Brace yourselves; It’s worse than we thought.

We have to resort to “warm water is melting glaciers” to keep the gravy train on the tracks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090923/ap_on_sc/us_sci_big_melt_2

Seth has lost his hold on reality. He needs an intervention.

Not so much “eclectic” as allowing personal freedom. You are free here in the USA to use SI units if they work better for you, or any other units you find convenient. For most folks, things with sizes in the 1 to 10 range are easiest and up to 100 works, but is uncomfortable. So 1 lb of butter or 1 gallon of milk are more convenient than 500 gm or 4000 ml. (Though 4 L is workable, but the 250 ml cup of coffee is a pain…) I regularly use both systems, picking the one that is easiest for any particular task. BTW, this effect is why many Europeans still ask for a pound of butter when it is 500 gms that is being sold.

Now, for ‘in your head math’ it turns out that numbers with lots of factors work better since you end up doing fractions eventually and that helps a great deal. That 1, 2, 5, 10 set of factors is not so useful when you need a 1/3 of it… and don’t have a calculator. It is also the case that if you do fractions you can hold a much greater precision and accuracy all the way through your math even if done with pencil and paper or computer. Then you only take a conversion error once at the end when you convert to the less precise decimal notation. 1/3 is exact. 0.333333 not so much…

You find 360 used as the basis for many “traditional” units, so you get lots of factors to work with. (The yard is 36 inches, or 360 1/10 ths. The standard of precision for many uses is the 1/10 th inch; though for other uses you can use the 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/16 or even 1/12 divisions if you like) Many of these can be exactly engraved with a compass. That, btw, is why the F scale is the range it is. Ease of engraving the glass from two temperature standards via division with a compass.

Another “feature” is that since fractions are rather precise, you don’t end up in the land of False Precision by believing all those digits on the electronic display. Most of the time you ought to set “fixed 2″ if at all possible since most of the time the majority of the digits on the calculator are a lie. Few things were ever input as 10 digit or more numbers… But if you end up with a fraction like 3/12457 you know it is exactly correct and precise.

Then there is also the rather interesting factoid that you can make an English Foot (via the Rod) with fairly decent precision any time you want anywhere on the planet with a couple of sticks, a bit of string, and a night sky. Oh, and you get a clock and time standard to boot…

So lets say we had a new ice age and civilization took a big hit. Think it might be convenient to be able to make a very accurate time standard and a very accurate length standard (and thus derived very accurate area and volume standards; that then yield very accurate mass and weight standards, and…) using little more than “found materials”? That is the virtue of the English Rod (or Pole) and thus the foot.

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/making-an-english-foot/

Then there is also the curious factoid that the English foot is rather directly related to the size of the globe. From:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/chasing-the-greek-foot/

Where we find that the Greek foot of antiquity is almost exactly the same as the English foot and the Minoan foot … think about it… Beginning to realize that this is not about the shoe size of an English king?

…the Greeks and Egyptians had a measure named a ‘foot’ (pous) that is almost the same as the English foot. (Within a couple of mm 304.8 for the Engish, 304 mm for the Minoan, 308.4 for the Attic, 300 for the Egyptian and Phoenician, etc.)

Take a look at the Minoan vs English. 0.8 mm difference over a few thousand years of history. I’ve got to think that being buried in volcanic debris might mess up your calibration in the 4th decimal place too…

This lead me to the factoid that if you take the earth’s equatorial circumference in ‘feet’ (English) as 131479724.6 (from the wiki metric number, converted) and divide it by 360 x 1000 (call it 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 100 or call it 360 degrees x 1000) you get: 365.2214573

(If the English foot were 304.7828 mm, which rounds to 304.8, the agreement would be 100.0000% which is inside the error band of 304.8 so it is possible that the original English foot is exact and the metric conversion is not precise enough to capture that…)

So please, do not bother to tell those of us who admire the strength of science as done in the past, who admire the elegance of the way it was done, and who are astonished at what was done with little more than sticks and stones 4000+ years ago, that there is anything at all inferior or inadequate about the quality of the minds that created those systems nor the quality of the product they produced.

