Tuesday Open Thread
The speaker list is up for the Board meeting tomorrow; not as packed as I thought with just four people on the waitlist. The majority of the speakers are speaking on high school boundaries (with several wanting to talk about Ballard High). There are only three of us speaking about the Green Dot resolution asking the City to not grant the zoning departures that Green Dot has requested. It's me, long-time watchdog, Chris Jackins, and the head of the Washington State Charter Schools Association, Patrick D'Amelio. (I knew Mr. D'Amelio when he headed the Alliance for Education and Big Brothers and Big Sisters; he's a stand-up guy.)
Comments
Trapped
HP
Snow likely before 4pm, then rain and snow likely. Cloudy, with a high near 38. Wind chill values between 24 and 34. South southwest wind 5 to 7 mph becoming light and variable in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible.
Friday NightRain and snow likely, becoming all snow after 10pm. Cloudy, with a low around 31. Breezy, with a south wind 17 to 22 mph becoming north in the evening. Winds could gust as high as 26 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New snow accumulation of 1 to 3 inches possible.
SaturdaySnow likely. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 37. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of 1 to 2 inches possible.
Saturday NightA 30 percent chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 24. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible.
SundayA slight chance of snow. Partly sunny, with a high near 35.
Sunday NightA slight chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 24.
MondayA chance of snow. Partly sunny, with a high near 36.
Monday NightA chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 26.
TuesdayA chance of snow. Partly sunny, with a high near 37.
Tuesday NightA chance of rain and snow. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 25.
WednesdayA chance of snow. Partly sunny, with a high near 39.
SolvayGirl
HeHe
Climate
And HeHe—Global Warming means more extremes. READ something that's been peer reviewed by real scientists for a change will ya?
SolvayGirl
-Freezing Point Depressed.
Perhaps you should study solar weather and the direct impact of the suns minimums and maximums on the earth's atmosphere. The idea that the earth is warming is inconstant with the data.
Start with the data behind "mini ice ages" and I think you will become more concerned with that vs the flawed global warming narrative.
You are going to wish for global warming within the next few years.
HeHe
Sources, please. Most...almost all...scientists disagree with you.
I could walk you through the science regarding rapid upper level thermosphereic cooling and the effects to the lower levels and the impacts the cooling has on Earth's weather and temperatures. Please read about the Maunder Minimum.
The basics...space is cold, very cold -455 f +/- When the sun's radiation collides with the upper atmosphere it warms and expands creating a greater distance between the -455 f temp and the Earth. When the radiation decreases so does the thickness of the atmosphere causing the lower levels of the atmosphere to cool and also contract and cool. This process continues until a equilibrium is established and results in the -455f moving closer to the earth. A thicker contracted atmosphere transfers the cooler air much easier and quicker than a thin one does.
Feel free to challenge me on this.
HeHe
I'm worried for all students, teachers and staff getting home safely.
-Fly
--Chad
Thankfully the students that could leave did (at least at Garfield).
-Parent
0 °K (= -455 °F) is the background cosmic radiation temperature. That's not what temperatures in the vicinity of Earth's orbit are like. The temperature of any object 1 AU from the sun that absorbs half the solar radiation it's exposed to would read about 280 °K (= +45 °F). The International Space Station is coated in special protective layers because, when in the sun, the temperature of the metal the station is built of can get as hot as 400 °K (+260 °F). But, when the same metal enters shade behind the planet, the temperature will drop to 200 °K (-100 °F) or so. Even in shade, no part of space near the Earth's atmosphere is ever as cold as 0 °K.
Even the surface temperature of Pluto can get only as low as 33 °K (-400 °F), 33 degrees above absolute zero.
Blinded by Science
OO
Next, Chad, please watch your tone when speaking of children.
I suppose I could be wrong, I have never been in space or outside of an airplane at 36,000. I have never been to the sun nor was I alive during the Maunder Minimum. I have read the academically accepted principles by Eddy and find them plausible. Beyond that it just makes scientific sense.
