NSIDC, PIOMASS and Cryosat

The NSIDC (The National Snow and Ice Data Centre) measures the extent (area) of the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean. With it's satellite, any area with more than 15% ice cover shows up as covered with ice so this will always be an over-estimate. 

PIOMASS (Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System) models the volume of ice floating on the arctic ocean.  It is a model with limited observational inputs from ground truthing.

Cryosat is a European Space Agency satellite that measures the the freeboard of the floating ice and hence, combining this with the extent of the ice can calculate the volume of the ice floating on the Arctic ocean. As of 2013, they have been operating for three years and their satellite is estimated to be capable of a few decades more of observations.  Try as I may, I haven't yet being able to find a site which shows the results they have measured over the past three years.  There is a nice qualitative animation but I can't find any quantitative results.

Before we have a look at the results from these three sources, we need a pinch of physics and a modicum of meteorology. 

1) If you haven't caught up with how Coriolis works, click here. What is important to this discussion is that in the Northern Hemisphere, any horizontally moving object veers to the right and the effect is greater, the closer you are to the North pole.

2) Most* of the radiation from the sun passes through clear air without being absorbed.  When it hits the ground, it is absorbed or reflected, depending on the nature of the surface.  This heating from below is what powers the earth's weather.

* Some of the ultra-violet wave lengths are absorbed high in the atmosphere.

3) When the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice and snow, most of the incident energy from the sun is reflected back into space.  The air above the ice is therefore  not warmed.  The air itself above the Arctic, radiates heat as does any object with a temperature above zero degrees K (minus 273 degrees Centigrade) and cools.

4) As the air above the Arctic cools it contracts,  it's density increases and it descends.  When it reaches the ground it spreads out southward in all directions.  You can see this effect when you open your fridge on a humid day.  The humidity condenses into a little cloud which makes the flow of air visible.  You will notice that the air spreads out across the floor.  If you have bare feet you can feel the effect.

5) Since the air is moving horizontally southward across the land, coriolis veers it to the right.  Instead of a North wind (moving toward the South) you have a North East wind (moving toward the South West).  This is a typical high pressure clockwise weather pattern with generally clear skies. The skies are clear since as air descends it is compressed which warms it and it can hold more water vapour.  ie.  If there were water droplets in the air, they would evaporate as the air descends.

6)  This clockwise wind pushes on the ice and water of the Arctic inducing clockwise water flow.  The Beaufort gyre north of Alaska is  a good example of such a current.  Note what happens to the ice (and the layer of fresher water which floats on the surface of the Arctic Ocean).  Here it gets interesting.  If something is spinning, common experience tells you that it gets flung outwards.  However here Coriolis comes into play.  If something is moving clockwise, 'to-the-right' is into the centre.  Clockwise gyres tend to move surface objects and surface water into the centre of the gyre. You see the same effects in the garbage gyres of the world oceans.

7) To the contrary, counter clockwise currents tend to fling floating objects and floating water outwards.  Counter clockwise air currents are caused when air warms  at the surface, rises and pulls air inwards.  The air flowing in toward the rising air is veered to the right resulting in a counter clockwise flow.

Pulling all this together, we are still somewhat blindfolded in our observations of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean.  The NSIDC results are a model somewhat constrained by observation and the observations read any area of water with more than 15% ice as complete ice cover.  If the prevailing weather patterns are clockwise and the ice is pushed together, their result should be pretty accurate.  In addition, if they compare clockwise years with clockwise years, the trend they show will be a good indication of which way ice cover is evolving from year to year.

However, when prevailing conditions are counter clockwise, ice will tend to be scattered and show up as a greater area of ice.  They may apply a correction factor for this effect based on ground-truthing but it will be an estimate. 

What we are missing here is the three years of the ESA results from Cryosat and as far as I can find they haven't been published.  The Cryosat web site talks about how they measure freeboard but not how they measure ice extent.  It would seem to me that by comparing the strength of the ice signal from water and from ice for any patch of water, they should be able to get a much better measure of ice extent than the NSIDC satellite gets.  There would probably have to be a correction factor applied for the relative reflectivity of ice and water to the wave length they are using but that would be pretty simple to do.

Who knows.  NSIDC reports that this year is the sixth lowest since measurements have been made.  Cryosat was operating over 2012 and 2013 and so should be able to shed some more light on the relative amount of ice on Sept 15 for these two years.  Perhaps ice volume this year was not as high reletive to 2012 as reported.  Where is the data.

Obama and Syria

The comments by the right wing in America on Obama's actions vis a vis Syria would be amusing if so many people didn't take them seriously.  Obama has never gone into dick measuring contests and he isn't in one with Putin now.  Obama goes for achievable results and look at what he is achieving with respect to Syria.

