Rut-Roh

You mean, President Bush was wrong when he said we have a strong economy?

Weird-ass Wednesday

Gazing into my crystal ball, I see ...

Ice.

You've probably seen the movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a mega disaster, end-of-the-world special effects extravaganza. Many people don't realize that it was based on the book, The Coming Global Superstorm.

Here's a blurb from Wikipedia:

The book posits the following theory:

* First, that the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic drift generates a cordon of warm water around the north pole, which in turn creates a cordon of warm air that holds in a frozen mass of arctic air.

* Second, that if the Gulf Stream were to shut down, that barrier would fail, releasing a flood of frozen air into the northern hemisphere, effecting a sudden and drastic temperature shift.

The book discusses a possible cause of the failure of the gulf stream: that the melting of the polar ice caps could drastically affect the salinity of the North Atlantic drift by dumping a large quantity of freshwater into the world's oceans.

The disaster they're talking about is this: The upper atmosphere's frozen air suddenly comes crashing down and instantly flash freezes everything in the northern hemisphere.

The book says this may have happened in ages past, as part of a larger climate cycle we know little about, and that the effects of man-made global warming are hastening the process in the current cycle. You know those flash-frozen green beans in the freezer? Well, it may be that Mother Nature flash froze some woolly mammoths a while back. They were unearthed thousands of years later with fresh food still in their mouths and undigested food in their stomachs. The article I've linked to gives the standard explanation that they "may have been trapped in bogs or quicksands and either died of starvation or exposure, or drowning if they sank under the surface. Though judging by the evidence of undigested food in the stomach and seed pods still in the mouth of many of the specimens, neither starvation nor exposure seem likely."

The movie depicts the same flash-freezing happening to humans and everything else.

So, how could the frozen air in the upper atmosphere suddenly come crashing down and instantly flash freeze every single green bean and human in the northern hemisphere? It's the "cordon of warm air" which prevents that from happening now. But if the air in the barrier is no longer warm, then the super-cold air slams to the earth (remember, warm air rises, cold air falls.)

The warm air barrier exists because of the "conveyor belt" effect of the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift. The Gulf Stream's warm water is pulled northward by the North Atlantic Drift. The warm water sits atop the cold water of the Drift. The evaporation of this warm water as it drifts north warms the air, and thus, most of Europe (remember, England is at the same latitude as Canada, yet it is considerably warmer.) Simultaneously, the further north the warm water travels, the colder it gets. As it cools, it sinks (warm water rises, cold water sinks.)

This cycle of warm water evaporating and warming the air, then cooling and sinking as it travels north, and traveling back down to the Gulf, is called thermohaline circulation. Everything works fine as long as nothing drastically interferes with this cycle.

The disaster in the movie is caused by the shutdown of thermohaline circulation. If it shuts down, then warm water is no longer carried from the Gulf Stream to the North Atlantic Drift because the Drift is no longer circulating. No warm water means no evaporation to warm the air. Instead, only cold water is evaporating, cooling the air. No warm air means no barrier to keep the super-cold frozen air aloft. The super-cold air has nowhere to go but ... down.

What caused the hypothetical shutdown of thermohaline circulation in the movie? A change in seawater density. If you alter salty water by adding freshwater, you change the water's density. Freshwater is less dense than salty water, so it stays on top. What caused the massive influx of cold freshwater into the ocean's seawater in the movie? Melting glaciers.

Of course, that was just a movie, and we don't have anything to worry about. Unless the glaciers start melting. Oh wait. They are.

Unlike the book, the movie didn't take into account what would happen if vast amounts of trapped methane were released into the atmosphere.

Methane is the byproduct of decaying plants. In bodies of water, the gases produced by the decay process can't rise to the surface because the water is too dense. The water keeps the methane trapped.

Runaway Methane Global Warming

This anaerobic decay produces methane which gets trapped in the silt as methane hydrates until the conditions of water temperature and pressure change which can release the methane in vast quantities very quickly. Another form is a frozen slush/ice methane hydrate where the methane is trapped in an ice/water mixture which releases the methane when it warms up or the pressure on the ice is reduced. Frozen methane hydrates can contain 170 times their own volume of methane. These frozen hydrates occur in the seabed deposits of the Arctic Ocean.

The same thing happens in the ground in permafrost.

Methane can also be trapped by permafrost layers which over-lay lower unfrozen layers of vegetable material that is decaying and producing methane which remains trapped by the frozen permafrost on top. If the permafrost layer were to melt then the methane in the layers below would escape into the atmosphere. Given the vast areas of permafrost in northern latitudes there is a significant potential for methane to be trapped that would be released if the permafrost melted as a result of global warming.

Well, it's a good thing the permafrost isn't melting. Oh wait. It is.

Well, have a nice day, everyone.
-----------------------------------------------

Wrap your heads around this

Good morning, boys and girls!

