The Gulf Stream, the Psychrometric Chart and Megastorms.

First the story about the abrupt changes now being observed in the Gulf Stream, the prevailing ocean current that has traditionally moved surface water from the tropical areas in the Atlantic ocean northward along the eastern coast of the USA, and into the North Atlantic ocean where it helps heat Northern Europe.   

Abrupt Change and the Decades-Long Time Frame: Greenland and the Gulf Stream

"...The theory is that freshwater melt from ice floats on salty sea water and creates a blockage in the warm northward flowing waters of the Gulf Stream. When the Gulf Stream shuts down, winter cold freezes the north Atlantic allowing cold air to penetrate much farther south, which has a reverberating cooling effect around the globe."

This point is backed up in the blue area shown in the North Atlantic.  The blue area is where ice is melting, leaving the surface water cooler as a result from the loss of ocean water circulation.
 

Source:  http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34152-climate-change-2015-the-latest-science 

 Next, the Psychrometric Chart showing the relationships between air temperature, relative humidity, amount of water vapor absorbed, and total energy of air under the full range of variation.

 

What brings these two together?  If the prevailing Atlantic ocean current commonly known as the Gulf Stream is truly being disrupted as recent evidence suggests than it would mean that more of the sun's energy that lands in equatorial regions of the Atlantic area would have to migrate toward cooler areas away from the equator as heat energy stored in molecules of air traveling in the wind instead of as heat energy stored in water molecules within the ocean currents.

When heat travels in the ocean currents, the warmed water delivers heat in a northerly direction along the coastline. Regional wind patterns pick up the heat from the oceans and distribute the energy.

When the heat energy travels in the wind, the energy exists as a combination of an elevated temperature of the air and the amount of water vapor absorbed into the air. Hot humid air transfers more energy than cold dry air.  And according to the Psychrometric chart, we can make two basic predictions about the future weather patterns we will see if the Gulf Stream is indeed disrupted.  I am not proposing a theory as much as simply interpreting what the chart shows in plain sight.

1) Warmer air can absorb exponentially more water vapor than cooler air.
2) Warm humid air has a lower density than cold dry air. As air cools, it shrinks.

This means that in the seemingly random locations where  warm humid air masses collide with cold air masses, there will be relatively larger amounts of snow or rain. and the resulting drop in barometric pressure will continue to pull in more surrounding air and source of precipitation.

It's a double-whammy. Higher average temperatures resulting from increased human activity not only lead to an increase in the amount of water vapor carried away from the equator region in the wind, the disruption in the Gulf Stream further increases the amount of water vapor carried away from the equator region in the wind.  And all that extra absorbed water vapor has to fall out of the sky eventually.

So the megastorms are the new normal.  


      

Climate Change and Megastorms. I told you so.

This is a misleading headline because the cold blob shouldn't be puzzling to scientists.

Cold Atlantic "Blob" Puzzles Scientists 

(CNN)At first glance, it stands out like a sore thumb. That blob of blue and purple on the map. One of the only places on the globe that is abnormally cold in a year that will likely shatter records as the warmest globally.

It's being called the Atlantic "blob." It's a large area in the North Atlantic that is seeing a pronounced cooling trend. The ocean surface is much cooler than normal and in fact record cold in some locations.

The mysterious cold blob is evidence that the traditional prevailing ocean current formerly known as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt has been disrupted by the effects of our warming climate.  Just like NASA scientists predicted back in 2004 and others before that. 

A Chilling Possibility: By disturbing a massive ocean current, melting Arctic sea ice might trigger colder weather in Europe and North America.

March 5, 2004: Global warming could plunge North America and Western Europe into a deep freeze, possibly within only a few decades.

That's the paradoxical scenario gaining credibility among many climate scientists. The thawing of sea ice covering the Arctic could disturb or even halt large currents in the Atlantic Ocean. Without the vast heat that these ocean currents deliver--comparable to the power generation of a million nuclear power plants--Europe's average temperature would likely drop 5 to 10°C (9 to 18°F), and parts of eastern North America would be chilled somewhat less. Such a dip in temperature would be similar to global average temperatures toward the end of the last ice age roughly 20,000 years ago.

More heat energy from the sun lands at the earth's equatorial regions than lands at the earth's poles. The heat energy has to somehow migrate away from the equator toward the poles either within ocean currents or through air currents.  So assume that the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt has been disrupted just like the cold blob indicates and that the excess heat from the equatorial region is being forced to migrate away from the equator toward the poles through currents in the atmosphere, or wind instead of through ocean currents.

Heat energy or enthalpy exists in the atmosphere in two forms.  One is the sensible heat, the temperature of the air that you could measure with a thermometer in degrees F or C.  The other form of energy in the atmosphere is the latent heat, the water vapor absorbed in the air, that you could measure with a hygrometer in % Relative Humidity.  The warmer air becomes the more water vapor it can absorb and the capacity to carry moisture increases exponentially as air warms.  See: Psychrometric Chart.  Hot humid air stores more energy than hot dry air but whatever amount of moisture is absorbed into the air in one location will eventually fall back to the ground as precipitation somewhere else.