His Secretary of State, Kerry, in answer to a reporters question* "is any way to avoid bombing Syria",  throws out the comment that Sure, if they were to give up their gas munitions but they will never do that.  Putin picks it up and sees a way to preserve the only regime in the Middle East that he has as an Ally and puts pressure on Assad to give these weapons up.  If America used her precision weapons on the Syrian Army, it would cease to exist as an effective force and who knows what the new regime would think about Russia.

The bait was skillfully dangled and the fish went for it.

* I wonder if the reporter was primed to ask the question.

So what was (or may be - it isn't certain until it happens) achieved.  Syria which has never admitted that it has gas munitions is ready to give them up, Putin gets to prolong the Assad regime and Obama doesn't have to bomb Syria, something that he is opposed to do at the most basic level of his being. Obama had to give something to get something and what he gave is just a temporary reprieve to the Assad regime.

Incidentally, having Assad come out on top in this conflict is not all bad.  You know for certain who will try to take over if Assad falls and then we have another fanatic fundamentalist regime in the Middle East even more bat shit crazy than the American tea party.  With Assad at the helm there is at least a chance of evolution rather than revolution.  Evolution always gives a better, more long lasting result than revolution.  One hopes that Assad has been sufficiently shaken by this challenge to his power that he begins to include other factions in his government.  Only time will tell.

Incidentally, as I see it, America has one last chance but I don't think she will take it.  The half term elections are coming up and it would be possible for the American people, if they could look beyond the rhetoric to see what is actually happening to their country, that they could give Obama a majority in the Senate and Congress.  Obama would than have the final two years of his time in power to sort out America. 

Even with a majority in both houses, it would be an uphill struggle.  The Democrats are only a little less self interested and corrupt than the Republicans but at least he would have a chance.  In fact, to really be effective, each house would have to have a large enough majority to stop filibuster by the hoary old reptile.  That is pie in the sky dreaming and will never happen. 

Open letter to Pres. Obama

Dear President Obama

I hope you won't bomb Syria unless you really do have proof that the regime was responsible for the gas attacks.  You are dealing with an area outside the day to day experience of most of us in the west.

Many of the Middle East anti-regime organizations deem it completely acceptable to send their young people festooned with explosives to blow themselves up along with their targets.

Many of the anti-regime organizations regularly put their offices and bases in areas crowded with civilians with the sure and cynical knowledge that if they are attacked, there will be lots of civilian casualties that they can use to whip up sympathy for their cause.

Do you really think it is unthinkable that at least one of the organizations that is opposing the Syrian regime could have made the gas attack themselves.  These anti-government regimes are highly fractured and often they are more at war with each other than with the regime.  One of them could easily have arranged a gas attack at the time that the Syrian government was bombarding an area of a rival faction.

President Obama, your FBI is a very corrupt organization as revealed by Sibel Edmons (Classified Woman) and your CIA and NSA highly incompetent as revealed by WMD's.  I imagine that the CIA and NSA is also just as corrupt as the FBI.

You have incredible pressures on you from Kerry and others to attack and I have no idea how you can resist this but I hope you do.  This is the test of a truly great man and president.

And just a final thought.  If it is proven that one of the factions is responsible for the gas attack, what are you going to do.  You certainly can't bomb them.  They are too diffuse geographically to be a target for even a targeted bomb.

Don't misunderstand me.  I am not defending the Assad regime.  It is at least as nasty as the Sadam Hussein regime was in Iraq but you (America) has been made to look foolish in the Iraq affair.  One more like that and you will loose all credibility. 

A methane spike

Recently (early 2013) there have been back and forth arguments about the possibility of a rapid methane emission from the Arctic Continental Shelves and especially from the very wide shelf off the north coast of Russia.  Sea level was 120 meters lower during the last glacial and apparently there is still permafrost under the sediment of the ocean bottom from this period despite the overlying layer of water which is above zero degrees centigrade. This layer is said to be up to 1.5km deep.   Although we don't yet have a very good handle on the subject, it is hypothesized that this permafrost is locking in enough methane as methane hydrate, either within or below the permafrost, to greatly increase global warming if it was released suddenly.

Since the permafrost is apparently still there and has been over the  10,000 years since the last glacial ended, the conduction of heat downward to this layer must be very gradual and hence,,  so the argument goes,, a sudden belch of methane is unlikely.  For the purpose of this blog, I will assume that such a reservoir does exist and speculate on a mechanism(s) by which it could be released suddenly.

