Can mining Australian coal slow sea level rise?

Disclaimer. I am stuck at home waiting for a child’s COVID test result, and desperately looking for a distraction from some personal admin. I am taking a sick day. This has nothing to do with my work, my employer, or anything else and is entirely me falling down an internet rabbit hole in order to avoid making a phone call.

Second disclaimer. I am not a climatologist, or an oceanographer, or a bulk commodity logistics manager. If I have drastically screwed up any of these fields, please correct me. Here we go:

Here on planet Earth, the surface is looking a bit grim. The recent and continuing increase in CO2 from burning carbonaceous materials has resulted in the planet warming up, and this warming is threatening to melt various ice sheets, which will raise sea level enough to inundate low lying coastal properties.

Of particular concern are the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, in West Antarctica, both of which discharge into the Amundsen Sea. One of the problems with these glaciers is that warmish (a few degrees C, so well above the freeing point of -2 for salty water) salty water, which circulates around the continental shelf of Antarctica, is melting these glaciers from below. During the last ice age, the glaciers were thicker, the sea level was lower, and as a result, these glaciers flowed all the way to the edge of the continental shelf. They carved enormous canyons in it was they went, and today these submarine canyons allow the warm salty water to flow inland and erode the current glaciers from underneath. Both glaciers are also prone to collapse, which would cause rapid sea level rise, as they drain a large portion of West Antarctica.

If the planet continues to warm, these glaciers could start melting from above as well as below, but even if warming were to stop tomorrow, the basal melting is happening right now, with current CO2 levels.

As a result, there have been studies (like Kimura et al.2017) of how this warm water actually interacts with the seabed and glacier, and over the past few years, several authors have proposed various technological solutions to keep the glaciers from melting. Many of these (e.g. Lockley et al. 2020) seem like science fiction. Others (Wolovick et al. 2018) imagine and model action beginning a hundred years from now.

At the same time, action to reduce CO2 emissions here in Australia has been sluggish at best. The coal industry is large, influential, well funded, and provides thousands of well paying unionized jobs. It is also a very successful industry, which, every year, exports close to 400 million metric tons of coal, mostly to East Asia. Roughly half of this is burned to produce electricity; the other half is used in steel production. Both eventually end up being turned into heat-trapping CO2, which is released into the atmosphere.

So, in the interest of solving both of these problems together, perhaps we should consider reducing the flow of deep warm water to the Amundsen Sea glaciers by filling the submarine canyons up with coal.

Let’s start by looking at the scale of the problem. Most of the Pine Island Trough is about 50 km wide, and 500-800 meters deep, with deeper areas and more complex topography near the ice edge.

Luckily, Australia has tens of cubic kilometres of coal reserves, depending on which definition one uses. And if the trough doesn’t need to be completely filled because the warm water doesn’t reach within 250m of the surface, than there is plenty of coal- perhaps even enough to put a submarine rubble berm across the entire Amundsen sea (e.g. Gurses et al. 2019).

Furthermore, the infrastructure to dig coal up, transport it to a port, and load it onto a bulk carrier already exists, and is in use. The only difference is the direction in which the ship sails after leaving port. In fact, Pine Island Bay is several hundred km closer to the port of Newcastle than any of the major East Asian ports are- it is just in the other direction. As a result, everybody in the Australian coal industry gets to keep their job, because they are still doing the same work. In fact, it makes jobs more secure, as the risk of having an asset stranded is reduced.

 Furthermore, the coal, once dumped, isn’t going to be burned. It is effectively sequestered. There should be enough WWI shipwrecks in the North Atlantic to be able to determine the behaviour of coal on the seabed on the 100 year timescale, but the recovery of coal from the Titanic suggests that it holds up reasonably well.

