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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/ski/n ... -the-alps/

Even the summers are getting mixed with winterstorms, in Europe/Asia and North America.

The UK may be suffering unpredictable weather at the moment, with yesterday showcasing four seasons in less than hour, but we're not alone in dealing with unexpected weather fronts.
Staff from Val Thorens in France, the highest ski resort in Europe - but in June usually a hotbed of hiking and alpine trails - posted a video on its Facebook page yesterday showing heavy snowfall in the resort’s centre.

The surprise flurry in Val Thorens comes as some North American resorts remain open following one of the best winter seasons ever in the region. Mammoth Mountain, which was named the snowiest place in the world back in January 2017, announced this week that it will stay open until at least the end of August, with lifts operating until 1pm everyday – welcome news for local skiers and snowboarders who have been enjoying the record-breaking amounts of snow since last November.

Even though the snow in Val Thorens didn't stick around for long, there's still chance to ski or snowboard in Europe throughout the summer on a number of high-altitude snow-sure glaciers.
A bizarre turn of events for Mother Nature or evidence of the impact of climate change in ski resorts – either way, it seems, for some winter is not yet over.

Meanwhile I read a fresh snowreport of possible new years 3 meters of snow on the NW side of the Alps, that is madness!!!
I work along the Belgium freeway E40, south is the bonjour French speaking, North is goedemorgen Vlaams, bread for supermarkets......already had two freak snowevents this early in the season, Lucky for me I have chains, wintertires and a heater while resting, sleeping after a night speeding bread all over.

Things are getting very interesting, plannned a winter survival trip to Sweden, no lighter/tent or sleeping bag....bbbbrrrrrr, BOB is ready!
Bought a BOV, former owner made it into an expedition vehicle, solar panels, extra watertank, battery, you name it at an excellent price of 3000 euro.

https://www.camptoo.nl/camper/4187/Ivec ... -Buccaneer

Easy does it.

Iveco turbodaily met hobby caravan, dubbellucht met achteruitrijcamera, zonnepaneel en elektrische opstap.
Portapottie en water in wc, luifel voor buiten.
Ringverwarming, koelkast met kleine dievries.
Eenvoudig en functioneel

I hope you survive your survival trip, wf!!

baha wrote:Has anyone ever tried to just lay down and die? It ain't easy. Unless you're willing to put yourself down you will continue to fight until your last breath. If you are killed by events then you don't have to choose. You don't get to choose...

My Dad used to say he would rather not survive the crash. Lots of people say that...but you won't get the choice. And if you do survive human nature says you will do whatever it takes to continue surviving.

The truth is we aren't really living now...We stay in our climate controlled boxes with our noses stuck in a video screen. We need opioids to dull the pain of our boring existence. There are too many people and not enough meaningful things to do...

Real life begins after the crash...and I will do my part to procreate

Go to the breaker box, turn off power, go outside and live there. You are free young man, go explore. Enjoy, but for the love of God quit bitching about how good you have it. You must be a millennial.

baha wrote:The truth is we aren't really living now...We stay in our climate controlled boxes with our noses stuck in a video screen. We need opioids to dull the pain of our boring existence. There are too many people and not enough meaningful things to do...

That's a matter of perspective. It depends on your situation, and your attitude depends on your past experiences.

For example, for many first world kids now, it's normal to rarely go out and play. It's normal to have mandatory walking in PE class in grade schools in the rural US, because so many kids are so obese and won't even walk more than they have to unless you force them. (I am not making this up. My girlfriends' school was doing that 15 years ago, and I can't imagine it getting any better on average).

And yet, if you ask these kids if they're happy, if they can log on and play World of Warcraft (or similar) with their South Korean or Japanese friends, they're good to go in many cases. To them, that's living.

Things change very fast now. Change brings new problems and new opportunities. While I hear what you're saying and recognize the problems (especially health) of living stuck in the information stream, that's as normal a mode of living as doing farm work after school was to kids 100 years ago, and rural kids much less than that.