Before starting, though, we should look at the true strength of Methane as a green house gas.  While it is oft quoted as 20 or 25 times as effective as Carbon dioxide, this is "on a 100 year basis".  As odd as it seems, instantaneously, methane is more than 100 times as effective as Carbon dioxide and hence a 4ppm increase in methane in the atmosphere would have a greater effect in the short term (a few decades) than our present 400ppm Carbon dioxide.    Click on the above link to see why this is so.  Reverse engineering the figures, I came up with a figure of 140.  In other words, the approximately 2ppm methane in the atmosphere at present has the warming effect of 280ppm carbon dioxide.  Just recently (Dec 2013) the NSIDC site quoted a figure of x86.

It should also be noted that ever increasing amounts of methane are being observed bubbling out of Arctic Ocean.  It is possible that this may is due to more intense observation.  Whether or not methane emissions are actually increasing will become apparent over the next few years.  Curiously enough, despite a likely increase in methane emissions over the past decade or two, methane levels in the atmosphere have hardly increased and this needs some explanation.

This is an exerp. from the NSIDC web site on the subject.

The Siberian continental shelf is a vast region of shallow-water covered continental crust, comprising about 20% of the global area of the continental shelf. During the last glacial maximum, much of the shelf was exposed to the cold atmosphere and froze to a depth of about 1.5 kilometers (about 1 mile). Layers of sediment below the permafrost slowly emit methane gas, and this gas has been trapped for millennia beneath the permafrost. As sea levels rose at the end of the ice age, the shelf was once again covered by relatively warm ocean water, thawing the permafrost and releasing the trapped methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas but is relatively short-lived in the atmosphere (about 12 years), leading to reduced global warming potential over time. In the short-term however, methane has a global warming potential 86 times that of carbon dioxide.


So what mechanisms could lead to rapidly increasing breakdown of Clathrates in or under the permafrost.

The added 120m layer of water over the Arctic continental shelves will have added extra stability to any underlying clathrates due to the increased pressure.  Therefore a greater temperature rise will be necessary to start the disintegration than before the sea covered these deposits .  Once enough heat has reached the clathrates to start this break down, the pressure will begin to rise.  If the overlying cap of permafrost is strong enough and continuous enough, this increase in pressure will have a negative feed back on the further break down of the underlying clathrate*. 

* Think of putting a piece of clathrate into a very strong sealed container at room temperature.  As the clathrate begins to break down, pressure in the vessel increases.  The warmer it is, the higher the pressure has to rise before clathrate break down ceases.  For instance, clathrates are stable at 17 degrees centigrade at a pressure equal to a depth of 1600m.

The problem arises if  pressure from the   methane which has been released from the clathrate is sufficient to crack the overlying permafrost and create a tunnel or crack up to the ocean bottom.  Now instead of the weight of the sediment (SG about 2), the pressure of the overlying water and the mechanical strength of the frozen sediment keeping the pressure on the clathrates, you have only the pressure of the water column from the ocean surface to the clathrate layer.  Some of the clathrate has already broken down and the methane is just waiting for a breach in the overlying  permafrost for it to rise to the surface.

On the other hand clathrates have latent heat just as does ice which creates a negative feed back on the rate of clathrate break down.  Clathrates can only break down as fast as the inflow of heat allows.  Already broken down clathrate will release its methane suddenly but remaining clathrate will break down only as fast as heat can reach it.  As more an more gas is evolved, the tunnelling increases and sea water with it's heat content gains access to these layers.  You have a sort of geyser as in Yellowstone park.  The process accelerates.

You also have an air (methane) lift effect.  Gas rising through any channel between  the clathrate deposit and the bottom of the ocean further reduces the pressure on the clathrate increasing its break down. The shallower the bottom of the sea where such a break occurs, the greater the reduction of pressure on the clathrate deposit.  Now yet another effect is kicks in.

At some locations along the continental slope, it is likely that all that is holding the sediment together is the permafrost and clathrate ice.  Once this layer starts to loose it's integrity due to the break down in the clathrates, small tremors can induce large slumps, releasing the pressure on large deposits of clathrate.  Picture the land slide on Mt St Helen that released the pressure on underlying gas-saturated magma.  I'm not suggesting anything so dramatic but the basic principle is the same.