Obviously, there are other potential problems. Although today’s bulk carriers traverse areas of high typhoon activity, these tropical storms are both more localized and more predictable than the huge temperate lows which spin through the Southern Ocean. There could be seaworthiness issues with the current fleet. Coal may not be a dense enough rock to stay in a pile on the bottom of the ocean without getting washed away be currents, so shipping overburden as well, or instead, may be necessary. And operating a floating unloader in the Amundsen Sea could prove to be challenging. But these are things than can be tested today, as opposed to technologies that are decades away. If someone spent the next 6 months integrating a selfunloader into a bulk coal carrier, it could potentially do a test run as soon as the pack ice melts in January. And while a phase-in from Asian exports would be the least disruptive approach, if urgent action was required, based on current export tonnages, a 250m high, 2 km deep, and 50 km long berm could potentially be dumped across the trough west of Burke Island in less than 30 years.

Global warming is happening now. So should our solutions.

 

 

Manhattanhenge, Milankovitch, and Mystical Miscalculations

 Last weekend was the reverse Manhattanhenge in New York City. In order to explain what this is, I must first explain the Manhattanhenge, and in order to explain that, we need to start with the Stonehenge, in England.

Stonehenge is a Neolithic-to-Bronze age stone construction in Southwest England, It’s key feature, for the purposes of this article, is that part of it, the heel stone, is astronomically aligned such that at the summer solstice, the sun rises over it (as seen from the middle of Stonehenge.)

Manhattanhenge, then, is when the sun sets in alignment with the cross streets of Manhattan. This does not happen on the solstice, however; it generally happens about a month before and after the summer solstice. A reverse Manhattanhenge, then, is when the sunRISE is aligned with the cross streets in Manhattan. This generally happens a month before and after the winter solstice. For example, last Monday.

The reason for this is that the streets of Manhattan are aligned 29 degrees north of west, and the sun doesn’t set that far north at New York’s latitude until it reaches a declination of 22 degrees. That is, the sun is straight overhead at noon at a latitude of 22 degrees north. The maximum declination reached by the sun is about 23.2 degrees, which is the axial tilt of the Earth at the present time

Of course, as geologists, we are not bound to the present time. We can, and do explore deep geologic time routinely. And one of the things that changes over geologic time is the magnitude of the Earth’s axial tilt.

Milankovitch cycles are regular changes in the Earth’s orbit that are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and other planets. One of the parameters which changes is the Earth’s axial tilt. When the tilt is larger, the seasons are more extreme, and when it is smaller, they are less extreme. For most of the Quaternary, from about 2.6 million years ago to about 1 million years ago, this cycle was the dominant influence on the Earth’s ice ages.

In terms of its influence on Manhattanhenge, that is easier to explain. A larger axial tilt would move both the normal and reverse events away from each other, so that the May and July events would both be farther from the Solstice. A smaller axial tile would move these events closer together, and nearer to the solstice. In fact, when the Earth’s axial tilt drops to 22 degrees, then, just like at Stonehenge today, the sunrise and sunset alignment will coincide with the winter and summer solstices.

A common theme in 20^th century speculative fiction, which is still sometimes repeated today, is that Earth’s Neolithic to early bronze age edifice-building civilizations worshipped the sky because they had alien patrons which would come to Earth and assist them with the otherwise implausibly large edifices which they built. While this theory has previously been used in science fiction to explain the Egyptian Pyramids or the Stonehenge, I do not know that it has been applied to Manhattan. However, as geologists, we have the tools to do seen if and when this happened.

First, we need a Milankovitch calculator. These can be found on the web, via either NASA or Colorado State University. Then, we can use the Milankovitch cycles to date *when* the aliens came to set up the urban street grid, based on when the Milankovitch cycles last dropped the Earth’s tilt to 22.0 degrees.

Unfortunately, like many science fiction ideas, this one gets less brilliant the longer we look at the numbers.  Any date for the alien founding of Manhattan needs to be less than about 17000 years ago, since before that the island was buried under a glacial ice sheet. This is a problem, because Axial tilt is currently declining; it reached a maximum about 9000 years ago, and hasn’t been lower than the current level for 19,000 years, a time when Manhattan was in the deep freeze. So it seems unlikely that the streets were laid out to align with the solstice. But there’s a more fundamental problem.

