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predicting the future...

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Predicting the future has been a pass-time for offals of birds readers, Christians, Nostradamuses, “intelligence agencies” and super-computers. Every time a new prediction is made with more “precision”, someone goes on the barricade and shouts that the sea level rise predicted for 2100 won’t be as bad, because new calculations show the previous estimate to be 25 per cent over the new recalibrated predictions. Hurrah!, claims an article in RT, “F*ck Climate Crisis” is the picture used to demonstrate how wrong “we’ve been so far”…

 

So, instead of drowning in 2100, your city by the sea will become totally submerged, only by 2150. Hurrah! Meanwhile the same experts from Utrecht University told us that 2035 will be a turning point as well… (https://www.uu.nl/en/news/deadline-for-climate-action-act-decisively-bef...)

 

Strong action needed to keep warming below 2 °C

Deadline for climate action: act decisively before 2035

If governments don’t act decisively by 2035 to fight climate change, humanity could cross a point of no return after which limiting global warming below 2 °C in 2100 will be unlikely, according to a new study by scientists in the UK and the Netherlands. The research also shows the deadline to limit warming to 1.5 °C has already passed, unless radical climate action is taken. The study is published today (30 August 2018) in the European Geosciences Union journal Earth System Dynamics.

 

So what’s the beef?

When looking at the maths of the new prediction one can see some nifty foot-work that would make Fred Astaire jealous. But the most interesting predictions come from the US GLOBAL TRENDS — A MORE CONTESTED WORLD 2040, A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE COUNCIL. It is designed to make sure the big boy USA stays on the top (and only) bunk.

 

“Intelligence does not claim infallibility for its prophecies. Intelligence merely holds that the answer which it gives is the most deeply and objectively based and carefully considered estimate.”

Sherman Kent

Founder of the Office of National Estimates

 

 

 

So there… And not funnily, these estimates consider global warming as a major influence of the future that could help us decide who we’re going to bash on the head or in the arse, for trying to be better than us…

 

Meanwhile, “Can we engineer our way out of the planetary problems we’ve engineered our way into?” is the subject of a small book by Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: the Nature of the Future.

“Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times
  
That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
 
In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

 

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Of course many of us, fossil fuel burners, won't see the reality that we’ve created. But this would be delusional, wouldn’t it? We’ve known about OUR modifications we’ve made to the little planet we call Earth for yonks, haven't we?…

 

Just the other day, after we bypass, Khloé Kardashian photo shows how they’re peddling an unhealthy lie to women, we were informed by the “Whole Earth Catalog”… See:

 

In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog”: a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue’s first edition.

At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the “Whole Earth Catalog” offered a vision for a new social order—one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like “Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia,” and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics” and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator. “We are as gods and might as well get used to it” read the first catalogue’s statement of purpose. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

The communes eventually collapsed, for the usual reasons, which included poor resource management, factionalism, and financial limitations. But the “Whole Earth Catalog,” which published quarterly through 1971 and sporadically thereafter, garnered a cult following that included founders of Airbnb and Stripe and also early employees of Facebook. Brand went on to work as a journalist, documenting the burgeoning hacker culture, and co-founded a small galaxy of publications and companies. Among them were CoEvolution Quarterly, a journal focussed on environmentalism; the “Whole Earth Software Catalog,” a digitally oriented update to the original; the Hackers Conference; the well, one of the earliest online communities; and a corporate-consulting outfit, the Global Business Network, that emphasized scenario-planning with a dash of optimistic futurism.

Brand doesn’t have much to do with the current startup ecosystem, but younger entrepreneurs regularly reach out to him, perhaps in search of a sense of continuity or simply out of curiosity about the industry’s origins. The spirit of the catalogue—its irreverence toward institutions, its emphasis on autodidacticism, and its sunny view of computers as tools for personal liberation––appeals to a younger generation of technologists. Brand himself has become a regional icon, a sort of human Venn diagram, celebrated for bridging the hippie counterculture and the nascent personal-computer industry. In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs described the “Whole Earth Catalog” as “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.” Brand’s centrality to Silicon Valley history was cemented, in 2006, with the publication of Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” A biography is in the works, as is a documentary film.

 

Read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-complicated-legacy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog

 

 

Picture at top, Pluto and Proserpine… More to come

 

GL.

 

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the rape of the earth...