".....that's as normal a mode of living as doing farm work after school was to kids 100 years ago, and rural kids much less than that."

It's not normal around here. Around my place, the kids have their chores to do, or those other things aren't available to them. While it may be normal for some, those farm kids were being taught to actually produce something. Kids nowadays are being taught to be good little consumers.

Being a rural homestead, I control the internet (no good 3g/4g signals). Lots of power there

There was no point in teaching my girls how to do farm work. All the profitable farming is being done by big machines operated by Mexicans. Two of the three like to garden and all would get along if growing your own became essential but their current jobs bring in a lot more cash and provide for them and theirs well.

Outcast_Searcher wrote:

baha wrote:The truth is we aren't really living now...We stay in our climate controlled boxes with our noses stuck in a video screen. We need opioids to dull the pain of our boring existence. There are too many people and not enough meaningful things to do...

That's a matter of perspective. It depends on your situation, and your attitude depends on your past experiences.

For example, for many first world kids now, it's normal to rarely go out and play. It's normal to have mandatory walking in PE class in grade schools in the rural US, because so many kids are so obese and won't even walk more than they have to unless you force them. (I am not making this up. My girlfriends' school was doing that 15 years ago, and I can't imagine it getting any better on average).

And yet, if you ask these kids if they're happy, if they can log on and play World of Warcraft (or similar) with their South Korean or Japanese friends, they're good to go in many cases. To them, that's living.

Things change very fast now. Change brings new problems and new opportunities. While I hear what you're saying and recognize the problems (especially health) of living stuck in the information stream, that's as normal a mode of living as doing farm work after school was to kids 100 years ago, and rural kids much less than that.

I grew up on a small farm and had chores before school in the morning and after school before homework because the critters didn't give a hoot they needed their feed and water taken care of at a minimum. Summer time meant spending at least 6 hours a day working on fencing maintenance and all the regular chores that were year around as well. After we got rid of the livestock things got a whole lot easier, but I was about in High School then. The real reason they were sold off is my dad got a job working in a factory and was working 12 hour shifts and just didn't have the energy to manage livestock when he wasn't at work or asleep. Switching from mostly farm fresh food to all store bought was a shock to the system.

Outcast_Searcher wrote:

baha wrote:The truth is we aren't really living now...We stay in our climate controlled boxes with our noses stuck in a video screen. We need opioids to dull the pain of our boring existence. There are too many people and not enough meaningful things to do...

That's a matter of perspective. It depends on your situation, and your attitude depends on your past experiences.

For example, for many first world kids now, it's normal to rarely go out and play. It's normal to have mandatory walking in PE class in grade schools in the rural US, because so many kids are so obese and won't even walk more than they have to unless you force them. (I am not making this up. My girlfriends' school was doing that 15 years ago, and I can't imagine it getting any better on average).

And yet, if you ask these kids if they're happy, if they can log on and play World of Warcraft (or similar) with their South Korean or Japanese friends, they're good to go in many cases. To them, that's living.

Things change very fast now. Change brings new problems and new opportunities. While I hear what you're saying and recognize the problems (especially health) of living stuck in the information stream, that's as normal a mode of living as doing farm work after school was to kids 100 years ago, and rural kids much less than that.

I agree wholeheartedly with both of you Living is degraded but if you were born into it, how would you know or even care?

A psychologist once tried explaining how depression is all in the mind telling me that experiments with monkeys show that a dominant male transferred to a cage where he was no longer dominant and no longer had access to females would show signs of depression. His point was that we should learn to cope. I would gladly supply that monkey with a knife to slid his own throat. That's how we are!

Back when I grew up, the sidewalks rolled up at 5. The latest thing open was the grocery store and they closed at 9pm.

There was literally NOTHING to do. Read a lot of books.

