Our Daughter is Saving the Planet - will you join her??

[Bluesofa]

3 minutes ago, BuffaloWhisperer said:

I'm also tempted to join Greta's crusade, but does Mr. Soros pay equal wages? Although I consider myself still quite young, I'm not exactly a pig-tailed teenage girl. 

You probably won't receive any sort of 'deposit' on account then.

[BuffaloWhisperer]

4 minutes ago, Bluesofa said:

You probably won't receive any sort of 'deposit' on account then.

I want to say that wouldn't be a bummer, but I won't... because it would be taken out of context.

Edited August 1, 2021 by BuffaloWhisperer

[AussieBob]

2 minutes ago, BuffaloWhisperer said:

I'm also tempted to join Greta's crusade, but does Mr. Soros pay equal wages? Although I consider myself still quite young, I'm not exactly a pig-tailed teenage girl. 

Things are on hold at the minute while this covid thingy thing takes the front pages. But your name and blood type has been taken and put on the list.  As soon as everyone no longer fears covid, we will re-emerge bigger and badder than ever, and ready to take advantage  help everyone understand why they should fear global warming climate change and donate to the cause. 

[BuffaloWhisperer]

4 minutes ago, AussieBob said:

Things are on hold at the minute while this covid thingy thing takes the front pages. But your name and blood type has been taken and put on the list.  As soon as everyone no longer fears covid, we will re-emerge bigger and badder than ever, and ready to take advantage  help everyone understand why they should fear global warming climate change and donate to the cause. 

Once this virus thing is over (caused by climate change, mind you), I want to do my bit for the planet. Putin said he's already taking care of the Arctic. I might take a flame thrower to the Antarctic and break off an ice shelf. We must prove that Gore and Greta are right.

[AussieBob]

9 hours ago, BuffaloWhisperer said:

Once this virus thing is over (caused by climate change, mind you), I want to do my bit for the planet. Putin said he's already taking care of the Arctic. I might take a flame thrower to the Antarctic and break off an ice shelf. We must prove that Gore and Greta are right.

 

 

[kerryd]

11 hours ago, Bluesofa said:

Thanks. It all came back mentioning about light coloured objects reflecting the sun and dark coloured objects absorbing it.
Having said that, in countries with seasonal snow, it melts when the sun's out, hence the temperature becoming warmer. There again it's a lot smaller amount in these instances.

Aussiebob beat me to it but yes, "white" colour tends to reflect the sun's rays while darker colours "absorb" them.
Which is why you should wear black in the winter and white in the summer.

Unless you are an Arab. In which case the men wear the cooler "white" colour all the time while the women have to wear the much hotter black.  (Almost like that is done on purpose.)

Note though that even when there is a massive amount of snow (and ice), there is still melting going on. Just not as much of it.
That is how the glaciers form. Massive amounts of snow deposited in mountain valleys (along with trace elements of what is in the atmosphere).
The snow melts, freezes, melts, freezes and so on, eventually compacting into dense layers of ice.

Scientists can then drill into that ice and remove core samples, which can be studied under microscopes where they can literally see the individual layers, count then and date them.

They can also extract samples of those previously mentioned trace elements and use that to determine what the Earth's atmosphere was like at the time.

I used to see the "formation" process on a much smaller scale when I used to traipse through the mountains behind my home in BC (Canada). 
We'd get massive amounts of snow in the winter (4+ meters) and it was often the "soft, fluffy" kind that is hard to walk on even with snow shoes.

But even in the middle of winter we'd get sunshine and you could (literally) see the snow getting "heavier" and water starting to drip off the ice-cycles. 
Of course, as soon as it clouded over or the sun went down, it all froze again.
The spring was the best though. More sun for longer periods. The snows would melt and compact during the late morning/afternoon, then freeze like a rock overnight. The next morning the surface would be hard enough to run snow machines on without leaving hardly any trace on the surface. You could blat around everywhere as all the underbrush and other obstacles were buried, but by mid-morning things would start to get "slushy" again.