The last tilt minimum was 29,000 years ago. But the tilt at that time was 22.2 degrees- in otherwords, the tilt never got low enough to put Manhattanhenge on the Solstice. Now, as it happens, the magnitude of the tilt cycle varies a fair bit from cycle to cycle. The previous minimum, 70,000 years ago, had a tilt of 22.3 degrees (according to the Colorado State University model linked above). In fact, at no time on the past 5 million years does the tilt drop to 22.0 degrees to put Manhattanhenge on the Solstice.

A responsible researcher would give up at this point and conclude that the streets were laid out on the angle decided in 1811, just like all supporting documents state. But because I’m blogging after midnight, I’m going to double down on the crazy:

What if TIME TRAVELLING aliens sent a message back in time to set New York up on this angle to align with a future solstice? After all, it turns out that in 4.77 million years, if New York is still around, the Earth’s tilt will drop to 22.0 degrees, and whoever is still left in the Tri State Area will be able to head into The City and watch the sunset between the skyscrapers on the longest day of the year. I hope they aren’t still in lockdown when that happens.

Geosonnet 56

White walkers turn the maple leaf to ice

A glacial edifice, three miles in height

Continuous, and ringed by edelweiss?

Or intermittent, phasing like a wight?

The sediment’ry basin, Hudson Bay

Has hollows which survived the glacial scours

So forty thousand years ago, they say,

The land had beaches, forest, meadow flowers.

A verdant corridor split west and east

The Hudson Bay was then an inland sea

Migration route for plankton, grass, or beast?

For many thousand years it was ice free.

   The Night King’s kingdom melted, split in two

   But when the Ice age deepened, it regrew.

Geology 47 111

Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Can bad fashion save the icecaps?

With rapid melting in the Arctic, and potential glacial instability in Antarctica. the planet’s present cryosphere is in a spot of bother. The root cause of this is warming from the heat trapped by greenhouse gasses, mostly CO2. But while many suggestions have been made for reducing CO2 output, as yet there are relatively few mothods for capturing those emissions which are still occurring. And with international agreements lacking enforcement mechanisms, a new push for Coal in the US, and decades of record rates of emissions growths, humanity clearly needs someone to police the worlds emissions. And we don’t need any old police. We need fashion police.

Although many proposals have been made for finding ways to prevent our hunger for fossil fuels from ruining the atmosphere, not nearly enough of these strategies have included the use of tacky clothing. And yet, the potential for horrific fashion statements to save the world should not be underestimated. The reason for this is that ultimately, the easiest way to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to react it with an alkali or alkali earth oxide, thereby forming a carbonate  mineral. While silicate weathering will do this naturally over a 50-100kA timescale, we can’t really afford to wait that long. Roasting carbonates obviously won’t accomplish anything, since that simply makes the alkali oxides available by releasing CO2. However, there are alternatives.

One way to generate an effective carbon dioxide scrubber is to split salt (from ocean water) into its component sodium and chlorine. The sodium will rapidly (on a geologic timescale) oxidize, hydrate, and carbonate, forming NaHCO3. This should be reasonably effective, so long as we can sequester the chlorine that is produced as a byproduct. And here is where the tacky clothes come in. During the latter part of the 20th century, outrageous costumes were constructed out of the polymer polyvinyl chloride. If we can simply manufacture enough disco pats, fake leather jackets, and not-so-Sunday dresses, that will sequester the chlorine from salt electrolysis in the world’s wardrobes, so that the sodium can be used for atmospheric CO2 drawdown.

Doing a bit of math here, with annual emissions of about 29 billion tons of CO2, we will need about 15 billion tons of Na to scrub our emissions. This requires approximately 55 billion tons of PVC to store the chlorine left over from the salt decomposition (powering the electrolysis is left as an exercise for the reader). Luckily, due to the large world population, this works out to only about 8 tons of PVC per person per year, or about 21 kg of PVC per day.

None of the PVC outfits I can find for sale on the internet at this hour appear to contain 21 kg of material. They are generally a little bit flimsier than that. And even with a new steampunk, burlesque, gothic, and disco outfit every day for every man, woman, and child on Earth, we are still looking to be short by a factor of 50. Buying 21 kg of new PVC outfits a day would necessitate a costume change every 7 minutes. Luckily, there are other things which PVC can be made into.