If you do, you might just end up with a lecture on the folly of False Precision, the benefits of fractions in math vs decimal math, and the incredibly poor science as done today (i.e. GIStemp – Calculators Gone Wild).

I will, however, be polite about it and not point out that the original meter was measured wrong, twice, and is not in conformance with the original definition and so it can not be recreated via simple means and is more poorly related to the polar circumference than the English Foot is to the equatorial circumference…

Oh, and for advanced credit: Want to know why there were several different cubits and related measures in the ancient world?

They didn’t have a lot of calculating equipment, but did need to deal with irrational numbers in construction and navigation. So they often built those numbers into the measuring device. You used one cubit for the sides, another for the hypotenuse on a pyramid, for example. You find relationships of root 2 and Pi in different rulers.

There were also different lengths used for latitude vs longitude distances to allow for the variation due to the oblateness of the planet in surveying. There were also differences based on which circle of latitude you were at ( “N” degrees gives a different absolute distance…) So it wasn’t so much that the ancients were ignorant and had not any standard length; it was more that they had a very good standard and then made self calculating rulers for other uses based on it. We still do this to some extent with the shipping nautical mile. It is a unit of arc, the exact length of which changes based on your latitude and the local oblateness. On a ship, you can measure the arc. Actual length, not so well…

This same technique is still used today in casting too. The rulers used to make the molds are “adapted” by the expected contraction of the metal as it sets. You make a 10 unit mold (that is 10 units on the measure) that is really larger than 10 SI units so that the final product is, in fact, 10 SI units. It saves endlessly doing the same calculation with the same coefficients over and over. This was even more important in the age prior to calculators and when few people did much math. Still important in casting shops.

We were just a bit too daft to figure out the elegance of the system for a few hundred years…

The more I have looked into ancient metrology, the more impressed I have become. And no, I will never, ever, give it up. They worked too hard to make it “just right”… It deserves preserving.

From the latest paper on the GRACE ice-mass measurements:

“We find that realistic constraints to the trend in ice mass loss derived from GRACE data determine a range of variation substantially wider than commonly stated, ranging from an important ice loss of -209 Gtyr-1 to an accumulation of +88 Gtyr-1 in Antarctica, and Greenland ablation at a rate between -122 and -50 Gtyr-1. However, if we adopt the set of most probable Earth parameters, we infer a substantial mass loss in both regions, -171 +/- 39 and -101 +/- 22 Gtyr-1 for Antarctica and Greenland, respectively.”

Geophysical Journal International, Volume 172, Issue 1, pp. 18-30, 2008

So although there are uncertainties mainly, as you say, from quantifying the post-glacial rebound, GRACE indicates that both Antarctica and Greenland are probably losing ice mass.

“… so why are the penguins dying. maybe because the scientists have “tagged” 70,000 and unknowingly interfered with normal penguin functions.”

I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I sure don’t want sex with any TAGGED penguin!

http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3735

RR Kampen (08:01:32) ” http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/sea_ice.html “

That article further clarifies that although many scientists may be playing politics for power & funding, many of them may be aware of the truth about north-south oscillations and the hydrologic cycle (even if they’re just starting to try to imagine the physics involved).

Good point — there’s too much focus on temperatures without sufficient awareness of, focus on, respect for, & appreciation of the power & complexities of the hydrologic cycle.

This is absolutely clear visually if you plot the areas under the graphs.

I suspect that the difference at the end of the year would be huge.

“So, Antarctica must be like the negative zone, where everything works backwards.”

My God, It’s all clear now. Antarctica is at the South pole – opposite polarity you see. Comparing its behaviour to the Arctic is like comparing an electron to a positron. In the North, re-radiated IR causes the ground to warm, but in the Antarctic the CO2 re-radiates anti-IR which removes energy from the electrons in the ground, thus making it cooler. Therefore this cooling is an indication of rising CO2 levels. If we reduce CO2, the temperatures will start to rise.

I shall start working on my research paper immediately.