There were 3 stations, CBS, NBC, and ABC. They signed off at midnight. Nearly all of the radio stations (all AM) had dawn to dusk operating licenses.

I feel no nostalgia whatsoever. You would have to drag me kicking and screaming to go back to that.

But you probably had better sleeping habits!

I'm not altogether joking, though:

Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory, makes you more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... ker-review

In our own way, in our little world, we are recreating that past world. And yes, our sleeping habits are much better.

When in the city I feel very much out of place and time. Uncomfortable.

First a warm and happy New Year to all

Agree with the need for sleep, not speed.
To be sleep deprived undermines everything

Survival trip is a no go, in a way we are all on this survival trip, Earth spinning and we humanity holding on to our madness, our manageable world.
Even no last minute camper trip to the Swiss Alps, Berner Oberland, only an easy 800 km day drive with family, no loot for the diesel yet but next summer up to Scotland after crossing the channel, only 120 euro for a ferry round trip with camper, Calais/Dover.

I remember my youngest, daughter Nermin playing GTA, holding a 9 mm standing on a roof aiming at a police chopper hundreds of meters away. Look dad, head shot...three times in a row, she could barely speak but already a near prof.gamer at PS. Last of us is a neat game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZesQXSyxo

My boys grew up with PS3 survival horror games, our favourite kind.
Just bought an external backup for ps4, Seagate 2T, amazing buy at Amazon, delivered next week, enough room to store anything, even lots of games, they are around 10/20 Gbytes these days....amazing.

Doomstead on the Rif is looking up, plenty winterrain, busy to get building license, extra ground for small shop and to park a truck.

Yes we will have far less machines around us to operate, especially after the crash........economy/grid/water and food.
I do think we will get something back after the hardships that are on the track before us, a chanche on a rebirth, to get to know our true selves.
A return to the mystery that is in and around us.

One has to prepare for such a blow, alike going mad, you suddenly find yourself in a totally different world. Try stop talking to yourself and you will see what I mean, hihi. You cannot say to yourself to stop talking but there are ways to get there, to strive for internal silence I mean. To be at the windy side, to maintain your attention without loosing your mind totally.....bbbbrrrr, scary thing.
To stand at the edge of everything and peek into the unknown.
To open the bubble we are living.
To die, then keep on living.
Insane in the brain.

Only one disease, indulging in listening to an internal corrupt person.
At mediëval times they tried to cut it out of our brains, no luck.
We have to accept our internal dialogue when growing up and take care of our physical body but we can also laugh at it and throw it away, our importance, our petty little fears, our indulgences.....they are all based on it, self pity in disguise. We are more than our minds and body makes us believe.

I believe we are all much better than our minds make us think, our petty personalities are not our true nature.
We are all into a battle with ourselves, our two mindsets, the Jihad.
We are magical beings stuck on a chicken coop, imprisoned by culture, cities.
A worldwide affair that started with agriculture, after leaving that Eden garden.
Allright, enough babble.......Climate Chaos right?

https://weather.com/storms/winter/news/ ... east-coast

Unfortunately, at this time, there is an extreme amount of uncertainty regarding whether this will actually happen, and if it does happen, the precise timing and who may be affected.
Welcome to the world of winter weather forecasting.

What we do know is a strong southward plunge of the jet stream will sharpen up this weekend over the Great Lakes and East, providing the jet stream energy that could, in theory, spin up an East Coast storm.

Baja,

Have you looked at the reliability of your systems?

What do you do if a critical component craps out? How reliant are you on suppliers?

These are things that bother me. We have a Yanmar engine, good piece of kit. It twice Ive been stuck because something pretty common was needed and not readily available. I now carry a spare head gasket.

Science is now making ever more tight connections between CC and 'stuck' Rossby waves. So Climate Chaos is likely about to get a whole lot more...chaotic...


