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BobCobb, You are full of bunk. After years spent on various weather sites, as well as lurking here, I can smell shills a mile off.

LH, Yes, you are right. I misread your post.

I am responding to the comment above: " several recent surveys testing whether conservative rejection of science on climate change and evolution has a mirror image in liberal rejection of science on GMOs, vaccines or nuclear power...." Taking this comment at face value ( i.e. accepting that liberals do reject GMOs, vaccines and nuclear power - which I do not think is true, at least for sure liberals accept vaccines), the dividing line is not science versus not science. It is liberal humbleness before god, nature or whatever: liberals believe that all of these things can spin out of control. This is in agreement with the idea that we can damage nature beyond her ability to repair herself and that once it gets too bad we cannot do anything to stop it. Liberals are much more critical of technological programs than conservatives are *when it comes to believing the outcomes of poorly defined programs can be controlled outside of the laboratory.* This is a huge difference. Personally, I think it is because liberals, on average, seek out more exploratory types of careers than conservatives and so tend to be attracted to more mentally demanding open fields. Conservatives tend to fields where they have more success, i.e. fields closed over human activities. As an example of a field that is closed over intended consequences and/or human activities. For example, a test pilot while requiring guts and talent has a limited range of effects. While unintended effects can destroy the plane, the effects stop there. Similarly, the affects of say working in business rarely have unintended consequences, the worst that happens is your business fails, or the economy gets screwed up. But, being a field limited to human endeavor, it will repair itself eventually even if individual humans are lost along the way. However, for anyone who works in a field with systems that do not have direct human controls or autamotically limited consequences is very humble about their ability to control those systems. Liberals believe we cannot control gmos, nuclear power (although this is also doubtful), global warming, pollution, etc. Therefore their responses on these issues are conservative. It is not that liberals are hypocritical about science, they understand it much better than conservatives and so are cautious. Conservatives believe that liberal doubts are stupid.

Bobcobb That is why I am really rooting for the ice to fail next summer. While I realize that by the time the election comes around, the ice will have 'come back' etc., if it goes low enough it could serve to force the environment into play as a major issue. Even if the Republicans win the presidency, they may be forced to acknowledge the environment in way they wouldn't in a non election year. But my point was that the anti-environment rhetoric is much more subtle than the lunatic right wing arguments. Those arguments don't need to be won, or at least the followers of those arguments are not the people that need to be convinced. The people who need to be convinced are the moderate republicans. If moderate republicans politicians can be given political cover to act, then they will. I think they do not now because the GOP has been so hijacked they are scared to act.

I think the problem is much more simple than or subtle than the GOP morons. That part of the party is easy to dismiss. The intention of the denialists is not to get anyone to believe their nonsense, it is to provide plausible reasons for not taking action. Or, more subtly, to let people who have busy lives convince themselves that the issue can wait just a little longer while they take their kids, to school, pay down the mortgage, etc. I see this in my mother and my sister who both hate the GOP. When it comes to global warming, they say well the evidence is in the middle and hope that new technology will rescue us and in the mean time they can't afford electric cars, solar panels, etc. I try to tell them that there are lots of things they can do without spending money (call congressmen, write letters, dry their laundry on a line, etc) but the fact is, having bought into a line of reasoning to not do anything major, they are forced to extend that line to cover all parts of their life, e.g. they cannot admit that drying their clothes outside helps because they have already conceded the opint that it is ok to wait (don't even get me started on how much easier and nicer it is to dry clothes outside (leaving socks out of it)). Off topic: personally I wish they would allow the debate about intelligent design but extend it all the way to aliens, etc. There is no need for a god to create life, just a decent engineer with a solid background in biology and chemistry...

uh, that would be 'held off'.

Hi Jai, Since the blog seems a bit slow... we know about the insulation, that is our first step actually. We've help off because our soon to be neighbor is a contractor who builds bio houses (e.g. all 'biologically neutral' products like wood fiber, lime, wood, etc. and he was going tocome over and take a look-see and advise us. As it's been the 5th warmest October in 75 years here, we've been lucky. We got a bunch of double paned insulated windows from an elementary school restoration that sort of fit: nice thing about knowing you are going to knock down a lot in a few years, you can take your sawsall to pvc window frames and make them fit between stones. Then there is rock wool for the rest of the holes. And i think we finally decided on a pellet stove (probably Attack), 30 kw with at least a 1000 liter puffer. The fun part is that I am mounting an arduino or raspberry pi based set of solar powered reflectors in yard and on the hill above us to add 100% natural, renewable heat. Not to mention it brightens up the house incredibly.

I originally intended to log in on the forum but the computer at work doesn't mesh well for some reason. I am not sure I agree with you about renovating old houses versus new houses. Old houses are basically a rough draft of a house design and you have to pretty much rip them down and start over or else pay in various ways for the for inefficiency, awkwardness of design and an endless list of honey do items. Hopefully it will be worth it but if my wife hadn't loved the house, I would would have preferred to level the thing and start over, reusing the stone and timber admittedly.