Expansion and contraction of air with temperature is simple to prove by placing a highly inflated toy balloon in a zero degree home freezer. The balloon will shrink and the air inside will cool and condense. If you leave the balloon in the freezer while slowly heating it with a hair dryer then the balloon will expand again. Another really cool experiment to try is filling the balloon with really cold air from the freezer and then remove the balloon exposing it to room temp 68f +/-. The balloon should expand 3x +/-. These are the same effects the solar rays have on the balloon around the earth called the atmosphere. The spinning helps minimize the effect by only exposing a % of the atmosphere to the sun or shade but it does happen in a similar way.
Im not sure why you choose to use FAKE information. At 36,000 feet the standard outside air temperature is -56.5°C (-69.7°F) it doesn't matter if you're an airplane of a air molecule. As you go higher it only gets colder. I not talking about materials in a vacuum!
The only source of global warming is the sun and cow farts have no impact at all on the earths temp. Spin it all you want.
HeHe
In atmosphere, the reason why it's colder at higher altitude (into the mesophere at least) is because air pressure is lower the higher in the atmosphere you go. It has nothing to do with contact with the "coldness" of space, because in vacuum heat can't spread by conduction, only by radiation, and from radiation space around Earth is quite hot. By the time you rise to the thermosphere, daytime temperatures of the gas at that altitude can easily reach 2500 °C from solar radiation, as conduction no longer works well so high.
Actually a planetary atmosphere does behave sort of like a balloon in some ways, contracting and expanding based on various factors - not just heat from the sun but also effects from the magnetosphere, among other things. The atmosphere even bulges at the equator due to spin. But a party balloon isn't usually big enough to effectively exhibit convection, which is the driver of weather systems generally. A better atmospheric model on a small scale might be a saucepan on the oven. When you add heat to that system, convection starts to cycle the colder water at top down as heated water at bottom rises. The more heat in the system, the more turbulent the convection. If you add a lid onto the saucepan, the system quickly becomes turbulent enough that the water actually comes to a full boil. The atmosphere is the same, with greenhouse gases a sort of lid keeping heat in the system so that it can't radiate off.
A real-universe example is close by. We know that greenhouses gases on Venus have made an atmosphere so hot that liquid heavy metals, such as iron, fall as rain or "hot snow" there. Venus has a surface temperature hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the sun, because Venus has an atmosphere, full of greenhouse gases, and greenhousey atmospheres retain heat. Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. Earth has a long time before we have to worry about heavy metal precipitation, but notice how the expansion and contraction of Venus's atmosphere (same as Earth's) doesn't play into to heat retention in the system. Remember that Venus's atmosphere also cools off at higher altitudes due to less density. On the surface it's around 500 °C on a good day, at 75 km elevation in its mesophere it's around -100 °C, but by 200 km (in the thermosphere) it rises again to about +100 °C.
Earth is no different. As we add more and more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere at a rate faster than the biosphere can take it out again, the more and more like Venus we will eventually become.
Blinded
The problem with the argument above is that the Maunder Minimum started in 1645. There was a clear cooling trend after the Medieval Warm Period starting in 1100 and becoming far more pronounced in 1400. The cooling trend that ended in the Little Ice Age started long before the Maunder Minimum, so you can't draw a causal link between the two.
If you look at NASA's web site they post the organization's belief of how sun spot activity relates to the Earths atmosphere and it's consistent with the experiments I wrote about.
You or I can't say when the little ice age started or ended to any degree of accuracy because we where not there nor was any currently living person. We do not have any reliable data collected with modern instrumentation. People were more concerned with just surviving and not shaping public opinion with over reaching theories.
Do you want to argue over the effects of Co2 on the atmosphere and label Co2 harmful, is that what you're itching for? I believe man could burn all the oil left on the planet and that would still not come close to matching the amount released by the Earths natural sources in 5 years.
But go ahead with your diatribe.
HeHe
UFO watchers and paranormal enthusiasts also see links between the unknown and increased sunspot activity, but there may be more of a correlation with the intensity of a person's belief in mystical phenomena.
Blinded
Those libs
Who said anything about sun spots? I'm saying solar energy as in particles heating the atmosphere casing it to expand. When the Sun's energy output is reduced the Earth's atmosphere cools and contracts.