Name of Object:

The Rape of Proserpina

Location:

Rome, Italy

Holding Museum:

Borghese Gallery

About Borghese Gallery, Rome

Date of Object:

1621–1622

 

 

Source: [http://baroqueart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;BAR;it;Mus11;4;en&cp]

 

The work was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese from a young Bernini after he had completed Aeneas and Anchises. The group was then given to Ludovico Ludovisi, the new cardinal-nephew of Pope Gregory XV, who had succeeded Paul V Borghese in 1621. This commission was an act of high diplomacy by which Scipione hoped to win favour with the hostile cardinal, who was also an avid collector with a splendid suburban villa beside Villa Borghese.


The subject shows Pluto, god of the underworld, abducting Proserpina, daughter of Ceres and Jupiter. The myth is related to the fertility of the earth and therefore could symbolise Scipione's desire for the rebirth of the Borghese family after the death of his father.


The movement of the figures is a vortex of contrasting forms related to late Mannerist methods, permeated by an expressive theatricality that is typically Baroque.
Bernini freezes the action at the height of the abduction, allowing him to best describe the tension in the bodies, stressing both the virile potency of the god and the sensual femininity of the nymph.


In her futile struggle against the brutal violence, the nymph pushes her hand into Pluto's face in an attempt to free herself from his grip, while the god, thrust forward, clutches her with a triumphant expression beneath his thick beard.
A tear on the girl's desperate face and Pluto's hands sunk gleefully into her thighs are two examples of extraordinary naturalism, a triumph of technique transforming hard marble into soft flesh.


As in other works, Bernini seeks a painted style for the surfaces, applying different finishes to the flesh of the god and the nymph, and creating a hair effect for Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the underworld, using a gradine, a tool normally used in an intermediate stage of marble sculpting.


The work, which belonged to the Ludovisi family, was acquired by the Italian State in 1908, and placed in Villa Borghese alongside other groups by the young Bernini that were commissioned by Cardinal Scipione.

View Short Description

Original Owner:

Cardinal Scipione Borghese, gifted to Cardinal Ludovisi



Source: [http://baroqueart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;BAR;it;Mus11;4;en&cp]

 

The myth is more than “related to the fertility of the earth” but in the alternating seasons due to Pluto freeing and sharing Proserpine during summer to the surface of the earth while Proserpine spent winter in Hades, the hell-kingdom of Pluto. Mercury was chosen to lead Proserpine out of her gloomy prison. Then the skies turned blue and sunny, grass green, bird sung — and joy was all around. By Autumn, Mercury would take Proserpine back to hell…

What is remarkable is that the men, RICH Cardinals of the Catholic Church, did not mind spending a pretty penny coming from passing the plates amongst the poor plebs on Sundays, on what would have been “soft porn” in these days, while being versed into the Greek and Roman myths.

Bernini, possibly one of the best visionary sculptor ever, obliged. Meanwhile this is a powerful reminder of the government men in Kanbra, poor in imagination, loaded with testosterones and lacking intellect…

 

And then cometh Erisichthon (old spelling from Classical Myths)…

 

Erysichthon

by James Hunter

That is, the tearer up of the earth. Erysichthon was the son of Triopas. He was an arrogant and impious man who dared to fell timber in the sacred grove of Demeter. As punishment, Demeter sent Famine to dwell in Erysichthon's entrails, so that he was continuously tormented by an insatiable hunger. He ate up all the food in sight, and sold all his possessions to buy more, but still he was not satisfied. Finally he sold his own daughter, Mestra.

Mestra appealed to Poseidon, who had taken her virginity, for assistance, and Poseidon granted her the power to change into any shape she wished, thus enabling her to escape her new master. Her father discovered her ability and sold her many times thereafter. Even this was not enough to assuage his raging hunger, however, and he eventually began to gnaw upon his own limbs, continuing his desperate quest for food until he had consumed himself entirely.

 

https://pantheon.org/articles/e/erysichthon.html

 

Note: picture at top of the sculpture by Bernini, taken about 1900.

 

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the rituals of unpredictability...

Gambling has been one of humankind's passion. Gambling is natural. Say spiders bet on their web catching an insect in a ritual of unpredictability. Build a web and hope. It has worked for millions of years. Then humans come along and spray toxic chemicals that change the rituals: no more insect to catch. 

