Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
From the “weather is not climate” department, the sea ice is in early and thick in Alaska. It makes me shiver just to look at the picture. They had to use an icebreaker to get fuel to Nome.
Figure 1. The Bering Sea region in Alaska. Anchorage is at the upper right. The Aleutian peninsula and chain runs down to the lower left. Ice covers all of Bristol Bay, and extends well out from the shore to the west. Photo Source
I fished commercially up there, in the Bering Sea. I’ve lived in a container in the Peter Pan Cannery boatyard in Dillingham, and gill netted for the noble salmon in Bristol Bay, drunk too much and worked it off laughing in a blazing hot steam bath with some Yupik guys trying to roast me out the door by cranking up the heat. I’ve made great money in driving sleet arguing with the herring regarding the eventual fate of their roe in Togiak, and seen the walrus hauled ashore in their thousands on Round Island. Those fisheries kill a man or two a year, plus the usual crushed hands and feet and the like. But I haven’t fished the January Bering Sea crab fishery, the one made famous as “The Deadliest Catch”. Figure 1 shows why I don’t do that.
The Bering Sea ice this year is in early, and it’s thick. Not only that, it’s moving south fast. The crab fleet has some $8 million dollars of gear in the water, and the ice is moving south at twenty miles a day. Usually ice comes in later and thinner, and moves south at three miles a day. Boats are tied up to the Dutch Harbor docks. At St. Paul Island, out of the photo to the left, the crab boats usually sell their loads to the processor boats. It is also totally iced in. Millions of dollars have already been sunk into moving the crab boats and the processor boats and the crab pots to Dutch. If this cold continues, the season will likely be a total bust.
My point in this post? Awe, mostly, at the damaging power of cold. As a seaman, cold holds many more terrors than heat. When enough ice builds up on a boat’s superstructure, it rolls over and men die. The sun can’t do that. The Titanic wasn’t sunk by a heat wave.
The thing about ice? You can’t do a dang thing about it. You can’t blow up a glacier, or an ice sheet like you see in the Bering Sea above. You can’t melt it. The biggest, most powerful icebreaker can’t break through more than a few feet of it. When the ice moves in, the game is over.
Now me, I’m a tropical boy. My feeling is that well-behaved ice sits peacefully in my margarita glass, making those lovely cold drips run down the outside, and giving me a brain freeze when I hold the glass to my forehead.
But when ice jumps out of my glass and starts running all around painting the landscape white and solidifying the ocean and falling on my head and freezing my … begonias, well, at that point the fun’s over. I call that “water behaving badly”.
And if you want to worry about a climate related occurrence, I certainly wouldn’t worry about the dread Thermageddon™, the long-foretold and ever-receding premature heat-death of civilization.
I’d worry about water behaving badly …
Best of the cold to my friends in Alaska, stay safe on the ocean, and my regards to all,
w.
If the Bering´s strait gets covered, after thousand of years, with ice, that would be the opportunity for americans to go back to asia!!
“I wonder what sea ice extent will be at its lowest point in summer 2012.”
Cherrypicking and nothing more.
“the ice is moving south at twenty miles an hour.”
Here in Sydney, we will be relying on the Equatorial waters melting this ice wall before it causes any problems in Sydney Harbour. However Louise may be in danger of not getting another fatuous comment off before she is entombed in ice.
In Sydney if the mercury reaches 44 degrees Centigrade, we put on a hat and walk on the shady side. No worries there, but in Nome, real problems.
It is far away from the issue here, but a Norwegian guy named Jarle Andhøy, sailing a russian boat, Nilaya,, are now near by the Rossea(Rosshavet), looking for “Berserk”. Lost 2 years ago.
In Rossea they will meet seeice, and a struggle. (My englese is not god).
They are searcking for 3 dead fiends(and reasonds), 2 years ago. A southpole-mission.
Currage ala Roald Amundsen. Follow him at nrk.no.
