Saturday, January 10, 2009


Nasa confuses reality with rhectoric

As we see here with the previous post Nasa is not always the best place to find impartial scientific facts.

Thomas Gold cited the behavior of the Nasa consensus of ‘in-house peer review”as the closed herd (neutron star rotation).

Another area where it is particularly bad is in the planetary sciences where NASA made great mistakes in the way in which they set up the situation. NASA made the grave mistake not only of working with a peer review system, but one where some of the peers (in fact very influential ones) were the in-house people doing the same line of work. This established a community of planetary scientists now which was completely selected by the leading members of the herd, which was very firmly controlled, and after quite a short time, the slightest departure from the herd was absolutely cut down. Money was not there for anybody who had a slightly diverging viewpoint. The conferences ignored him, and so on. It became completely impossible to do any independent work. For all the money that has been spent, the planetary program will one day be seen to have been extraordinarily poor. The pictures are fine and some of the facts that have been obtained from the planetary exploration with spacecraft - those will stand but not much else.


Here they not only get the the science completely wrong,but make the most absrd statement that is recently been disproved as we observe.

Continued operation of the oceanic conveyor belt is important to northern Europe's moderate climate because of northward transport of heat in the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current. The system can weaken or shut down entirely if the North Atlantic surface-water salinity somehow drops too low to allow the formation of deep-ocean water masses. This apparently happened during the Little Ice Age (about 1400 to 1850 AD). The conveyer system shut down and northern Europe's climate became markedly colder. Old paintings from this era show Dutch skaters on frozen canals-something that would not occur during today's climatic regime. Cores extracted from deep-sea sediment deposits contain evidence of earlier cold periods.

Todays climate regime has the dutch out skating in their millions and the global conveyor firing on all cylinders.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The Dutch strapped on skates and flocked to icy canals this weekend as freezing temperatures afforded an increasingly rare chance to skate across their flat country.

After more than a week of cold, an estimated 2.3 million skaters, out of a population of 16 million, have taken to frozen canals and lakes, according to a poll released ahead of the weekend.

That number is expected to double if Queen Beatrix decides to don her skates as well.

"The number of opportunities you have to skate in the Dutch winter is decreasing," said Jochem van de Laarschot, who usually speaks on behalf of Dutch food retailer Ahold but took a half a day off last week to skate.


Ocean Conveyor's 'Pump' Switches Back On
How will climate warming affect ocean circulation? The answer isn't so simple.

One of the “pumps” that helps drive the ocean’s global circulation suddenly switched on again last winter for the first time this decade. The finding surprised scientists who had been wondering if global warming was inhibiting the pump and did not foresee any indications that it would turn back on.

The “pump” in question is in the western North Atlantic Ocean, where pools of cold, dense water form in winter and sink beneath less-dense warmer waters. The sinking water feeds into the lower limb of a global system of currents often described as the Great Ocean Conveyor. To replace the down-flowing water, warm surface waters from the tropics are pulled northward along the Conveyor’s upper limb.

The phenomenon has far-reaching impacts on climate. It transports tropical heat to the North Atlantic region, keeping winters there much warmer than they would be otherwise. And it draws down the man-made buildup of carbon dioxide from air to surface waters and eventually into the depths, where the greenhouse gas is stored for centuries and offset global warming.


As we see from the graphic the flows are Asymmetric with flows in inverse states in each hemisphere.This is rather simplistic and the flows are also driven by wimd gyres ie the planet rotates the wind blows.This is also understood in comparative atmospheres eg Jupiter (sobolov meteorology of a rotating planet)and as seen in transport of the Giant red spots.

Makirieva et al gives some qualitative energy flows for the thermacline circulation.

Thermohaline circulation is the global overturning of the ocean, with water masses sinking in the polar regions and upwelling elsewhere at lower latitudes. Global mean temperature of the oceanic surface is 15C.Oceanic waters below 1 kmhave constant temperature of 4 C world over. In the absence of thermohaline circulation,
oceanic waters would have had uniform temperature at all depths. The reason for the constant low oceanic temperatures at depths below 1 km consists in the unique physical properties of water. Water has maximum density, i.e. it is the
heaviest, at 4 C. In the result, the cold polar waters sink to the depth of the ocean. The power of this downward flux, which occurs around the poles, is F _ 1015m3 year_1 = 3 _ 107 m3 s_1 (Stuiver and Quay, 1983). To compensate for this flux, water
masses undergo upwelling over the remaining area of the world ocean, S = 3.6 _ 10^14 m2. The water masses ascend and heat up to the surface temperature. The mean upwelling velocity is u = F/S _ 2m year_1 = 5 _ 10_8 ms_1. The waters
are warmed from 4 to 15 C, i.e. DT = 11 K, during their upwelling from depth to the surface, at the expense of solar radiation. The energy flux of this heating is rcDTu, where r = 103 kgm_3 is water density, c = 4.2 kJ (kg K)_1 is water heat
capacity. The total global power of thermohaline circulation is thus rcDTuS = rcDTF = 1.4 _ 10^15W_ l _ 10^3 TW

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