Thread: What lousy weather!!!!!!

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Originally Posted by Dave Severson

Yup, saw that this morning, downright scary.... How bad was it in Aberdeen this morning, had -25 here....

they said 37 below

Originally Posted by Dave Severson

That dang Al Gore is telling lies again... Global Warming my butt!!! Last night was -25, today it made it all the way to -4!!!!

The good news is, sounds like they're getting some decent snow in Montana and Wyoming, rivers and lakes out there were down quite a bit... Need lots along the Missouri River, it is really down.....

Dave I was worried about you guys in N.D. with these super cold storms and weather. Hope you guys are staying warm, Probably need to heat your hands over the exhaust pipes!

Originally Posted by stovens

Dave I was worried about you guys in N.D. with these super cold storms and weather. Hope you guys are staying warm, Probably need to heat your hands over the exhaust pipes!

Gasser and I are both in South Dakota. Staying warm, but the natural gas bill is sure gonna be scary!!!!

8 degrees in bama .. poor tow motor driver has to be out in the cold most of the time ..

Its about 5 degrees here On the Ohio River, with a windchill of -15. Not used to this!!! I went out to check the coolant in my Ram, and broke the grille off opening the hood, and shattering the cap off the overflow tank! Im not touching it again until it warms up! Hopefully my door handles stay in tact!

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

Don----now I am no scientist, but I do remember that somewhere I was taught that you can't creat or destroy energy by ordinary means-----
What I want to know is how much colder and what will the weather be downwind of all those wind powered generator fields?????

Nuclear power would be great! I doubt the tree huggers will let it happen though. Then of course there's the two usual questions:

1. Very expensive to build and maintain, who's going to pay for it???

2. Where are you going to build them??? We all know nuclear power is safe, but nobody wants one in their back yard!!!!

Maybe 25 cent gas won't happen, but until they're outlawed, Hot Rods will continue to be built. Maybe fewer of them will be daily drivers, but they'll still be out and about on evenings and weekends.

As for all the global warming and the oceans are going to rise 10 ft.... don't know if that will happen or not, certainly not in my lifetime. If it does, people will move!!! There are a lot of costal cities that shouldn't have been built where they are anyway. Personally, I still believe a lot of it is cyclic in nature. Is there scientific proof or scientific theory that if all the cars were parked global warming would be reversed??? Are cars the biggest source of the problem or just the most politically correct to cast the blame on????

Darn cold weather!!! It was only 50 degrees at the house this morning and I had to wear a sweatshirt to take the trash out. It is only going to be 72 today but by Saturday, it should warm up to 75.
If this cold snap continues, I may have to move to warmer climate.

mike in tucson

Dave though cars do polute and add to the carbon load on the environment, they certainly aren't the only problem or the vast majority. I think you have to look at industrialization, and big countries like China relying heavily on coal burning for heat. It's also a balance of resources that can recycle if you will, those carbon emmisions such as trees and algal beds in the oceans. It's fuuny because everybody is quick to defend rain forest preservation and will tell you that rain forests are needed to recycle co2 emissions out of the atmosphere, and this is true but not to the numbers they would lead you to believe.
They real place to protect is the oceans. Phytoplankton eat co2 and produce o2. To the tune of something like 85% of the o2 we enjoy(if I remember correctly from school 20 years ago!) What is a lot more worrisome to me than fossil burning vehicles, is chemical runoff from various sources including agriculture, and industrial waste which goes into the rivers and streams and eventually into the oceans where it does a great job of killing plankton. Add to this south east asian aqua farming of high density shrimp farms where the waste causes agal blooms that kill reefs and then the whole area goes anoxic,(coral reefs are also a source of o2, and once the algal bloom dies so does everything else) and well now your talking a big problem! When I lived in the Keys( as a marine biologist) I remember the average land elevation is something like 3-4 ft above sea level. What is being seen by the melting at the caps, is a slow rise in sea level of about 1 inch per year. So yes in about 30 -40 years there may be no Florida Keys.
I think what ever anyone can do to lower their personal impact on the environment is all we can do, and I'm willing to get a more effiecient car to go to work when I buy my next car, but I really don't think hot rodders are the problem here, I think it's this ideal that the earth is indestructable and therefore we don't need to do anything different. That and the fact that all the alternative energy resources are more expensive, and limited in production at the moment. Plus we all are not getting any richer in this economy! Our heating bill shot to 400.00 bucks for a 2300 square foot house in a relatively warm area! Our thermostat was set to 64. The house is 2x6 framed with dual pane windows. Our problem was no window coverings, so out went the criedit card for insulted drapes and blinds! What a difference that just made. Hopefully the bill will be a lot less next month! Little things make a big difference!