Whilst Stumbling, I kept seeing references to the coming Singularity, which is expected to occur sometime around 2035, give/take a few years.

There doesn't seem to be much debate about whether it will happen; that seems to be foregone.

There is minor debate about when it will arrive; some say sooner, others say later.

There is some talk about what could possibly stop it (and general agreement that nothing short of a global catastrophe capable of wiping out Civilization As We Know It could stop it.)

But there is lots of discussion about what it will mean, even though, it seems that, due to the nature of the Singularity itself, the effects are unknowable.

At first, I didn't pay much attention to this because I thought all this was some kind of New Age thing, like the so-called Harmonic Convergence of yesteryear. But one evening, I decided to Google me some Singularity and see what this was all about.

I really wish I hadn't.

Surviving the Singularity

A Butlerian Jihad

The Singularity is Near


Have a nice day.

Rut-roh.

Have you heard about this? Honeybees are disappearing - literally. Not even their bodies are left behind. Could it be ... RAPTURE?

Vanishing honeybees mystify scientists

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Go to work, come home.

Go to work, come home.

Go to work -- and vanish without a trace.

Billions of bees have done just that, leaving the crop fields they are supposed to pollinate, and scientists are mystified about why.

The phenomenon was first noticed late last year in the United States, where honeybees are used to pollinate $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and other crops annually. Disappearing bees have also been reported in Europe and Brazil.

I read a report about a week ago that some scientists think cell phones are the culprit. But that can't be right because this article says the problem was first noticed late last year. Cell phones have been in use for a long time. Besides, later on in the article, it says that this same phenomenon was reported in 1880.

Commercial beekeepers would set their bees near a crop field as usual and come back in two or three weeks to find the hives bereft of foraging worker bees, with only the queen and the immature insects remaining. Whatever worker bees survived were often too weak to perform their tasks.

If the bees were dying of pesticide poisoning or freezing, their bodies would be expected to lie around the hive. And if they were absconding because of some threat -- which they have been known to do -- they wouldn't leave without the queen.

Since about one-third of the U.S. diet depends on pollination and most of that is performed by honeybees, this constitutes a serious problem, according to Jeff Pettis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service.

"They're the heavy lifters of agriculture," Pettis said of honeybees. "And the reason they are is they're so mobile and we can rear them in large numbers and move them to a crop when it's blooming."

Honeybees are used to pollinate some of the tastiest parts of the American diet, Pettis said, including cherries, blueberries, apples, almonds, asparagus and macadamia nuts.

"It's not the staples," he said. "If you can imagine eating a bowl of oatmeal every day with no fruit on it, that's what it would be like" without honeybee pollination.

I hope they're right about this part, "It's not the staples." Otherwise, we'd be looking at famine. Can you imagine famine in the United States?

Pettis and other experts are gathering outside Washington for a two-day workshop starting on Monday to pool their knowledge and come up with a plan of action to combat what they call colony collapse disorder.

"What we're describing as colony collapse disorder is the rapid loss of adult worker bees from the colony over a very short period of time, at a time in the season when we wouldn't expect a rapid die-off of workers: late fall and early spring," Pettis said.

Small workers in a supersize society

The problem has prompted a congressional hearing, a report by the National Research Council and a National Pollinator Week set for June 24-30 in Washington, but so far no clear idea of what is causing it.

"The main hypotheses are based on the interpretation that the disappearances represent disruptions in orientation behavior and navigation," said May Berenbaum, an insect ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Here's the cell-phone usage hypothesis, probably. I wonder what else could be interfering? In the cell-phone signal scenario, the worker bees can't navigate back to the hive, so they die. Well then, where are their bodies?

There have been other fluctuations in the number of honeybees, going back to the 1880s, where there were "mysterious disappearances without bodies just as we're seeing now, but never at this magnitude," Berenbaum said in a telephone interview.

In some cases, beekeepers are losing 50 percent of their bees to the disorder, with some suffering even higher losses. One beekeeper alone lost 40,000 bees, Pettis said. Nationally, some 27 states have reported the disorder, with billions of bees simply gone.

Some beekeepers supplement their stocks with bees imported from Australia, said beekeeper Jeff Anderson, whose business keeps him and his bees traveling between Minnesota and California. Honeybee hives are rented out to growers to pollinate their crops, and beekeepers move around as the growing seasons change.

Honeybees are not the only pollinators whose numbers are dropping. Other animals that do this essential job -- non-honeybees, wasps, flies, beetles, birds and bats -- have decreasing populations as well. But honeybees are the big actors in commercial pollination efforts.

To me, this was the scariest part. They're "not the only pollinators whose numbers are dropping."

"One reason we're in this situation is this is a supersize society -- we tend to equate small with insignificant," Berenbaum said. "I'm sorry but that's not true in biology. You have to be small to get into the flower and deliver the pollen.

"Without that critical act, there's no fruit. And no technology has been invented that equals, much less surpasses, insect pollinators."

I don't think this is very good news, people.