 

But overall, in our wisdom, using the best computing power available, we cannot predict the weather more than three weeks ahead — and this is stretching the probabilities to below 70 per cent. So we are told by a new study that :

 

Publication in Science Advances

 

Current climate model simulations overestimate future sea-level rise

 

 

The melting rate of the Antarctic ice sheet is mainly controlled by the increase of ocean temperatures surrounding Antarctica. Using a new, higher-resolution climate model simulation, scientists from Utrecht University found a much slower ocean temperature increase compared to current simulations with a coarser resolution. Consequently, the projected sea-level rise in 100 years is about 25% lower than expected from the current simulations. These results were published in the journal Science Advances.

Estimates for future sea-level rise are based on a large ensemble of climate model simulations. The output from these simulations helps to understand future climate change and its effects on the sea level. Climate researchers continually aim to improve these models, for example by using a much higher spatial resolution that takes more details into account. “High-resolution simulations can determine the ocean circulation much more accurately,” says Prof. Henk Dijkstra. Together with his PhD candidate René van Westen, he has been studying ocean currents in high-resolution climate model simulations over the past few years.

 

Ocean eddies

 

The new high-resolution model takes into account ocean eddy processes. An eddy is a large (10 – 200 km) swirling and turbulent feature in the ocean circulation, which contributes to the transport of heat and salt. Adding ocean eddies into the simulation leads to a more realistic representation of the ocean temperatures surrounding Antarctica, which is key for determining the mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet. “The Antarctic ice sheet is surrounded by ice shelves which reduce the flow of land ice into the ocean,” Van Westen explains. “Higher ocean temperatures around Antarctica increase the melting of these ice shelves, resulting in an acceleration of land ice into the ocean and consequently leading to more sea-level rise.”

The current climate model simulations, which do not take ocean eddies into account, project that the ocean temperatures around Antarctica are increasing under climate change. The new high-resolution simulation shows quite different behaviour and some regions near Antarctica even cool under climate change. “These regions appear to be more resilient under climate change,” says Van Westen. Dijkstra adds: “One obtains a very different temperature response due to ocean-eddy effects.”  

 

Supercomputer

 

The new high-resolution model projects a smaller mass loss as a result of ice-shelf melt: only one third compared to current climate models. This reduces the projected global sea-level rise by 25% in the upcoming 100 years, Van Westen mentions. “Although sea levels will continue to rise, this is good news for low-lying regions. In our simulation, ocean eddies play a crucial role in sea-level projections, showing that these small-scale ocean features can have a global effect.” It took the team about one year to complete the high-resolution model simulation on the national supercomputer at SURFsara in Amsterdam. Dijkstra: “These high-resolution models require an immense amount of computation, but are valuable as they reveal smaller-scale physical processes which should be taken into account when studying climate change.”

 

 

At this stage, the main equation for global warming is add CO2, methane and NOxes, into the atmosphere and the bugger will warm up. Now comes the million dollars question: warming up, sure, but by how much? And what are the consequences?

 

It appears that the new study has discounted the melting of Antarctica to nil or there about, because of the "eddies". My feeling is that some learned idiot punched-in the wrong data into the most accurate computer on the planet and dismissed Antarctica altogether. 

 

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I could be wrong so there will be more to come...

 

 

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ausgleichsbehälter...

If you have central heating, like we had in Europe, you would have an Ausgleichsbehälter — or an unsealed large enough container dedicated to absorb the expanding water (steric effect) as the system heats up. It's simple. For planet Earth, the calculations of the rise of the water on the massive surface of the oceans is a bit more complex as there are different levels of heating (expansion/contraction) depending on the depth and the temperature added to by climatic changes. For example the minimum volume of water is at 4 degrees Celsius (maximum density of water), thus melting ice water will contract until the water reaches this temperature, then the water will expand again. Deep water will not warm up like water on the surface. Thus the variations in expansion to measure the future sea level under global warming conditions become complex. As well the variation in salinity interfere with the expansion. Here is some calculations:

 

 

 

 Diagnosing the Steric effect in sea surface height

 

Changes in steric sea level are caused when changes in the density of the water column imply an expansion or contraction of the column. It is essentially produced through surface heating/cooling and to a lesser extent through non-linear effects of the equation of state (cabbeling, thermobaricity...). Non-Boussinesq models contain all ocean effects within the ocean acting on the sea level. In particular, they include the steric effect. In contrast, Boussinesq models, such as NEMO, conserve volume, rather than mass, and so do not properly represent expansion or contraction. The steric effect is therefore not explicitely represented. This approximation does not represent a serious error with respect to the flow field calculated by the model [Greatbatch, 1994], but extra attention is required when investigating sea level, as steric changes are an important contribution to local changes in sea level on seasonal and climatic time scales. This is especially true for investigation into sea level rise due to global warming.