For example, the credit cards used to purchase PVC outfits by people too brazen to stoop to cash are made of PVC. And while they only weigh a few grams each, most people do have a few. Similarly, the music to which PVC clad people traditionally dance comes from an archaic form of grooved PVC platter known as a “record”. Buying 140 LP records a day will put all of the world’s citizens at their PVC quota without having to wear anything at all.

So fear not, reader. There is hope. with enough old time music and garish clothing, anything is possible.

Prime Minister's Business Advisory Chair loses his marbles.

On Friday, Maurice Newman, the chair of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, wrote a frothing opinion article in The Australian newspaper (paywalled). It reads more like a Evangelical Christian teenager’s blog than an op-ed by an adult with a job, but basically follows the delusional UN world order climate hoax script found on American survivalist websites and other reputable sources of scientific knowledge. Of course, it is not a crime to be a delusional conspiracy nut. And if tin foil hat sales are what we need to preserve our aluminum industry, I’m all for it. But having one of the PM’s chief economic advisors carry on this way is like having the head of the Canberra Deep Space network decrying the moon landings as a hoax. It is like the health minister saying that vaccines cause autism, or that fucking virgins cures AIDS. The only way it makes any since at all is if The Australian has transformed into a joke newspaper like The Chaser. Except that it isn't actually funny. If the Prime Minister expects his Business Advisory Council to be taken seriously, he should replace the chair with someone who actually has a grip on reality. Because it is difficult to have confidence in a person who publicly espouses lunacy.

OCO

 A month out, and already the carbon tax is ancient history.  And while no household bills have yet appeared to demonstrate the savings (or lack thereof) to the common battler, there is no doubt as to the identity of the big winners.

(Photo: The Australian)

I do not have any specific inside information on this topic, so this is only my best guess as to what Gina Rinehart has been joyfully singing as she dances through the empty corridors of her palace (cue Disney winter wonderland music)...

OCO

Let it go,

There’s no carbon tax any more.

OCO

Let it go,

Put more oil rigs off shore.

The snow fell late on the mountains this year.

Carbon footprint, or a dream?

A country in isolation

Burning coal, and making steam.

The wind is howling and the swirling turbines glide.

Couldn’t keep them out, Murdoch knows I tried.

Don’t let them in. Don’t let them see

Transmission lines are too costly.

Conceal the real

Cost of the pole.

Their bills will grow...

OCO

Let it go

There’s no carbon tax any more

OCO

Let it go,

Let’s just heat the earth some more

I don’t care

If it’s hot today

OCO

Let it go,

The coal never bothered me anyway.

It’s funny how some distance makes Europe seem so small.

Their carbon trading system can’t get to us at all.

Out here in the smoky air

No asthmatics can breathe,

But doctors hand out puffers

To give them a reprieve.

OCO

Let it go

There’s no carbon tax any more

OCO

Let it go,

Let’s just heat the earth some more

I don’t care

If it’s hot today

OCO

Let it go,

The coal never bothered me anyway.

Standing

Smoking

By the donors chosen

You won’t

Fine me

The tax is so behind me

Carbon, free to go.

Let it go

OCO

We won’t tax that anymore

Let it go

Let it go,

Let’s just heat the earth some more

I don’t care

If it’s hot today

Let the seas rise on...

The coal never bothered me anyway!

Coal Cares

This is the most fantastically over-the-top pro-coal website I have ever seen.  Pure genius.  I have no idea who is actually behind coalcares.org, but I hereby declare them a legend of the internet.

Who still believes in global warming?

So I was blissfully snoozing away in my ex-blogging slumber, when a sudden ruckus on the internet woke me up. Evidently some anti-science thinktank in the US has been putting billboards up featuring pictures of people who refuse to reject reality. I don’t really see why anyone would want to do this, other than perhaps an open invitation to be mocked by the entire internet, but I’m not complaining. After all, it is a free country.
What I don’t understand, however, is the associated backlash. What is is about the following billboard that everyone finds so offensive?