Here is a Pathteacher post from the archives 2012 about the interaction of temperature and humidity in the atmosphere and how the Psychrometric Chart predicts the major weather trends we can expect in our warming climate.

Pathteacher: This chart explains why we can expect more extreme weather

I think it is reasonable to say the amount of precipitation will tend to decrease in areas where the atmosphere is typically the warmest and the amount of precipitation will tend to increase in areas where the air is the typically the coolest. We will see more persistent droughts, more intense wildfires and growing deserts in hotter areas and an increasing number of random Megastorms that dump huge amounts of precipitation causing flooding, property damage, crop losses and infrastructure failures in cooler areas. This doesn't bode well for the agriculture or property insurance industries, or for our prospects in general.       

Which brings me to an image of the storms currently pounding the Atlantic Coast in the Southern USA.  This is a massive storm being described as the largest storm in the area in 1,000 years and the rain that has fallen over a foot deep in many places is causing catastrophic damage over a wide area. Yes, there have been massive storms in the past, but as the global climate continues to warm, the rate of incidence and destructive power of the massive, catastrophic, Megastorms like this one will increase.  

Get used to it.  This is the future we have chosen, or at least ignored as a real threat.  A typical climate denier might say this is all just business as usual or point out how the climate changed before there were 7 billion people on Earth or recite end-times prophecy, or maybe even admit that climate denial is an easier alternative to admitting they don't give a shit about the world their children and grandchildren will inherit.  But none of that matters anymore because climate change is happening right now and I plan to keep reminding people I told you so.

Scrooge McTrump vs all the other ducks

If the GOP leadership really wants Donald Trump left out out of their 2016 Presidential primary elections then they are going to have to forcibly restrain him with Lilliputian tactics.  The GOP base is comprised of a million tiny people who post about conservative values anonymously of course in the reader comment sections and they are prepared to tie down the Donald and his hair to the ground while he sleeps. But the Donald doesn't actually sleep and if the Lilliputians try to tie him down he will just hire undocumented workers from nearby Islands to chop away at those tiny ropes and after becoming a free man again, Gulliver Trump will be inspired to run as a 3rd party candidate just to spite the GOP leaders and to show deference and respect to HRC in return for future business / banking / foreign policy considerations.  Assuming this is all true (which of course it will be or my name isn't Abernathy P. Duckling)  the biggest question left is:

1. What will Donald Trump call his 3rd party?

a)  American Eagle Party
b)  Liberty for All Party
c)  True Patriot Party
d)  Unity Party
e)  TRiUMPh! Party

Spectacular photo from the Pacific coast of South Africa

I took this photo in 2012 during a work trip to Port Elizabeth on a Sunday side trip with my American host.  I have thought about this and other amazing sights along with the wonderful people I met while was there just about every day since.

Detroit Graffiti Art

Here are some examples of Detroit's world class graffiti artwork painted on buildings along Grand River near Canfield a couple miles from downtown.   In Detroit you can paint a whole building and people are like... Cool, do more!

And the taco truck of course..  

An easy to remember pattern for the digit sum of any multiple of 10.

If for whatever reason you ever need to know the sum of all the integers from 1 up any number at all, you can take the time to add them all up manually or figure out an easier way to arrive at the answer.  In the table below multiples of 10 are matched to the sum of all the numbers from 0 up to that multiple of 10.   Do you see the pattern?

   Multiple of 10         Sum of numbers from 0 up to X                      
          1                                      1
         10                                    55                                    
        100                                 5050                                  
       1000                              500500                              
      10000                            50005000                        
     100000                         5000050000                    
    1000000                      500000500000                  

This is a great example of why you need to think about a math problem before actually diving into the math.

If you were asked to add up all the numbers from 1+2+3+4 all the way to 10 you would likely either add it up in your head or maybe use a pen and paper and arrive at the answer 55.  That's easy enough, not too much thinking required, just plug and chug.

But the same problem is not so easy for adding up the numbers between 1 and 100.  Here is where the lazy and bright might figure out that to add up the numbers between 0 and 100 they could just add 0+100, 1+99, 2+98, 3+97, 4+96,.. etc,.. 49+51 and the answer would be 50 ways to add up to 100 with 50 in the middle leftover or 5,050.

So then the pattern is this, 50+50 is 100 and 5,050 is the sum of all the digits from 1 to 100. The same pattern predicts that the digit sum of 1,000 is 500,500.

This then leads to an easy way to calculate the sum of integers from 0 up the number itself.

The sum of all numbers from 1 to X = (X*X+X)/2

I hope you get to use that little math trick someday.

Billy Martin's signature on an old baseball.