ocean crust is thinner and weaker than continental crust. 

I’m aware that anthropogenic sources produce 100x more atmospheric CO2 than the 300 active surface volcanoes.  I’m wondering how many more volcanoes lie under the seas, and if we’ve properly identified the amount of time these spend erupting.