Fortunately, the steric contribution to the sea level consists of a spatially uniform component that can be diagnosed by considering the mass budget of the world ocean [Greatbatch, 1994]. In order to better understand how global mean sea level evolves and thus how the steric sea level can be diagnosed, we compare, in the following, the non-Boussinesq and Boussinesq cases.

Let denote $ \mathcal{M}$ the total mass of liquid seawater ( $ \mathcal{M}=\int_D \rho dv$), $ \mathcal{V}$ the total volume of seawater ( $ \mathcal{V}=\int_D dv$), $ \mathcal{A}$ the total surface of the ocean ( $ \mathcal{A}=\int_S ds$), $ \bar{\rho}$ the global mean seawater (in situ) density ( $ \bar{\rho}= 1/\mathcal{V} \int_D \rho dv$), and $ \bar{\eta}$ the global mean sea level ( $ \bar{\eta}=1/\mathcal{A}\int_S \eta ds$).

A non-Boussinesq fluid conserves mass. It satisfies the following relations:

 

\begin{displaymath}\begin{split}\mathcal{M} &= \mathcal{V} \;\bar{\rho} \mathcal{V} &= \mathcal{A} \;\bar{\eta} \end{split}\end{displaymath}(11.3)

 

 

Temporal changes in total mass is obtained from the density conservation equation :

 

$\displaystyle \frac{1}{e_3} \partial_t ( e_3 \rho) + \nabla( \rho \textbf{U} ) = \left. \frac{\textit{emp}}{e_3}\right\vert _\textit{surface}$(11.4)

 

 

where $ \rho$ is the in situ density, and emp the surface mass exchanges with the other media of the Earth system (atmosphere, sea-ice, land). Its global averaged leads to the total mass change

 

$\displaystyle \partial_t \mathcal{M} = \mathcal{A} \;\overline{\textit{emp}}$(11.5)

 

 

where $ \overline{\textit{emp}}=\int_S \textit{emp} ds$ is the net mass flux through the ocean surface. Bringing (11.5) and the time derivative of (11.3) together leads to the evolution equation of the mean sea level

 

$\displaystyle \partial_t \bar{\eta} = \frac{\overline{\textit{emp}}}{ \bar{\rho}} - \frac{\mathcal{V}}{\mathcal{A}} \;\frac{\partial_t \bar{\rho} }{\bar{\rho}}$(11.6)

 

 

The first term in equation (11.6) alters sea level by adding or subtracting mass from the ocean. The second term arises from temporal changes in the global mean density; $ i.e.$ from steric effects.

In a Boussinesq fluid, $ \rho$ is replaced by $ \rho_o$ in all the equation except when $ \rho$ appears multiplied by the gravity ($ i.e.$ in the hydrostatic balance of the primitive Equations). In particular, the mass conservation equation, (11.4), degenerates into the incompressibility equation:

 

$\displaystyle \frac{1}{e_3} \partial_t ( e_3 ) + \nabla( \textbf{U} ) = \left. \frac{\textit{emp}}{\rho_o e_3}\right\vert _ \textit{surface}$(11.7)

 

 

and the global average of this equation now gives the temporal change of the total volume,

 

$\displaystyle \partial_t \mathcal{V} = \mathcal{A} \;\frac{\overline{\textit{emp}}}{\rho_o}$(11.8)

 

 

Only the volume is conserved, not mass, or, more precisely, the mass which is conserved is the Boussinesq mass, $ \mathcal{M}_o = \rho_o \mathcal{V}$. The total volume (or equivalently the global mean sea level) is altered only by net volume fluxes across the ocean surface, not by changes in mean mass of the ocean: the steric effect is missing in a Boussinesq fluid.