Depending on the "seasons", some of that snow/ice would last until the next year when it would get covered in another 4(ish) meters of snow and the process would start over again.
Used to be a treat to be hiking in the mountains in the middle of the summer and find a "north facing" crevasse filled with snowy ice. The beginnings of a new glacier (unless the planet was in a warming phase in which case it may have been the last skeletal remains of a old glacier).

But as mentioned previously, the more "white" there is, the faster the cooling process happens (if we are in a "glaciation" phase). 
The more "dark" - the faster the planet warms up (if we are in a "warming" phase).

There are so many variables that can affect those phases though. Like say a volcanic eruption which fills the atmosphere with light-blocking clouds (which would "cool" things).
How ever, all the ash in those clouds would eventually settle on the ground and when the light returned that ash would help to "warm" things up.

(We used to scatter ashes on the snow when I was a kid. It was easier to scatter the ash and let the sun melt the snow under it than to  shovel it ! You could scatter a bucketful of ashes on snow a meter deep and within a could days there'd be bare ground.)

The Pinatubo Volcanic eruption in the Philippines (1991) apparently was responsible for the planet's mean average temperate to drop by 1 degree Celsius from 1991-1993.
More than 5 million cubic meters of ash were thrown into the sky and apparently the ash cloud circled the globe several times.

Had all that ash ended up floating down to Antarctica and falling on the snow there, it could have had a devastating effect on the climate there. (Assuming of course that one prefers the year round bitter cold that is the norm there.)

Note: scientists studied the ash from the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull (Iceland) that cause havoc in Europe. They found that a millimeter thick layer of ash on top of the snow sped up the melting process but a blanket of 13(+) mms actually insulated the snow beneath it.

Just another "variable" to try and factor in when discussing climate change. I'm sure Greta blames us for those volcanic eruptions (and all the earthquakes as well).

Simply can't imagine what her "stolen" childhood would have been like with those generations of people she blames everything on. 

Then again, I can't figure out how "man" was able to affect the climate to such a degree that he "ended" the last Ice Age (roughly 11,700 years ago) ! Especially as there were only an estimated 1-10 million "people" on the planet back then (some say approx 2 million, some say 4 million and one study guesses "1-10 million").

While looking up estimates of the number of humans on the planet 12,000 years ago I came across something called the "Toba Catastrophe".
That refers to a supervolcano eruption in Indonesia around 75,000 years ago. 
"The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a global volcanic winter of six to ten years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode."
Some theorize that this resulted in the population of "homo sapiens" to drop as low as 1,000-10,000 "breeding pairs".

And - lol - while looking up the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene epoch) what did I see ? A reference to the "Milankovitch Cycles".

"The main factor at work in climate cycling is now believed to be Milankovitch cycles. These are periodic variations in regional and planetary solar radiation reaching the Earth caused by several repeating changes in the Earth's motion."

Though they hold that those cycles don't explain everything (as I mentioned in a previous post, scientists are still working on refining his theories).

 

[Bluesofa]

Thanks for your detailed reply.

6 minutes ago, kerryd said:

Unless you are an Arab. In which case the men wear the cooler "white" colour all the time while the women have to wear the much hotter black.  (Almost like that is done on purpose.)

That had never occurred to me before. Maybe that's the Arab idea of 'hot women'?

 

10 minutes ago, kerryd said:

scientists studied the ash from the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull (Iceland) that cause havoc in Europe. They found that a millimeter thick layer of ash on top of the snow sped up the melting process but a blanket of 13(+) mms actually insulated the snow beneath it.

That's an interesting situation regarding how the thickness of the ash changes from warming to cooling.

[JamesE]

3 hours ago, AussieBob said:

I think this clip could do duty as a Sandbox meme but I'd probably get arrested or banned from the country. Still...

[kerryd]

11 minutes ago, Bluesofa said:

That had never occurred to me before. Maybe that's the Arab idea of 'hot women'?

For me, it was always one of the "proofs" that wearing of certain garments was not a "choice" or a "religious requirement" but a decree by men to enforce their domination over women.
No one in their right mind would wear all black all the time in the searing sun unless they had no choice.