Another factor at play is that the clathrate itself likely caps deeper deposits of free methane.  Heat from the centre of the earth seeps upward to meet the "cold" seeping down from the sea floor*.  Above about 20⁰C clathrates don't form. On average, temperatures rise 25 degrees per km you go down into the earth.  Below the permafrost layer, one would expect to find free methane.    If methane is seeping up from deep deposits of liquid or gas hydrocarbons, from coal measures or from  shale, as it hits the deep cold pore water of sediments it is absorbed by water and forms clathrates. This caps underlying methane and any crack is quickly sealed as methane seeps up such cracks and forms clathrate.  It has been observed that some of the methane seeping out of permafrost areas on land is young methane (likely from the break down of organic material) and some is old (likely from deeper hydrocarbon deposits).   Such rising methane will sit below its cap of clathrate ice just waiting to be released.

When it was initially calculated how fast our ice sheets could melt, only thermodynamics was taken into account.  At that time it wasn't realized the effect of, for instance, moulons increasing the slide of ice into the sea and it also wasn't realized that a warmer ocean was melting floating ice sheets from below.  As these ice sheets disintegrated, ice flow to the ocean increased and the contribution to sea level of ice was larger than thermodynamic considerations would have predicted.

We may be making the same mistake here with clathrates as we only consider how fast heat can be conducted down through the layers of sediment toward the deposits of clathrates.  We could be in for some wee surprises as some of the above "convection" type phenomenon cut in.

ps.  There is another wrinkle in this story.  If the permafrost isn't conventional permafrost; in other words frozen ground, but is itself methane clathrate; ie permafrost with a methane component dissolved in it, it will not melt at just above 0⁰C.  It's melting temperature will depend on how much methane is in the ice and on what depth, and hence what pressure, it is at.  It would be very instructive to have a few hundred cores taken on the Arctic continental shelf to see what is actually down there and at what depth.  Methane clathrate can exist at 20⁰C with sufficient pressure.  Such cores would allow a much better estimate of how prone we are to a sudden release of methane.

Monsanto, Blackwater, Bill Gates

I have copied and pasted this blog in my blog to widen it's publication.  Most of my readers are in the USA and will be much more familiar with the people mentioned in this publication than I am.  Here is the link to the original blog.  I have no problem believing that Monsanto would do as described but Why on earth would Bill Gates support this legalized  criminality.  True, he is a hard nosed businessman in his core business but he has done so much good outside his business.  It's hard to understand.

Monsanto Buys BLACKWATER the largest mercenary army in the world

Added by admin on July 20, 2013.
Saved under featured, NEWSDAY

Cross Posted from Political Blindspot

A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (later called Xe Services and more recently “Academi”) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State “security services,” that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.
Many military and former CIA officers work for Blackwater or related companies created to divert attention from their bad reputation and make more profit selling their nefarious services-ranging from information and intelligence to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training – for other governments, banks and multinational corporations. According to Scahill, business with multinationals, like Monsanto, Chevron, and financial giants such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are channeled through two companies owned by Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These officers and directors share Blackwater.
One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, was the one who made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, entering into the contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate organizations of animal rights activists, anti-GM and other dirty activities of the biotech giant.
Contacted by Scahill, the Monsanto executive Kevin Wilson declined to comment, but later confirmed to The Nation that they had hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and 2009, according to Monsanto only to keep track of “public disclosure” of its opponents. He also said that Total Intelligence was a “totally separate entity from Blackwater.”
However, Scahill has copies of emails from Cofer Black after the meeting with Wilson for Monsanto, where he explains to other former CIA agents, using their Blackwater e-mails, that the discussion with Wilson was that Total Intelligence had become “Monsanto’s intelligence arm,” spying on activists and other actions, including “our people to legally integrate these groups.” Total Intelligence Monsanto paid $ 127,000 in 2008 and $ 105,000 in 2009.
No wonder that a company engaged in the “science of death” as Monsanto, which has been dedicated from the outset to produce toxic poisons spilling from Agent Orange to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), pesticides, hormones and genetically modified seeds, is associated with another company of thugs.
Almost simultaneously with the publication of this article in The Nation, the Via Campesina reported the purchase of 500,000 shares of Monsanto, for more than $23 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which with this action completed the outing of the mask of “philanthropy.” Another association that is not surprising.
It is a marriage between the two most brutal monopolies in the history of industrialism: Bill Gates controls more than 90 percent of the market share of proprietary computing and Monsanto about 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed. There does not exist in any other industrial sector monopolies so vast, whose very existence is a negation of the vaunted principle of “market competition” of capitalism. Both Gates and Monsanto are very aggressive in defending their ill-gotten monopolies.
Although Bill Gates might try to say that the Foundation is not linked to his business, all it proves is the opposite: most of their donations end up favoring the commercial investments of the tycoon, not really “donating” anything, but instead of paying taxes to the state coffers, he invests his profits in where it is favorable to him economically, including propaganda from their supposed good intentions. On the contrary, their “donations” finance projects as destructive as geoengineering or replacement of natural community medicines for high-tech patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world. What a coincidence, former Secretary of Health Julio Frenk and Ernesto Zedillo are advisers of the Foundation.
Like Monsanto, Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa” (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM). To this end, the Foundation hired Robert Horsch in 2006, the director of Monsanto. Now Gates, airing major profits, went straight to the source.
Blackwater, Monsanto and Gates are three sides of the same figure: the war machine on the planet and most people who inhabit it, are peasants, indigenous communities, people who want to share information and knowledge or any other who does not want to be in the aegis of profit and the destructiveness of capitalism.
So why were so many media outlets, editorialists and bloggers clamoring to say that the purchase was a “hoax”?
That’s a good question. The more cynical among us might suspect a financial incentive from Monsanto itself to such “journalists.” Monsanto indeed has hired a public relations team to seek out critical blogs and websites reporting on their crimes against both Nature and humankind. We have seen this first hand in comments on PoliticalBlindSpot.com articles on Monsanto. It is not beyond the realm of possibilities that they have created blogs where seemingly legitimate authors write organic thoughts, observations and rebuttals. The public presumes these are real-world people, when in fact they are working PR for the company.
But the core argument of those who claim that the Monsanto purchase of Blackwater is not true lies in the fact that we can only officially document Blackwater being hired by Monsanto for years. Immediately following this extensive work that Blackwater did for Monsanto, they sold the company. Because of the nature of how the sale transpired, it is impossible to document who the sale was to. The obvious and logical conclusion to insiders (particularly in the private security industry), however, is that the sale was in fact to Monsanto who had been employing the group.
Xe (now Academi) has, indeed, been purchased, and while there’s no way of DOCUMENTING who the new owners really are, the logical conclusion would be that Monsanto, who had been employing them prior to the sale are the new owners. This, of course, would also make sense of the secrecy surrounding the deal and the identity of the new owners. The company was bought out by private investors via private equity companies that don’t have to divulge any of their dealings, with Bank of America providing much of the $200 million in financing for the deal.