Nevertheless, following [Greatbatch, 1994], the steric effect on the volume can be diagnosed by considering the mass budget of the ocean. The apparent changes in $ \mathcal{M}$, mass of the ocean, which are not induced by surface mass flux must be compensated by a spatially uniform change in the mean sea level due to expansion/contraction of the ocean [Greatbatch, 1994]. In others words, the Boussinesq mass, $ \mathcal{M}_o$, can be related to $ \mathcal{M}$, the total mass of the ocean seen by the Boussinesq model, via the steric contribution to the sea level, $ \eta_s$, a spatially uniform variable, as follows:

 

$\displaystyle \mathcal{M}_o = \mathcal{M} + \rho_o \eta_s \mathcal{A}$(11.9)

 

 

Any change in $ \mathcal{M}$ which cannot be explained by the net mass flux through the ocean surface is converted into a mean change in sea level. Introducing the total density anomaly, $ \mathcal{D}= \int_D d_a dv$, where $ d_a= (\rho -\rho_o ) / \rho_o$ is the density anomaly used in NEMO (cf. §5.8.1) in (11.9) leads to a very simple form for the steric height:

 

$\displaystyle \eta_s = - \frac{1}{\mathcal{A}} \mathcal{D}$(11.10)

 

 

The above formulation of the steric height of a Boussinesq ocean requires four remarks. First, one can be tempted to define $ \rho_o$ as the initial value of $ \mathcal{M}/\mathcal{V}$, $ i.e.$ set $ \mathcal{D}_{t=0}=0$, so that the initial steric height is zero. We do not recommend that. Indeed, in this case $ \rho_o$ depends on the initial state of the ocean. Since $ \rho_o$ has a direct effect on the dynamics of the ocean (it appears in the pressure gradient term of the momentum equation) it is definitively not a good idea when inter-comparing experiments. We better recommend to fixe once for all $ \rho_o$ to $ 1035\;Kg m^{-3}$. This value is a sensible choice for the reference density used in a Boussinesq ocean climate model since, with the exception of only a small percentage of the ocean, density in the World Ocean varies by no more than 2$ \%$ from this value (Gill [1982], page 47).

Second, we have assumed here that the total ocean surface, $ \mathcal{A}$, does not change when the sea level is changing as it is the case in all global ocean GCMs (wetting and drying of grid point is not allowed).

Third, the discretisation of (11.10) depends on the type of free surface which is considered. In the non linear free surface case, $ i.e.$ key_ vvl defined, it is given by

 

$\displaystyle \eta_s = - \frac{ \sum_{i, j, k} d_a\; e_{1t} e_{2t} e_{3t} } { \sum_{i, j, k} e_{1t} e_{2t} e_{3t} }$(11.11)

 

 

whereas in the linear free surface, the volume above the z=0 surface must be explicitly taken into account to better approximate the total ocean mass and thus the steric sea level:

 

$\displaystyle \eta_s = - \frac{ \sum_{i, j, k} d_a\; e_{1t}e_{2t}e_{3t} + \su... ... \eta } {\sum_{i, j, k} e_{1t}e_{2t}e_{3t} + \sum_{i, j} e_{1t}e_{2t} \eta }$(11.12)

 

 

The fourth and last remark concerns the effective sea level and the presence of sea-ice. In the real ocean, sea ice (and snow above it) depresses the liquid seawater through its mass loading. This depression is a result of the mass of sea ice/snow system acting on the liquid ocean. There is, however, no dynamical effect associated with these depressions in the liquid ocean sea level, so that there are no associated ocean currents. Hence, the dynamically relevant sea level is the effective sea level, $ i.e.$ the sea level as if sea ice (and snow) were converted to liquid seawater [Campin et al., 2008]. However, in the current version of NEMO the sea-ice is levitating above the ocean without mass exchanges between ice and ocean. Therefore the model effective sea level is always given by $ \eta + \eta_s$, whether or not there is sea ice present.

In AR5 outputs, the thermosteric sea level is demanded. It is steric sea level due to changes in ocean density arising just from changes in temperature. It is given by:

 

$\displaystyle \eta_s = - \frac{1}{\mathcal{A}} \int_D d_a(T,S_o,p_o) dv$(11.13)

 

 

where $ S_o$ and $ p_o$ are the initial salinity and pressure, respectively.

Both steric and thermosteric sea level are computed in diaar5.F90 which needs the key_ diaar5 defined to be called.

 

 

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