Not to bother others they are traveling without a emergency-transmitter. Want not to endanger others nomore.
Sorry to disturb you about this.
Just for a little balance in the “weather in not climate” arena, check the sea ice page http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
Overall, the Arctic ice is close to a record low.
The temperature near the pole is way above average.
Louise
“flu and novovirus which are more prevalent in winter. ”
All four horsemen “prefer” the cold.
Pestilence.
Famine,
War.
Death.
All increase with cold and decrease with a rise in T.
Alaska FAA Cameras:
http://akweathercams.faa.gov/wxcamsitemap.php?x=3102&y=3825&z=75
from the NWS Anchorage ice desk :
FORECAST THROUGH MONDAY…165W TO 175W…COLD NORTH WINDS THURSDAY
WILL MOVE THE ICE EDGE TO THE SOUTH 10 TO 15 NM. WINDS WILL TURN TO
NORTHEAST FRIDAY AND MOVE THE ICE TO THE SOUTHWEST 10 TO 15 NM ON
FRIDAY. THE WINDS WILL BECOME MORE EASTERLY OVER THE WEEKEND. EXPECT
ICE MOVEMENT 12 TO 15 NM TO THE SOUTH SOUTHWEST SATURDAY AND 12 TO 15
NM TO THE SOUTHWEST SUNDAY AND MONDAY. THE NET ICE MOVEMENT WILL BE
TO THE SOUTHWEST 45 TO 60 NM.
Louise, how about these:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/494582_3
A simple assessment of the immediate effect of rising temperature can be made on the assumption that particular degrees and patterns of heat or cold will continue to produce the same mortality rates as they did previously. Lack of daily statistics has prevented accurate assessment of this kind for some regions, but outside the tropics, it indicates that rises in temperature over the next few years would increase heat-related deaths less than they decrease cold-related deaths. For example, on this assumption, the rise in temperature of 3.6°F expected over the next 50 years would increase heat-related deaths in Britain by about 2,000, but reduce cold-related deaths by about 20,000.[5]
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/494582_2
Statistical analysis shows that the winter mortality rate is closely associated with cold weather. Time series analysis on deseasonalized data, using multiple single regressions,[6] shows that cold spells are closely associated with sharp increases in mortality rates. The deaths continue for many days after a cold spell ends and account for all of the excess mortality rate in winter.
…One mitigating factor in relation to heat-related death in relatively cool countries such as Britain is that increased deaths during a few days of hot weather are followed by a lower than normal mortality rate. The likely reason is that many of those dying in the heat are already seriously ill and even without heat stress would have died within the next 2 or 3 weeks.
Willis, you truly are a Renaissance Man. Or Cliff Claven, not sure which. I kid… 😀 I do enjoy reading of your experiences, and appreciate the lessons as well.
The contrariness of Thunder Bay (Ontario) continues. It is absolutely balmy here.
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/on-100_metric_e.html
It has been like this for weeks and it often gets above zero (Celsius). I’m sure that when it warms up elsewhere we’ll be freezing. Maybe the glaciers will bypass us.
Willis,
That was a piece of poetry.
You are right up there with the greats right now: Shakespeare, Yeats, Milton, Bob Dylan, Willis…..
Come on Markx,
You know that Dylan doesn’t belong in that group.
And I can remember a 3″ snowdrift in my bedroom when I was in high school during those “an Ice age is coming!” years (in a house that wasn’t built with a blizzard in mind-the only blizzard PDX has had in the last 60+years). I agree with most of the writers-give me more global warming, please!
No wonder Willis is so prolific (though not necessarily always right) — looking at his CV was a bit of paradigm-shift.
Indiana Eschenbach, I presume?
Tim Folkerts says:
January 27, 2012 at 4:01 pm
“Just for a little balance in the “weather in not climate” arena, check the sea ice page http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
Overall, the Arctic ice is close to a record low.
The temperature near the pole is way above average.”