Ours is an old contadini house, complete with stalls in the basement and still a meter of hay in the attic. Insulation is nil, or possibly negative (it seems like). However, the radiators and associated plumbing are now in order and we are desperate for heat. Our choice to make it through the winter is, given that we don't want to use methane, diesel or electricity, is pure wood, pellets or biomass. I was ready to sign off on pellets but I like the idea of burning our scrap biomass, and there is the cost difference. I just don't know anything about how efficient biomass stoves are when switching between fuels of different qualities, how to control them from overheating and so on. Unfortunately I don't have time to learn really. Anyway, I'll log onto the forum from another computer and do the discussion there as I learn more.

Hi Nevin, Hi Nevin: an off topic question, but it is off-season, I guess... I did try asking this on the forum under the thread about interesting construction but I couldn't register, my problem not the forum's. I live in the Italian Alps and we just bought a house with a diesel boiler which we want to remove. In the future we will do solar (we are building a set of solar tracking mirrors i.e. small pv powered with Arduino tracker to reflect light onto solar heating) but for the moment, we are looking at some sort of biomass: wood, pellets or general biomass as a source of fuel. Did you ever consider biomass or pellets and why not?

If anyone is interested in this type of scifi, The Black Cloud by Hoyle is a fun read, if outdated (1957). I mention it because of hte comment about about Hollywood connections. I don't think a global warming blockbuster is sellable in Hollywood since no matter how you spin it, it comes out as political and no one wants to go see a movie and fight through political overtones. However, if the plot is something like the Black Cloud, i.e. a totally different source of the same result, it might be easier for the message to get through about what could happen as a result of global warming.

Hi Chris, thanks for the response. I'll go read the article you suggested. Living in a mountainous area, my experience with snow and ice melt is intuitive: sunlight melts ice but the main factors are weather conditions. A rain, even a cold rain, causes much more melt than sun. Likewise a warm wind can remove cm's per hour while sunlight on a cold day has almost no effect. Sunlight's greatest effect is where there is a dark colored wick to absorb and re-radiate/transport the solar heat. Because of this, I assumed that on a cold summer day in the high altitudes, the ice would remain relatively constant. I wonder how constant the temperatures are over the surface of the ice: if micro-climates don't play a large role in melting the ice at high altitudes.

I thought the major source of melting in Greenland was the warmer air flows coming from a warmer ocean and neighboring continent. I assumed that the ice free line would gradually creep north and have a higher altitude but that at higher altitudes and latitudes, Greenland would actually gain ice from increased snowfalls? Anyone? (I did try to research this but I don't seem to know what key words to use that return results.)

As an amateur who predicted the area (or was it extent) to fall to 2 million last year, I thought I would get my predictions out of the way early, before the blog gets busy with the more professional and able forecasters: 8 days with less than 1.5 million. This is based on the same line of thought (I refuse to call it 'reasoning') as last year: once the ice levels decrease past a certain point, the melt will continue past what have been the up until now normal influences.

Sorry for the off topic post. I thought I remembered someone asking about the topology of Greenland and are there any exits below sealevel. I stumbled across this on the BBC about the new radar survey of Greenland. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23866810

I'll stay at 3.2, though this has the feeling of being anchored by my earlier guess. But as rational as I can make it: I still think the ice is porely (ha ha) and I think Stormy August will take a big hit out of what is left.

If had my druthers, I would really like to see all scientists, as part of their phd, be forced to do at least one project where they start from first principles and derive the theory/experiment/ etc. This whole basing things on literature and standing the shoulders of giants gets gamed into academic tiddliwinks. But the issue here isn't an academic one about having a career based on trendy articles that are forgotten 5 years later, it is about, when faced with serious consequences, the moral obligation to publish the range of outcomes and make clear how limited 95% is.

@Dorlomin Chamberlain, arguably, took the conservative position. Conservative != good science. Often correlated, perhaps, with good science, but not the same as. Similarly, in regards to the comment "Do your own [non conservative] research and publish it", it is a bit like trying to prove that meat tastes good by asking vegitarians to try it. Perhaps you meant "Create your own community, create standards for those communities that work given the needs of science, create your own journals, do your own research and then publish it." For what it is worth, I think that science is both too conservative and, at the same time, very trendy. Perhaps that is the same thing though.

SHould say "From the article...."

Article from BBC about disappearing Alaskan village. Note the quote: "The US government imposed this Western lifestyle on us, gave us their burdens and now they expect us to pick everything up smallpox after an Indian.

DOug noted that "a scant decade or so ago, anybody daring to hypothesize Arctic sea ice reaching its present parlous condition by the year 2013 would also have been citing an extreme worst-case scenario and would have been mocked by more than the usual suspects" Maybe it is time that the critics and all of their predictions from back then where held to the flame. Their predictions are on record, no?

But whatever, I said my piece, I bow out.

@JC: Same thing: global warming caused by using oil and coal as fuels destroys the environment.

At the very least, the names should be Inuit terms for damage, devil, destruction, etc. That at least bridges the gap between popular imagination and destruction. I can see TV weathermen telling that story for fun if nothing else and leaving the impression in local people's minds that Arctic cyclones are bad and destroy things.