A couple of things you might not know

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Wednesday, May 21. 2014

A couple of things you might not know

1. The world-wide present and historical range of the Moose (known as Elk in Europe and Asia). I did not know that they used to be in Rhode Island, nor did I know that there were any left in Colorado. In Maine and NH, they are all over the place and moving south ~~due to global warming.~~ Wolves and hunters are needed.

2. No wonder they are freaking out. Who knew this? In 2012, 57 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet melted between July 8 and July 12. Man, that must have been a hot week in Greenland.

Posted by The News Junkie in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 12:25 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)

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Well, that Salon article was obviously written for the modern unthinking college graduate. If you've a smidgen of critical thinking, you see the holes in the sieve.

#1 JKB on 2014-05-21 13:23 (Reply)

I did not know that they used to be in Rhode Island.

Moose wandered down to my CT hometown, not far from RI, every 20 years or so. The moose that wandered into town when I was 6- a very cold winter- became meat for a neighbor's freezer. Until the day he died my father bore a grudge against the neighbor for having killed the moose.

#2 Gringo on 2014-05-21 14:09 (Reply)

In Colorado mountains high country, there are so many moose it is like living in Alaska. They can chase or kill people, especially people with dogs that P--- the moose off, or during mating season, when tension is high. They wander in the cities, the outback, everywhere. They are near Vail, all over Summit County, etc. Of course they are also hunted to help control the population. Recently, a year or two ago, about a half dozen were killed by auto collisions on Rt. 9, and I70, too, in Summit. Usually not good for the driver either, since moose are BIG.

Thank Gawd they only eat vegetation, often the wet type.

And a few years ago, at least one, and maybe a second, wolf from Wyoming was killed on I70 in Clear Creek County, where also a few years more ago sadly a high school male runner was killed and partly eaten by a mountain lion, Idaho Springs.

The above were in the newspapers, or personal observations.

Personally, I imagine there exist a couple wolves and grizz in Colorado. But maybe not? There are the stories, not in the paper usually.

#3 Harry on 2014-05-21 15:47 (Reply)

Another source states that if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, the sea level would rise 6 meters/20 feet. Since the assertion is that 57% melted in July 2012, where was the 12 foot rise in sea level?

#4 DMac on 2014-05-21 18:10 (Reply)

The entire ice sheet doesn't melt. What melts is the surface of the ice sheet. The extent of the surface melt was unusual, but it wouldn't have any appreciable effect upon sea level. Even when it melts, most of it, except along the coast, will soon refreeze. So there is a lot of melting each year that doesn't add anything to the ocean.

#4.1 Basil on 2014-05-21 18:53 (Reply)

Was that the surface melting? How deep. How long before re freeze. Tooooo much hype to little data....

#5 dorf on 2014-05-21 19:03 (Reply)

Last year, in the mountains above Creede, CO, I drove up on a young moose (which I did not think lived this far south) and followed him for about ½ mile up the road before he got bored and ran off into the trees. I got a few shots on my iPad just to show I wasn't hallucinating!

#6 RonL on 2014-05-21 20:31 (Reply)

I read the linked wikipedia article on the Moose and found, to my utter astonishment, that there has been an ALARMING drop off in the Moose population since the 90's and although they are not quite sure how it is caused by, you guessed it, Global Warming. Bet you didn't see that coming

#7 TRob on 2014-05-21 21:53 (Reply)

So just how hot would it have to get for 57% of Greenland's ice sheet to melt in 4 days? 3000 degrees?

Maybe someone will solve the equation to illustrate just how asinine that statement is.

#8 feeblemind on 2014-05-22 10:30 (Reply)

let's see, water needs 334KJ/kg to melt. That's roughly 334MJ per cubic meter of ice.

Greenland has roughly 2 million square kilometers of ice. If that ice is on average 100 meters thick (and that's a severely conservative guess, the real value is much higher), we're talking about 0.2 million cubic kilometers of ice.
That's 200.000.000.000.000.000 cubic meters of ice.

At 57% melted, that'd be 3807600000000MJ of energy input just on Greenland.
Greenland receives roughly 2800000000MJ of energy from the sun each day at most (that is, if there were no atmosphere, no day/night cycle, no cloud cover, in reality thus the figure is much lower).
That yields 1360 days at least are needed to melt 57% of the ice pack on Greenland using solar energy alone.

Granted that in reality Greenland probably receives at most a quarter of that energy, and has at least twice as much ice, the real figure is probably closer to 11.000 days, or roughly 30 years.

And that's if there were no mechanism in place to freeze that stuff back into ice :)

#8.1 J.T. Wenting on 2014-05-22 13:29 (Reply)

The Greenland ice sheet "melts" every summer. The sun shines all day and all night and the surface gets a sheen of slushy water on top of it. But the actual ice pack grow bigger every year simply because in general it does not melt and winter snows keep piling up. If you placed a marker on the snow in the middle of Greenlad today and went back 20 years later you would have to dig down 30'-50' to find it. The ice pack keeps growing.

#9 GoneWithTheWind on 2014-05-22 11:31 (Reply)

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Wednesday, May 21. 2014

A couple of things you might not know