Wow, that sounds very scary but since all this ice loss is supposed to be due to anthropogenic global warming rather than regional warming how about global sea ice, is it close to a record low too? 🙂
Jan 27, 2012 at 4:53 pm The Poems of Our Climate says:
“…Come on Markx,
You know that Dylan doesn’t belong in that group….”
Correct POOC, I simply put him in there to lift the standard a bit and let Willis know how outstanding that really was…
Louise here is yet another link to warm vs cold mortality. Lookup Indur Golkany in Wikipedia you’ll find a link to his numerous post on WUWT many about this matter and others.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/
Did Hemingway or London cast you as a character in one of their stories? How about “Old Man And The Sea”?
Do you still carry a skinning knife? Don’t tell me you have a hook.
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 27, 2012 at 12:55 pm
My CV is here if you are curious …
Looked at the CV. My take is that you are an accountant who cannot hold a job done for any length of time … 🙂
Best wishes to you and your family.
tobyglyn says:
January 27, 2012 at 5:02 pm
“…”
________________
SMACKDOWN
Bob says:
January 27, 2012 at 5:40 pm
“Did Hemingway or London cast you as a character in one of their stories? How about “Old Man And The Sea”?
Do you still carry a skinning knife? Don’t tell me you have a hook.”
___________________________
Rumor: Hook
Reason: Skinning Knife
This Week: Poet
Last Week: Peasant
Willis:
I spent the winter of 1962-63 on Adak Island running and maintaining the troposcatter communications system for R.C.A. Services Company. We lived in Quonset huts tied down with massive cables that kept them from blowing away. We bought our beer from the Navy PX at 15-cents a can and the four of us in my hut drank up the monetary equivalent of a new Volkswagen in one year. Adak is the most forlorn, windblown wasteland in the Bering Sea. In those days, the crab fleet came to Adak with two processing ships and stayed for three months docked in Smuggler’s Cove.
Each crabber (75-foot wood boats) typically brought in 3,000 pounds of King Crab every three days and was paid a dollar a pound at the dock. That was big money when a new Volkswagen cost $1,740 and a Jaguar XKE was $6,500. I made a fine living on the side servicing the crab boat radars. They couldn’t find their crab pot buoys without radar. It took me a couple of trips to the boats to get the hang of their economy. I charged my first customer $25 for repairing his radar. The captain was so embarrassed at my paltry fee he threw in a couple fifths of Canadian Club and three, ten-pound King Crabs. I later asked a deck hand what they were used to paying in their home port of Seattle. He said, “$150 minimum just to come look at the thing and half the idiots we’re sent can’t fix it.” I fancied things up pretty quickly after that.
In hot places where they may not have air conditioning, they can use inexpensive fans, as I do when it gets to hot.
A few days ago I was reading about the over two hundred deaths in Northern India due to the cold.
Willis, Right On!
Louise the pretend intellect says:
January 27, 2012 at 1:04 pm
I have yet to see any reliable statistics that enable us to see whether a warmer or colder climate will lead to more deaths (across the globe) in the future.
Answer: that is because you rely on non-logic, incapable of your own thought.
It has been reported that tens of thousands of elderly french people died as a direct consequence of a particularly warm summer (2009?). I have also heard statements that there were a number (again in the thousands) of extra deaths due to the cold in the UK in 2010 (although not directly due to hypothermia as some have claimed). Does anyone have a link to actual facts rather than political spin on this issue?
Answer: During the “little ice age” people in Europe were eating their own children to survive. Once again you are incompetent and reveling your ignorant babble.
It is all too easy to say cold kills more than heat does, surely that depends upon where ‘most’ of the population happens to live? Those in the sub-sahara are unlikely to suffer frostbite just as those in Alaska are unlikely to suffer sun-stroke.
Answer: Great populations hang out in Antarctica. Maybe you should too.
Unbelievable you survive your own inadequacies. Take a trip without a pill.