More Fun With Ice Spikes

Per this Caltech page on ice spikes, I tried freezing distilled water in an ice cube tray. I didn't get any of the impressive needles seen on this page, or anything like yesterday, but I did get a stubby little growth, seen here in the front right:

I also heard a rustling of ice a few minutes ago, and I think it was the cube seen above on the left, which had cracked and lifted out of its container. 

It has an interesting indentation on its top, about the size of your thumb from the base of your fingernail to the end of the thumb:

 

This ice cube tray is more rigid than the blue one I used yesterday (which still has its spiked cube); perhaps that makes a difference. I'll try distilled water in the blue one and see what happens.

U.S. Unlikely to Meet Obama's Copenhagen Pledge

In the Washington Post, Brad Plumer writes that "coal is making a comeback in 2013," and gives this just updated chart from the EIA:

It seems likely due to a recent, steady rise in natural gas prices:

and fracking looks unlikely to lead to much more reduction in CO2 emissions;

 

Note the small "X" in the chart, indicating the 17% emissions cut by 2020 (below 2005 levels) that President Obama pledged at Copenhagen. Doesn't look like we're going to be hitting that....

Right now US emissions for the past 12 months are at 5.304 Mt CO2/yr, down 732 Mt CO2/yr (12.1%) from their peak. Per capita emissions are at 16.9 t CO2/yr, down a whopping 25% from their December 1973 level of 22.3 t CO2/yr. (That's as far back as the EIA monthly data goes, though I'm sure there is annual data somewhere.)

Please Explain This

Update: As William Connolley points out in the comments, these are a phenomena known as "ice spikes." More here and here.

----

Please, someone explain this to me: for the second time in a month, there is a strange growth on my ice cubes:

It's a near-verticle sliver extending upwards. I filled the ice cube tray with water (cold water, I think), and put it in the freezer about 2-3 hours ago. I happened to look in and found this, which is similar to one I saw a month ago, though that one wasn't as long.

Here's another view:

The only thing above the tray are some frozen pieces of chicken wrapped in aluminum foil -- well frozen, since I put them in about two days ago. I don't see any drips from them.

As you can see, there is another, smaller growth in the front left of the tray:

What the heck is going on?

Another Movie Gets Climate Change Wrong

Knowing the blogosphere, there will probaby a kerfuffle about the upcoming movie After Earth, or at least some shots at point-scoring.

Debuting June 7th, it stars Will Smith and his son Jaden, who play a father and son who crash land on Earth a thousand years after a diaspora that took place 60 years from now, because the planet had became uninhabitable. But it apparently includes some sketchy science, including about rapid climate shifts. Science magazine writes, this week:

So of the three movies I can think of that somehow involved climate change -- the abysmal The Day After Tomorrow, Waterworld (where somehow the planet contained enough ice that when global warming melted it all, the only land that remained was the tip of Mt. Everest), and now After Earth -- all have seriously perverted the science for the sake of story telling.

Well, Soylent Green mentions the greenhouse effect, but it wasn't central to the plot. I guess.

Maybe someday someone will make a real movie about a realistic scenario that centers around the future with a changed climate. Meanwhile, if you ignore its science, After Earth actually looks pretty good:

A Joke of a Congressional Hearing

You would think that a Congressional hearing on climate change would include the best scientists the nation had to offer.

Alas, you would be a fool.

Instead, it includes a couple of them, with the rest a ragtag group of people you either never heard of, or, have heard of and laughed at.

Tomorrow, Rep. David B. McKinley, P.E. (R-WV) is to hold a hearing on climate change in Fairmont, West Virginia. (That's a location sure to garner a lot of media attention.)

He has a couple of good scientists on his panel:

• Jim Hurrell, Director, NCAR Earth System Laboratory.
• A. Scott Denning, Professor, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University.
• Dr. John Christy, Distinguished Professors of atmospheric science, and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

although to be honest I am still concerned about John Christy, who in his last testimony hawked the ridiculous Anthony Watts "study" on US temperatures that was by no means real science -- it had been merely posted on a blog just a day or two earlier, and it hasn't been heard from since.

And then, the hearing includes a bunch of...activists, who have scant qualifications to be advising the nation on climate change, and whose response is already totally predicatable:

• Annie Petsonk, International Counsel of Environmental Defense Fund.
• Marc Morano, Executive Director and Chief Correspondent for ClimateDepot.com; former senior advisor, speech-writer and climate researcher for Senator James Inhofe.
• Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Environment, Competitive Enterprise Institute.
• Dennis Avery, Director, Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute and author of “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years”.
• Sarah Forbes, Senior Associate, World Resources Institute.

Sad....

Morano is "Chief Correspondent" for his own Web site -- impressive! Very impressive.....

I am "Lord Correspondent" for my own blog -- surely that ought to get me a invitation or three, right?

What a fucking joke.

A Good Day for Science in America

No matter how bad your day was, at least there was this:

And it was a "+1" for science in America.... Remember this?

"There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design," she said.

Or this?

There was the time in 2011 when Bachmann interpreted Hurricane Irene and an earthquake felt along the East Coast as God's warnings to politicians. A year later, as Florida braced for Tropical Storm Isaac, she said, "We are looking at a spiritual hurricane in our land."