Michael E. Mann et al. (2017), "Influence of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Planetary Wave Resonance and Extreme Weather Events", Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 45242, doi:10.1038/srep45242

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45242

Abstract: "Persistent episodes of extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere summer have been shown to be associated with the presence of high-amplitude quasi-stationary atmospheric Rossby waves within a particular wavelength range (zonal wavenumber 6–8). The underlying mechanistic relationship involves the phenomenon of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) of synoptic-scale waves with that wavenumber range becoming trapped within an effective mid-latitude atmospheric waveguide. Recent work suggests an increase in recent decades in the occurrence of QRA-favorable conditions and associated extreme weather, possibly linked to amplified Arctic warming and thus a climate change influence. Here, we isolate a specific fingerprint in the zonal mean surface temperature profile that is associated with QRA-favorable conditions. State-of-the-art (“CMIP5”) historical climate model simulations subject to anthropogenic forcing display an increase in the projection of this fingerprint that is mirrored in multiple observational surface temperature datasets. Both the models and observations suggest this signal has only recently emerged from the background noise of natural variability."

1) The impact of more thermal energy on middle latitude non-zonality of the westerlies and increasing instances of blocking events is not new.

2) The waffle language in these articles makes me cringe. There is no "may" in the impact of both Arctic warming and extra thermal energy in the global atmosphere-ocean system. There are deterministic, causal impacts which we are seeing. As long as climate researchers treat random-based statistics as their one and only tool (hammer), then every problem looks like random noise (nail). Variability is not randomness in the atmosphere system. It is a non-linear superposition of deterministic processes. Too bad researchers have basically no tools to analyse the morphology of the atmosphere-ocean state and resort to Gaussian statistics. Gaussian statistics have no value by themselves and require understanding of the deterministic processes involved.

Yes, 'scientific reticence' sometimes drives me crazy.

For Dissident and others. Can we expect the clathrate gun to go off and other exponentially fast climate change inducing effects IMMEDIATELY after the Arctic is relatively ice-free? And will these effects trigger a mass die off in human population because of fall off in agricultural production etc?
This seems to be what Guy McPherson is claiming, in essence loss of human habitat

onlooker wrote:For Dissident and others. Can we expect the clathrate gun to go off and other exponentially fast climate change inducing effects IMMEDIATELY after the Arctic is relatively ice-free? And will these effects trigger a mass die off in human population because of fall off in agricultural production etc?
This seems to be what Guy McPherson is claiming, in essence loss of human habitat

We had the bloody ESAS debate on this board a while back. On the time scale of 100 years I see evidence of huge changes. I read the "Clathrate Gun" monograph and it makes a good case for relatively small CH4 releases leading to warming periods during the glaciation phases over the last 3.3 million years. We are now dealing with something different. It is more like the CH4 nuke. And ocean anoxia is the 800 lb gorilla in the room not seen even by many climate scientists.

In my view, a pure clathrate melt driven warming feedback is slower than the looming ocean anoxia driven warming. The former requires warming to burrow deep enough in the oceans to destablize seabed clathrates. The latter has no equivalent waiting period and will make sure that the ocean waters warm enough to destabilize the seabed clathrates.

If you look at the pink limestone layer associated with the Iridium layer that led to the impactor induced extinction theory for dinosaurs, then you will see an inconsistency. An impactor would have produced at most two years of global cooling with winter summers in the middle latitudes (not in the tropics). It would not have killed off animal life in the oceans even if it could have killed off unadapted animal life outside the tropics. The two year figures comes from how long any plausible fine mode aerosol loading could last in the atmosphere:

1) the residence time of aerosols decreases with altitude since density falls off exponentially with height

2) the troposphere is scoured by cloud process clean of most aerosols; aerosols seed cloud and are precipitated out

The pink limestone layer shows that the oceans were anoxic for tens of thousands of years. It seems that the impactor hit around the time of climate tipping point and what did in the dinosaurs (on land and in the seas) was a major warming event and not some short lived dust-load cooling event. There is indication we are on the brink of another pink limestone epoch.