Repost: Global warming skeptics claim Patriots win Superbowl

I realize that I quit blogging two week's ago, but with the superbowl set to be a rematch of the game 4 years ago, I thought a repost of my post-game analysis would be appropriate. Let's hope that the Giants once again prove the denialists wrong. And reposting isn't really blogging, so I'm still not here.

Repost:

I don’t want to call attention to skeptical web sites by actually linking them from this site, but the usual suspects in global warming denialism have homed in on a new target- the Superbowl champions.

The gang of 397.5 is now claiming that the Giants didn’t actually win. And to support this stance, they have trotted out all of their tired old canards:

• By truncating the data at 2 minute warning, a Patriots win is obvious.
  
• Satellite measurements suggest that the 4th down rush failed to exceed the space-based error margins for a first down.


• Increased, undetectable solar irradiance dazzled Tom Brady, and the Giants’ D had nothing to do with his performance.


• The Giants victory is a conspiracy perpetrated by rent-seeking sports journalists who are selfishly trying to increase interest in the dullest Superbowl of all time in order to justify their hegemony of the sports infotainment industry.


• The Manning brothers score regularly on Mars, Titan, Pluto, and many other planetary bodies, so game winning passes here on Earth must be caused by some mysterious exotic power which should constitute interference with the football game.


• Millions of years ago, football scores were both much higher and much lower than in tonight’s game.


• Common sense demands that a team which makes up less than 0.05% of the population of Hudson County can’t possibly be responsible for upsetting the greatest sports franchise on Earth.


• In-con-ceEEEEEI-vable.*


• The consensus view that the team with the most points wins is a self-fulfilling delusion perpetrated by the opaque fraternity of peer review.


• By cherrypicking away all of the Giants’ scoring plays, the game becomes a Patriots shutout.

* I don’t think this word means what they think it means.

Isotopic wins the 2011 Acrtic sea ice minimum competition

The winner of the third annual Arctic sea ice prediction pool is “Isotopic”, with a winning guess of 4567 +/- 100 thousand square kilometers.

As is usual, Isotopic’s prize is the chance to nominate a blog topic upon which I will try to write.

Congratulations, and thanks to all who played.

2011 Arctic Sea Ice minimum predictions

The 2011 sea ice extent betting pool has now closed. Unlike previous years, we no longer have a distinct multimodal betting population. However, despite my advertising the contest on denialist schill sites, nobody has guessed at a final ice extent anywhere near or above the 1979-200 average (on right). On the other hand, we no longer have large guess populations off-screen to the left, as we have in previous years.

Tune in this October to see who wins.

2011 Arctic sea ice extent minimum prediction pool

Update:
The contest so far:


Neven and Peter are reminded that contestants who have been mathematically eliminated at the 2 sigma level are entitled to guess again. It is up to you guys to keep track, though. This post will remain on top until the contest closes.

original post:

The 2011 Arctic sea ice extent minimum prediction pool is now open. A reminder that this is a competition on extent, not coverage.

The 2010 summed guess curve and final result are shown below:


Guesses are to be in the form of extent and sigma (a mathematical measure of uncertainty), in thousands of km² You may use decimal places if you insist.

Your guess will define a Gaussian curve.

The function with the highest value for x=minimum daily measured ice extent (from IARC-JAXA) wins.

See the 2009 announcement, opening, and final curve for details.

This contest will close much sooner than last year's. Guesses must be submitted by the time the Earth reaches aphelion in its orbit, which the internet tells me is 3 pm on July 4 (UTC). Trash talking, dissembling, and boasting in the comments section is still encouraged.

The prize, as always, is the choice of a blog topic on which I will write.

Geochemical googling

Razib over at Gene Expression has recently pointed out a new Google tool, which allows one to look for correlated searches and the geographic breakdown of those searches. Surprisingly, he failed to apply it to geochemistry. So I shall.

Here is the distribution for “Geochronology”

The three top correlated words or phrases were:
0.9361 porphyry
0.9315 f 650 gs
0.9309 bmw f 650

Which suggests that the f-series beamer bikes have been around for a geologically significant time period. I suspect the correlation refers to percentage of total searches from each state. I am not particularly surprised that the rocky mountain west is more geochemical than the rest of the country.