Do you doubt this happens?
The sun spots are irrelevant. There's no one who can definitively say when or why a ice age occurred. But I can tell you the only source of global warming is the Sun.
--Sept. 27, 2018: The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018, and the sun’s ultraviolet output has sharply dropped. New research shows that Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding.
“We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”
HeHe
The problem with your whole argument is shown in the "Layers of the Atmosphere" illustration (2nd image from the top). Yes, at the solar minimum, the upper thermosphere is much cooler. However, once you get to the lower thermosphere and below, the atmospheric temperature is identical at solar maximum and solar minimum.
The other thing you seem to be ignoring is that the hottest 10 years on record (global average temperature) are 2016, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2014, 2010, 2005, 2013, 2009, and 1998 (descending order). Seven of those ten years (1994-98, 2002-12, and 2016-present) are all listed in that NASA article as being cool to cold in the upper thermosphere. If the effect that you are arguing for existed, we would see a cooling trend here. Since that isn't what the observed data show, you might want to rethink your hypothesis.
Finally, if sunspots are irrelevant, it's not a good idea to start your argument with the Maunder Minimum, which is all about sunspots.
You mentioned the 10 hottest years on record are all since 1998. Are you aware that the number of weather stations used in calculating that was significantly reduced in 1990? Prior to 1990 there were ~6000 weather stations used for that calculation. In 1990, the number of stations was reduced by 3/4, to ~1500. And it appears that more “cold site” stations were removed than “hot site” stations. So it’s really difficult to compare pre-1990 temperature averages to post-1990 temperature averages.
Given weather reports, I’m fully expecting SPS to cancel school all week. With no change to midwinter break that will mean kids (and teachers) will have been in classrooms for a total of 18 days since leaving for Christmas.
Is teaching and learning so onerous that another break is needed?
I don't want my children to spend summer in school.
I do think that schools should open tomorrow.
FNH
I'd love to cancel mid-winter break. You would have to get past Seattle Education Association to open schools during mid-winter break. It isn't going to happen.
JS
More Snow
When It first appeared on the calendar, it was the Tues/Wed after President's day. These were labeled as "snow day make-up" ...
I do recall making up a day on one of those days in the mid 1990s.
With schedule creep, mid-winter break is now a week long and is no longer available to be used for snow day make-up.
The school year has crept so far into June that if I were in high school today I wouldn't be able to do the summer job (at a summer camp) I did many years ago because I wouldn't be able to report for staff week.
northwesterner
My guess is her next stop will be death valley to show case global warming. Yikes
Ironic
Even if not records it sure was cold in most of the lower 48. There goes the global warming tag line. Oh wait I forgot it's now climate change. Similar to when much of North America was under 100 feet of ice and now it's not, so yes the climate changed.
Looking at the data for the past 2 winters, there is no support that the average temp this winter is higher than last winter. So good luck with cherry picking the data. Yes the climate is changing...it getting colder.
Maybe it's the Earth's precession coupled with lower UV radiation output of the Sun that's causing the record colds temps? Similar the temps will rise dramatically when the Sun's UV output is at its high and the precession move the Earth closer to the Sun.
HeHe
The 97% is a myth. I’ll bet you don’t even know how many “scientists” were polled that the 97% is based on. Hint: it’s not 100.
Also what was the question that supposedly 97% of them agreed on?
And knock off the name calling.....if someone doesn’t agree with you, they’re a “Trump cult member”??
Not all schools are neighborhood or walkable, and far from it in many cases. Even ignoring option schools, some kids are placed into non-neighborhood schools, or non-walkable schools for many reasons; program and offering reasons, school construction causing whole school displacement, etc
- B
But maybe you’re not from around here if you’re talking about an inch or two anyway. It’s abundantly clear we have much more than that.
Fluffy
One caveat I throw out to people - the new coins of the realm, if not for us but for our children and grandchildren, will be data and water. Companies and the government want as much data as they can get. You can live without oil but you can't live without water. We in the Northwest may be glad we are here.
I see what was a decent scientific discussion has dissolved so we'll end this here. It's a pity.