People send me stuff. This made my day, so I thought it was worth sharing. Remember this?
New pictures of the hole in Yamal – and Pingo was its name-o
Matt Sexton writes via our contact form:
I just wanted to share with you a story that happened to me last night. My HOA had a community potluck and someone brought up the holes that “Had suddenly begun appearing in Russia”. Thanks to your site and the story about those holes, and was able to inform him about the real facts behind what was happening there. I was a little shocked, he is an otherwise intelligent guy, but, I couldn’t believe that he had latched onto the sensational aspects of the story without reading all the facts.
Either way, I thought you would like to hear that your site has positive effects even around small time, everyday things like a HOA potluck.
– Matt
Thanks Matt.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“and though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all” (Lennon-McCartney)
Now they how many holes it takes to scare them awfully, now!
Please excuse my ignorance here at the southernmost tip of darkest Africa, but what is a “HOA potluck”?
[HOA= Home Owners Association – potluck is “bring a dish to community dinner” – mod]
Home Owners Association
I’ll second Matt Sexton’s commendation.
A year ago, a Harvard-educated physician friend telephoned in a panic after being subjected to an alarmist lecture that included sea-level rise. My friend owns a second home on a small creek and had been convinced by the alarmist that his property was in imminent danger.
WUWT’s Reference Pages enabled me to quickly locate a reputable academic source for actual sea level rise. As a result, I was able to point out that 3.2 mm/year (+/- 0.4mm) hardly qualifies as the nightmare scenario that had been painted by the lecturer aboard the cruise ship.
For me, WUWT is an invaluable tool in the fight to counter the incessant alarmist propaganda machine.
Presumably “HOA” = home-owners association, a group of folks that own homes in a specific neighborhood.
Potluck is a meal in which everybody brings something to share and how good the food is depends upon how lucky you are.
Yes and the next phase is to realize you are addicted to WUWT and the efficiency in internet-based learning itself.
Vincent says:
August 6, 2014 at 10:44 am
Please excuse my ignorance here at the southernmost tip of darkest Africa, but what is a “HOA potluck”?
———————–
HOA is HomeOwners Association
Potluck is a dinner where everyone brings a “pot” of food and share.
“Nature” has declared the holes to be due to methane eruptions, not pingos:
http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-siberian-crater-attributed-to-methane-1.15649
While I’ve been skeptical of the pingo explanation, their evidence of a methane eruption seems really weak. The scientists based their methane eruption hypothesis on the fact that methane concentrations were quite high at the bottom of the hole. However, I would guess that if you dug a hole 70 meters down into methane-hydrate rich permafrost and exposed it to warm summer temperatures, you’ll end up with high methane concentrations even in the absence of an eruption.
Here’s SciAm’s alarmist take on the holes in Yamal:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-craters-are-just-the-beginning-of-arctic-surprises/
I used WUWT to point out to my kids that the propaganda message they got at school from a guest (activist) lecture about a hot spot in the mid troposphere from human-caused CO2 never happened. I also took the opportunity to point out to them what 400 ppm in the atmosphere is when expressed as a percent. We need some organized content tool to re-educate ourselves and loved ones in place of random responses to the distortion science biz. Thanks again!
Can someone help me out with this?
I know Wikipedia is not a reference (or, indeed, a reliable source of information for many topics). However, lacking knowledge about these things, I looked up Pingos, and found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingo.
I really can’t see a relation to the Yamal holes and the images in the Pingo article. Is there a better source of information that would clearly demonstrate this?
Thanks,
And here was the firs post I think.
🙂
And here is the link I forgot.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2006/11/17/welcome-to-watts-up-with-that/
I met a police officer over the weekend who was stunned to hear the temperature of the Earth was the same now as almost 18 years ago. I was able to refer him to the recent article by Monckton. Perfect timing. He said he had been completely sucked into the alarmist narrative and, after a brief tour, is now hungrily reading through the resources available here.
Thanks WUWT for ‘being here’.
Neil: not sure what you’re looking at but the relation is fairly clear to me. Granted the holes aren’t exactly the same altho it is fairly simmple to see that the creation mechanism is identical. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find that some AGW folks have changed the Wiki pics to some that look less like the Yamal holes just to sow confusion and doubt…..
Neil: now I see your point. The Wiki pics are either un’erupted’ or very old pingos. They do not show the characteristic hole as they remain simply expanded and enlarged, or have backfilled with stuff (highly technical term there…) over time. Either way, think of it as an Earth Zit.
Speaking of knowledge holes, it is possible to keep track of commercial shipping using the vaunted Northwest Passage shipping lane in that mostly ice free alarmist reality distortion of the Arctic? I know the tracking number will be precisely zero most of the time, but it would be good to track it possibly with global maritime shipping stats and maritime insurance rates. The alarmists have a purpose in propping up distortion from time to time with the falsehood that there really is an emerging shipping lane there. It serves a purpose for them to fool the low information types. See Bloomberg etc for examples as though it really is a business story.
All these polite definitions of HOA. Has nobody else ever had to deal with an HOA?
All this goes to underline that Some of the People can be Fooled All of the Time. Unfortunately it is fact, and there appears that there is little that we can do except pity them.
Resouceguy, the Canadian government already does. Any vessel attempting a Northwest Passage transit must register with Canada. In 2013, there were 23, including an ice strengthened freighter and two ice strengthened cruise ships. The freighter and one cruise ship made it. The other cruise ship and several other vessels had to be rescued by ice breakers. Some vessels turned around. A French vessel was abandoned for the winter and started an attempt to get out on July 25.
Neil says:
August 6, 2014 at 11:09 am
At this point, I’m not convinced the Yamal things are pingos. I have no idea if they have a name.
The pingo process seems to me outght to be a pretty slow process, and that when things melt, we should be left with a pond of water, almost up to the land surface, especially since other holes are full.
The terrain looks very flat, so that would make artesian water flow unlikely, and would be the only way water could cause something like that to happen in days.
OTOH, I’m also not convinced that methane is a key player, though I can see
some possibilities.
As so often happens, the meaning of “potluck” has changed from its use when first attested in 16th century England. Then, it meant “the luck of the pot”, in that an unexpectedly arriving guest had to take his or her chances with whatever the host had available to eat. Its modern American meaning of “communal meal in which everybody brings something” stems from the 19th century Northwest, derived without changing the word by association with the NW Coast Indian traditions of potlatch. We no longer finish off the evening meal with displays of conspicuous consumption such as ceremonially killing a slave with a weapon designed for that purpose, however.
The casual nature of these encounters with nearly-ubiquitous ignorance highlights how important it is that people arm themselves; it serves, alsow, as a reminder to writers past and future, that they should be as factual and unbiassed as they can in reporting. You owe it to the readership to fact-check, spell-check, self-check (for bias).
Not everybody’s articles need be as laden with facts and support as Chris Monckton’s (for an ideal example), but that’s the right direction.
Bully for you, Matt Sexton! And good job to all who try to shed light into the vast, creepy darkness surrounding the profiteers of anthropogenic climate change.
unbiassed probably should be spelled “unbiased”.
They look.like the pintos I studied in Geomorphogy back in the 1960s