By 2100 humanity is basically guaranteed to be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. There will not be any "singularity" and techno-utopia. None of our technology has ever come without a heavy pollution price. For some reason people think that their iphones are squeaky clean. And food originates in the oceans and the soil (greenhouse operations notwithstanding). Anyone who thinks humans do not depend on the planet for survival is a certifiable idiot. The planet is about to undergo a warming induced mass extinction event.

"Clathrate Gun" monograph

link?

ocean anoxia is the 800 lb gorilla in the room not seen even by many climate scientists.

I'm pretty sure Peter Ward sees it, but maybe I'm misinterpreting him or you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtHlsUDVVy0

(~5 years old now)

Also, how much do we know about the sea bed in ESAS. Is it utterly lifeless? If not, might there be some burrowing creatures there which may become more active as things warm? And even if it is now (which I doubt), might not new creatures be migrating into these newly warmed waters (I'm quite sure they are), some of which may be active burrowers? Couldn't these provide pathways for warm water to get directly down to deeper layers of sediment without having to depend on slow radiative transfer?...Just some thoughts that waft about in my feverish brain...

dohboi wrote:

"Clathrate Gun" monograph

link?

ocean anoxia is the 800 lb gorilla in the room not seen even by many climate scientists.

I'm pretty sure Peter Ward sees it, but maybe I'm misinterpreting him or you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtHlsUDVVy0

(~5 years old now)

Also, how much do we know about the sea bed in ESAS. Is it utterly lifeless? If not, might there be some burrowing creatures there which may become more active as things warm? And even if it is now (which I doubt), might not new creatures be migrating into these newly warmed waters (I'm quite sure they are), some of which may be active burrowers? Couldn't these provide pathways for warm water to get directly down to deeper layers of sediment without having to depend on slow radiative transfer?...Just some thoughts that waft about in my feverish brain...

Dynamical timescales in the oceans are vastly slower than in the atmosphere. Nobody who has not conducted ocean model studies has any gut feeling about the timescales. This would include pretty much everyone on this board. Biotic activity on the seabed is a function of the local temperature and not the surface temperature. Until the seabed warms up, don't expect any actual change. You were part of the ESAS bomb crowd that predicted imminent mass gas release. You had no basis for your gut feelings.

Ward buys into the instant extinction from the impactor theory. He says nothing about the thick layers of pink limestone that overlap the thin irridium layer. The anoxic regime is a CH4 and H2S emission regime associated with warming of the oceans and not with any cooling, as opposed to the regular CO2 emission regime. For both regimes the process is remineralization of detritus rain. So life does not shut down in the upper ocean layer, which remains oxic.

We have had mass extinction events in the past fully linked to the formation of the pink limestone strata reflecting ocean anoxia. We do not need instant Hollywood schlock fiction meteor cataclysm death. A 10 km ball of rock would not have killed off all macro life on the planet. The oceans would have experienced impressive tsunamis, but their contents would not have been dumped over land. Ward and the rest of the believers are mistaking correlation for causation. If the irridium layer was not imbedded in the pink limestone strata it would have been substantially more convincing. In the video he talks about a 1 year period as any of the data he has ever worked with has such resolution. He is engaging in BS based on a bait and switch. Since the impactor event was short lived (2 years) he can rightly claim high temporal resolution. But the rest of the rock strata analysis only gives him a resolution of several thousand years. As it stands, the attribution is being based on pure faith.

There is nothing to dismiss the irridium layer as being basically an additional stressor and not the one and only. Physics puts limits on how much a 10 km diameter rock ball could do to wipe out higher life on the planet. Life is fragile but the impact was not sufficiently long lasting to do the serious damage. Ocean anoxia can and does kill of higher life forms in the oceans. Given all the other mass extinction events associated with warming, the land is no refuge during warming events.

As for the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis, here is the monograph link:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1029/054SP

I read the paper back print version about six years ago.