And, of course, this? 

“I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine that injection and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.”

Not to mention, this:

“Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.” 

Good riddance, Michele Bachmann. You were an embarassement to yourself, but even worse, to America. 

Now please, stay away. Far, far away.

The Fluoride Deniers

A letter in today's Oregonian:

My Article on Air Capture

I have the cover story in the June issue of Physics World magazine, about air capture of carbon dioxide: "Mopping up carbon."

Favourite Science Joke

Via: Why Evolution is True

Today's CBS "Face the Nation" Segment

Today's CBS Face the Nation segment on "Extreme weather patterns and the possible role of climate change" is actually pretty good -- measured, fair, not sensationalistic, and not dismissive (at all). The participants --  WFOR Chief Meteorologist David Bernard, Climate Central's Chief Climatologist Heidi Cullen, TIME Magazine's Jeffrey Kluger and American Meteorological Society President Marshall Shepherd -- did not go beyond the science and did not ignore it, either. In particular, the show did not attempt to present a 50-50 view as if it were a fair division of the scientific argument -- they made it clear these current weather events are taking place in a fundamentally different environment than they once did. Well worth watching. Kudos.

N.b.: Except the host, Bob Schieffer, could have asked better, less repetative questions. But then he knows hit audience better than me.

"The Struggle for Dominion Over the Earth..."

"The time is coming when the struggle for dominion over the earth will be carried on. It will be carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882

(From the frontispiece to Clive Hamilton's new book Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (recommended))

A New Hurricane Metric

The huge amount of damage done by Hurricane Sandy -- about $75 billion, with 275 deaths along its path -- has been causing scientists to rethink how they classify storms. Now there's a paper out introducing "TIKE" -- Track Integrated Kinetic Energy.

From Wikipedia:

"On October 25, Sandy hit Cuba as a Category 3 hurricane, then weakened to a Category 1 hurricane. Early on October 26, Sandy moved through the Bahamas. On October 27, Sandy briefly weakened to a tropical storm and then restrengthened to a Category 1 hurricane. Early on October 29, Sandy curved north-northwest and then moved ashore near Brigantine, New Jersey, just to the northeast of Atlantic City, as a post-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds."

Technically it didn't count as a "major hurricane," a term which the National Hurricane Center reserves for hurricanes that reach maximum sustained 1-minute surface winds of at least 50 m/s (111 mph) -- equivalent of category 3, 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Yet its size -- the largest Atlantic hurricane on record (as measured by diameter) certainly contributed to it doing major damage. The size of a storm determines its surge, and for big storms damage from coastal flooding is often larger than wind damage.

The existing hurricane metrics -- Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) and Power Dissipation Index (PDI) don't take size into account, only wind speed:

with the PDI being the same summation with with velocity cubed.

By contrast, TIKE, as defined by Misra et al,  is calculated by:

Of course, in practice the integral is going to be a summation, which Misra et al do every 6 hours (as for ACE and PDI), with wind speed and radii data from the Colorado State University Extended Best Track dataset.

Wunderground writes:

According to Misra, Hurricane Sandy had a higher TIKE value than any other tropical storm or hurricane in the North Atlantic Ocean Basin since 1990. Hurricane Lily, which occurred in 1996, was the runner-up, followed by 2010’s Igor, 1995’s Luis, 1997’s Erica, and Hurricane Olga, which occurred in 2001.

They obtain results since 1990:

Big Jump in Ocean Warming

Ocean heat content numbers are in for the first three months of 2013, and they show the 0-2000 meter layer increasing more than in any previous observed period (added 5/28: except one):

The total change in the top half of the ocean works out to 0.70 W/m² over its 8.25 years of data (per area of the ocean).

And for the 0-700 meter layer:

Northern California shaken by 5.7-magnitude earthquake | OregonLive.com

A fairly big quake.... but nothing here in Salem:

http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2013/05/northern_california_shaken_by.html#incart_river_default

"Somewhat better than minimum adequacy..."

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/23/18456081-bridge-collapses-in-washington-state-cars-people-in-water

"In a 2010 evaluation, the group said the bridge is "somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is."

"However the bridge did not make the Washington Department of Transportation's list of "structurally deficient bridges."

"Functionally Obselete"

A report on this bridge: "functionally obselete":

http://nationalbridges.com/i-5-skagit-river-bridge

This comes from a private citizen, who obtains the database from the Federal Highway Administration and converts it to a useable format.

Because apparently it's too much to ask that the FHA do this on their own.

Infrastructure Grade = D+

The first thing I think about for something like a bridge collapse over a major American highway-- which shouldn't happen anywhere, anytime -- is the many warnings given by the nation's engineers that our politicians have ignored over the years:

more bridge photos here

http://www.king5.com/news/local/Report-I-5-bridge-collapses-over-Skagit-River-cars-in-water-208758631.html?gallery=y&c=y

I-5 Bridge Collapse Over Skagit River in Washington Sends Cars, People Into Water - ABC News

http://abcnews.go.com/US/bridge-collapse-skagit-river-washington-sends-cars-people/story?id=19246280

Bridge collapses in Washington state - CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/us/washington-bridge-collapse/index.html