Not surprisingly, Zircon has a fairly similar distribution.

The matched terms are also bizarre:
0.8794 high density foam
0.8757 garmin geko
0.8719 snowboard gear

Archean is interesting:

The main distribution maps fairly well with the Archean Wyoming craton, one of the two Archean cratons in the US. I don’t know why the residents of the Superior craton are so disinterested in their geology.

It matches up with:
0.8993 motocross tires
0.8921 were wolves
0.8907 proterozoic

And finally, for a bit of soft-rock affirmative action, I looked at the distribution for global warming.

This was much more widespread, and interestingly, was somewhat inversely correlated with the temperature anomaly for the last 90 days (from NOAA):

2010 Arctic Sea Ice minimum winner

Due to extensive travel in the September/October time period, I forgot to post the winner of the 2010 Arctic sea ice minimum competition.

Figure 1. Final results for the 2010 sea ice minimum.

The winner was Atwasi, whose guess of 4851 +/- 82 slightly edged out James Annan at 4750 +/- 80. According to his comment, Atwasi is a geophysicist like last year’s winner, Hypocentre. James was the runner up for the second year in a row.

Atwasi may now nominate a blog subject of his or her choosing for me to flail at.

Is there any interest in guessing at the winter maximum this year?

Some seasonal suggestions for saving the snow

Although this trend may not be apparent for this week’s current weather patterns, the northern winters are getting warmer. While the optimists among us may feel that eventual progression from carbon-based energy sources to some other technologies may help resolve this problem, it is unlikely that such a transformation will be made anytime soon. So unless we all want to melt Greenland, some additional measures should probably be taken to keep the north pole cold.

Such geoengineering proposals are often contentious. However, properly framing them may reveal surprising levels of support for modest measures. Here are two examples.

1. Clear the taiga. The boreal forest is a huge expanse of cold-climate conifer trees, which inhabit terrain that was either glaciated or tundra during the last ice age. These trees are adept at absorbing the springtime sun, and replacing them with flat, reflective snow would hopefully postpone the spring thaw. As the trees are a potential source of building and paper raw materials, cutting down the existing forests ought to pay for itself. However, should seedlings in these areas be allowed to regrow, then they would become a thicket of sub-economic sized trees which would still protrude from the snowpack. So a yearly cull of small conifers would be in order, to keep the flat ex-forested plains flat and snowy. Supporters of this idea could assist in this by creating a market for small felled conifers. As such trees lack inherent utility, they could potentially become decorative items, to be lit up by representations of the boreal winter’s 24 hour stars. Supporters of this proposal could signal their support by displaying a small severed conifer in their homes during the time period leading up to the northern winter solstice.

2. Eliminate the ozone. Ozone is a greenhouse gas. It traps heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape into outer space. It also adsorbs UV light, so simply eliminating all of it would make the surface of the earth uninhabitable. But during the polar winter, there is no solar UV to block, so a temporary elimination of ozone in the middle of winter would allow cooling without the complications associated with destroying the entire layer.

Trouble is, our current system of ozone destruction using chlorofluorocarbons does not work during the winter- it works in the spring, once the sun has come up. So some other method, such as aerosolizing a solid ozone-destructing catalyst (like this) would have to be used, so that the catalyst would be out of the system by springtime.

Even so, there would be a temporary increase in UV as the ozone layer rebuilt during the arctic spring. And this would have a carcinogenic effect on northern animals, especially their exposed body parts, like noses. Still, giving a few reindeer cancer may be the price we have to pay for saving the planet, so I suggest anyone who things this is a good deal should display picture or statues or reindeer with swollen, cancerous red noses.

Although geoengineering can be contentious, canvassing the level of support for these particular suggestions should be easy. Simply look for homes where severed conifers or cancerous reindeer are being celebrated and displayed, and if such places are common, then the obvious interpretation is that the inhabitants of such houses are in favor.

See also: Santa boycotts coal.

2010 minimum arctic sea ice betting pool

Update 2!!
I think this is it, unless Eli and GFW and crandles wish ti reguess for reasons stated in the comments.