Jerry Clayton: That is a very interesting question about removing energy from the air with windmills. I will go out on a limb, noting there are some other science folks here, and take an overview crack at it. First, you are correct that the energy has to come from somewhere and that the energy of the atmosphere is related to it's temperature. As a Chemist I am used to thinking in terms of calories, kilocalories, joules and kilojoules while the power folks use kilowatt-hours. For a very easy approach we can use the equation that the energy of gas molecules is:

E = (3/2) R T and delta-E = (3/2) R (delta-T)

where R=1.987 cal/degK mole and T is in absolute Kelvin degrees (1.8 times larger than 1 degree F). So for every 1 kilojoule (1 Joule = 4.184 calories) taken out of the air we have roughly:

delta-T = (2/3)(delta-E/R).

Of course there will be a greater loss due to friction in the windmill so this is only a rough estimate. R in Joules is 8.314 Joules/deg.K mole and at 1 atmosphere 1 mole of air is about 22.414 Liters (about 5.924 gallons). So suppose delta-E is 1 kilojoule.

delta-T = (2/3)(1000 joules/8.314 joules/deg.K-mole)

delta-T = 80.186 degrees K mole for every 1 kilojoule or

(delta-T per 5.824 gallons swept) = 80.186 degrees K. (negative)

The extreme questionable catch here is how many moles (5.924 gallons) of air is actually swept by the blades and I have no way to figure that. All I can say is that yes the air should cool a bit behind the windmills but probably only a few degrees on a large scale. This is made more complicated by the fact that air molecules are traveling at about 1100 mph microscopically at 1 atmosphere but even so we know that bulk air is a fluid and it takes time for pressure fronts to travel in the weather reports so the "other air" would rapidly fill in behind the blades. As a macroscopic observation I recall from a few days ago that the "day" was incremented by 1 second (or was it a millisecond? anyway the rotation of the Earth is slowing) this year so over a very long time the rotation of the Earth is slowing. Since normally tall mountains provide air resistance to the rotation of the Earth, what we are talking about is adding air resistance to the rotation of the Earth. We need the help of an Aeronautical Engineer with knowledge of blades; a helicopter designer. Simply put I would say that yes there has to be some cooling but probably not much.

Stovens: I agree that the Phytoplankton could help the rain forests in converting CO2 to O2 but I have looked at that data and done calculations on that situation. The problem is that Phytoplankton need iron to make their key energy converting heme groups and when winds off of the Gobi or Sahara bring iron-containing sands into the ocean Phytoplankton flourish but if you try to seed them with iron filings or iron sulfate the amount of iron is staggering. In one of my courses we tried to estimate how much the iron concentration of the Pacific could be increased by just 1 ppm assuming the Pacific is uniformly 1 mile deep and using the area between Alaska, Japan, Australia and the West Coast of North and South America and converted that to cargo ship loads in tons of pure iron filings and I forget the actual number but it was in many thousands of cargo ships completely filled with iron filings! So tests where iron filings or iron sulfate are added to sea water show tremdous increases in Phytoplankton in say a 500 gallon tank of sea water are interesting but the Pacific Ocean is HUGE! When you start messing around thinking about Earth-sized quantities of mass or energy you realize the Earth is huge in scale relative to our household quantities. For a chemist used to thinking in terms of liters or gallons, the volume of 1 cubic mile of seawater is amost an unimaginable amount!

Dave S. mentioned a key factor as the age of some of us, but I think some of us will be around to see electric cars.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

I once during some study on weather that a moderate sized thunderstorm released to the atmosphere the equivalent of many, many kiloton atomic bomb----have you seen that????
In the cooling effect , I would have to assume it would exceed the amount of net kilowatt that we generate----

Actually since the earth rotates toward the east, the mountains actually act like a huge sail and catch the wind, helping the planet to turn---

And then there is the corolis (sp) effect after you cross the equator????

At least in the farming areas where the wind generators are being built, the lowering temp will cross the dew point and we'll get rain , which will help the corn grow for the bio fuels----

It's been mid 80's for a week now and close to 90 some days. i wish it would get back to normal in the high 60's to mid 70's

It didn't rain the last 2 day's, sun has been brite & clear last week it was in the high 60's, today it got up to 17 ! Our 1st winter here, and their coldest winter in yrs!

Pat

This says it all!!!