Global Warming Ice Age

The first of June and it is cold again. Of course cold is relative. The temperature today is what I considered warm back in January, but for June it is now cool, no, cold. At 1:00 p.m. it has risen to 67 degrees F. All this attention to cold has been brought on by my reading. I’m attacking a group of books the titles of which I have seen for years but never attempted to read. The latest is South: The Story of Shackleton’s Expedition. The adventure took place during World War One 1914-17. The short version is Ernest Shackleton’s journey to be the first too find the south pole by land. How he and his crew ever survived this trip to frozen hell is nothing short of a miracle.

Throughout the read I kept thinking about how those who truly believe that global warming will cause Antarctica to melt are daft. I recommend theses people read this book and then tell me you still believe it will happen because we use fossil fuels. I believe the world will exhaust its supply of fossil fuel long before Antarctica melts. As long as earth is tilted as it is, and as long as the south pole is where it is, at the bottom of the sphere it will take armageddon to melt it even partially.

Oh yes, the earth can tilt like it did when our moon was formed and send the Sahara desert into a zone where it is cold and then maybe just maybe the south pole would melt. But, wouldn’t it stand to reason that as the existing pole shifts northward to expose it to the sun that another area of the planet will take its place and freeze into a new Antarctica? Wouldn’t it also stand to reason that as the planet shifted it would do so slowly thus causing the freeze to occur in a continuum so by the time Antartica was melted its counterpart would be frozen?

Reading this story was a double feature for me. I loved it as an adventure and second it got my stagnant brain to begin thinking logically about what would happen to all that ice. The reason for the ice is because most of Antarctica is in the dark just as the north pole is in the dark for much of it’s year. The second reason is that because the axis of the earth is tilted it puts Antarctica further from the sun so the place is really cold. Shackleton recorded minus fifty-five degrees below zero for a winter segment of his journey. He described what happens when the ice that had trapped and was holding his ship captive, cracks open and water fills the void. At minus 55 the water turned to ice four inches thick within minutes.

The photo above shows the change of Antarctic sea ice between 1850 to 2013. I learned in my fourth grade science class that water expands when it freezes, and it subsequently reduces when it melts. What that tell me is that we should have been seeing a loss of coastal regions to ice melt water since 1850. Have we? I have never read nor heard any such phenomenon reported. Try this experiment for your self. Fill a glass tumbler with ice cubes to the brim, next add water until it is at the brim. Let the ice-water filled glass sit for a couple of days and watch to see if there is any water on the surface the glass sits on. There won’t be any. That is because as the ice melts it’s volume contracts you will have a full glass of water without ice when it is done.

Watch the animation above and see how the sea ice changes from year to year. Tell me have you read of any reports that the oceans are rising and falling at our shorelines in sync with this changes? I haven’t.

I believe only God can increase global warming that will cause the ice at the poles to melt. I don’t believe that mere men can effect such an extreme shift in temperature that will cause the ice to melt and the oceans to flood the earth.

My recommendation to all the people who believe in man made global warming that will cause the ice at the south pole to melt and flood the world is this: put your energy into believing in God. Nature will take care of planet earth and we will not be responsible for it’s demise, but God will.

Ice Tubes

       A strange and wonderfully magical phenomenon occurs in my pond during the winter. Ice tubes appear from the surface of the frozen water. When I stopped to analyze how these things form, it is not so strange.  In order to keep the fish healthy, I run an aquarium pump into the water below the ice. The pump feeds the air through a plastic tube into an air stone on the bottom of the pond.  The stone breaks the air into billions of tiny bubbles. The net result is the water becomes frothy with air, and the fish have oxygen for survival.

Winter 2009 Ice-Tube on Frozen Pond

     When the temperature goes  below freezing, the bubbles keep an area of the surface open.  As the temperature drops further, nature continues to freeze the surface even against the force of the bubbles. Eventually, the hole in the ice is the size of a quarter. The  tiny bubbles become big bubbles. The hole resembles a kid blowing bubbles through his lips with spit. The difference is that the pond can make bubbles faster than any kid. The bubbles burst in the frigid air and the resulting micro fine spray of water freezes in mid air. At first the bubble  freezes into a  dome with a tiny escape hole. The cycle continues until a cylinder of  frozen water begins to form. The bubble bursting and freezing continues for hours and the cyclinder grows like a stalagmite. The difference is that the ice tube is hollow and continues to let air escape from under the ice.

Ice-Tube-Up Close, approx 8 inches tall

     There have been times when my pond had as many as six of these ice tubes protruding from the ice. All, at least six inches tall, and twisted into various shapes. The wind blowing across the ice will push the bursting bubble mist into different directions before it freezes. The results are amazing. This year, the pond never had more than one ice tube at a time. With spring around the corner, I don’t expect to see too many more of these delightful structures this year.