Update! The guesses so far are posted below. Contest will close tomorrow night once I get the kids to bed and clean up- call it 30ish hours from now. We're all a bunch of doom-glooming alarmists so far!

original post

The 2010 Arctic sea ice extent minimum prediction pool is now open.

Guesses are to be in the form of extent and sigma (a mathematical measure of uncertainty), in thousands of km² You may use decimal places if you insist.

Your guess will define a Gaussian curve.

The function with the highest value for x=minimum daily measured ice extent (from IARC-JAXA) wins.

See the 2009 announcement, opening, and final curve for details.

I apologize for not posting on the solstice, but I was in transit from a conference in America.

This contest will close much sooner than last year's. Guesses must be submitted by the time the Earth reaches aphelion in its orbit, which the internet tells me is 11 am on July 6 (presumably UTC). Trash talking, dissembling, and boasting in the comments section is encouraged.


Figure 1. Last year's contestant curves and final 2009 minimum sea ice extent (red line).

As with last year, the winner gets to pick a topic for a silly blog post.

The hopelessly half-assed northern maximum sea ice extent betting pool

Due to my three big summer projects, I wasn’t able to put up a proper maximum sea ice betting pool like I did for the Northern summer. But using the theory that late is better than never, here you go. Rules are the same as the last contest. Enter a value and sigma, to define a Gaussian curve. Person with the highest value at the final ice extent (from JAXA's AMSR-E webpage) wins.

Contest is open immediately, and closes the first time I get to blog after the second child is born, OR the first day the JAXA record drops for a second consecutive day. Whichever comes sooner. Note that sea ice could max out anytime between now and the end of March. Ditto with the baby coming.

Hopefully the skillful forecasters will outperform the half-assed guessers, compared with the three-month-out summer forecast of last year.

Running with the theme, the prize is that the winner gets to pick a topic, about which I will write a half-assed post.

I did it

It is only a matter of time before this surfaces in the hacked email archive, so I figured I might as well fess up now.

From: lab_lemming@geemail.com
To: Phil Jones The.Dark.Lord@climatelord.ac.uk
Date: March 15, 2008 8:34 pm EST
Subject: The deed is done.

Hi Phil,
Mission accomplished.
Crichton drank the whole glass. If this thing works as promised, that denialist scumbag will be dead in six months, and they’ll see nothing but natural causes. It won't solve our problems, but we gotta start somewhere.
Thanks for the bug; the stem cell ban here means that we can’t weaponize cancer like you Brits do.
You’re buying Christmas drinks at AGU this year.
Cheers,
The Lord’s Lemming

Party like the Paleoproterozoic

The Paleoproterozoic was an interesting time. Oxygen finally settled into the atmosphere on a permanent basis, most of the iron formations we use to make cars, bridges, skyscrapers etc. were formed, and the removal of methane from the atmosphere cooled the surface until everything froze, creating a condition known as the “snowball Earth”.

Similar conditions may have reoccurred again in the Neoproterozoic, but since then, the tropics have tended towards being ice free. But will this last? A simple extrapolation says no.


Figure 1. linear extrapolation of the last three years of sea ice minima.

As you can see, sea ice has been increasing for the last three years, by about half a million km ^2 per year. With only 360 million km^2 of ocean on the planet, a continuation of this trend will freeze the entire ocean by the year 2724! We are all doomed.

The Arctic sea ice prognosticator of the year is...

Hypocentre!

The JAXA minimum arctic sea ice extent value for 2009 was 5249844 km2, which was recorded in September 13.

The final score for each contestant is the value of their Gaussian curve at 5249.844, and is listed in table 1.

Table 1: Contestant final scores and original guesses.

The results are plotted in figure 1.

If I recall correctly from the original comments, Hypocentre is a hard rock geologist, and the 2nd through 5th place winners were all climatologists.

Figure 1. Contestant curves and final 2009 minimum sea ice extent (red line).

Hypocentre, as the winner of the contest, may now nominate a topic for a future blog post (post nomination in comments, please).

Everyone else, tune in next (northern) summer solstice for the 2010 version of this contest.

Commentary, corrections, and sour grapes are welcome in the comments section.