New York-based USTC Holdings said it will acquire Xe and its core operating subsidiaries, but did not disclose the price or terms of the agreement in a statement.
USTC Holdings is an investor consortium led by private equity firms Forte Capital Advisors and Manhattan Partners.

Various researchers have been trying to document the buy via a paper trail, but so far without much luck. That, of course, is the point…
Keeping it private
One thing that is known: Forte Capital Advisors is the baby of long-time Blackwater ally Jason De Yonker:

DeYonker has unique experience with the Company that dates back to its founding in the late 1990s. He advised the Company through development of its early business plan and expansion of the Moyock training facility as well as supporting negotiations of its first training contracts with U.S. government agencies. Between 1998 and 2002, Mr. DeYonker co-managed Xe founder, Erik Prince’s family office which included management of Mr. Prince’s portfolio companies.

What does that mean? The guy is a glorified accountant.

Prior to joining Forté, Jason co-managed a +$100 million family office. In addition to actively managing various platform companies, Jason was a part of the executive team responsible for family wealth management.
Jason has spent the last 18 years advising on various mergers, acquistions and divestitures with an aggregate transaction value greater than $1 billion. Jason’s experience include: transaction advisory, portfolio management, real estate development, venture capital and cross border dealings. Jason began his career with Arthur Andersen Corporate Finance Group, and was a Director in Deloitte & Touche’s Corporate Finance Group. He also was the Finance Director for the West Family Trust, a venture capital group focused on cross-border transactons.
Jason recieved a Bachelor of Business Administration, with a concentration in finance and accounting, from the Univeristy of Michigan.

The other investor? It looks like the very junior partner will be Manhattan Partners, a private equity company – a shop that gathers money from anonymous rich investors and uses the pool of cash to  leverage buyouts of big companies they wouldn’t have been able to take over on their own.
Manhattan Partners invests in “compelling growth and special situation transactions,” but this will be their first known foray into defense industries – WarIsBusiness.com reports (via Spencer Ackerman):

Manhattan Growth Partners is led by Dean Bosacki and Patrick McBride. Bosacki serves on the board of “the world’s largest commencement photography business,” among other companies. Manhattan Growth Partners, which describes itself as “a progressive thinking private equity firm,” also holds a majority interest in Hugo Naturals, a line of organic, vegan-friendly soaps, lotions, scents and soy candles sold at Whole Foods and other greenwashed retailers.

At the end of the day, it would seem the logical conclusion is that in spite of arguments to the contrary, Monsanto in fact did buy the Blackwater mercenary group… or at least the renamed Blackwater Xe (now Academi) Services group. The big question now is why?
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