Off topic on climate again:
It has been quite the winter in much of the country. It is beginning to be noticed that the melting arctic ice cap means more energy being poured into the system. (John M. Wallace et al. Global Warming and Winter Weather SCIENCE vol. 343 no. 6172 February 14, 2014 page 729. It is also noticed that the jet streams around the northern hemisphere are losing their power and this has resulted in them becoming less stable. The result seems to be that they are wandering southward bringing lots of cold and snow. I think I more or less predicted this earlier. It is a less extreme case of my principle weather prediction that when that ice is totally gone the cold sinking air over the North Pole in the summer will no longer exist and the jet stream will stop altogether.
The arctic will be the hottest place on earth, after allowing for cloud cover that might change things, and that hot air will be goaded by the laws of thermodynamics to move toward the South Pole. And we are in the way. That much has yet to see the light of day.
As I have mentioned the weight of the evidence is that glaciers appear in hours to a day or two and last for millennia. Hence we can expect hailstones of enormous size building to … I really don’t know … maybe thousands of feet. Generally one can fly above the weather in a commercial jet – that’s something like six miles up. But thunderstorms can, so far as I know, occasionally be more than twice that. These are isolated columns of course, easily skirted by aircraft. Well the really big thunderstorms, drawing as they might from the whole northern hemisphere rather than a fraction of a continent, should be even higher. So the ice pile up from a summer’s worth of unremitting hail might be quite high indeed, higher than Mount Everest. That kind of weight would be a serious challenge to the tectonic plates below, so yes, we could see the ice extravaganza punctuated by brand new volcanic chains.
Well the climatologists are making tiny steps in that direction, after the fact of course. I wish I could offer advice on where it might happen. It would make sense for it to happen near the Rocky Mountains, but whether to the east or west I know not. If somebody said in a firm voice that the coriolis effect would push it against the east side of the mountains I would not make demur. That would put it pretty near Yellowstone Park, which they think is a super-volcano in a critical condition. When? August or September figuring from the sun’s intensity at the North Pole and the fact that there is evidence that glaciers now vanishing formed in the summer. Which year? Maybe within the next five, since the article says that the entire ice cap may be gone each summer sometime over that span.
I really don’t know. But at least I consider the possibility.
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