Water

Ishmael sent me a couple of climate related stories that he asked me to share with you.

How many tons of ice melted in Greenland in one day in July?  A whole lot!

This story informs us that wildfires occur in northern latitudes and ice melts in summer, but with a lot of alarming language.

You don't really need to read the articles above, but they triggered Ishmael because one of his areas of expertise is water, and the Gell-Mann effect came into play.  Most of us have one or more topics that we really know - and when we read about that topic in the media, we notice how poorly the press understands it.  The real problem is Gell-Mann Amnesia - when we read stories on topics outside of our expertise, we forget how inaccurate the other story was!

11,000,000,000 (that's eleven billion) tons of ice -- How much water is that, really?  How does it compare to a river, a water treatment plant?  Let's start by convert the figure into gallons.  One gallon of water weighs 8.35 lbs.  One ton is 2,000 lbs.  So one ton of water is 240 gallons of water.  Our large figure of daily glacier and ice sheet melt in Greenland, 11 billion tons of ice, is equivalent to 2.6 trillion gallons of water in 24 hours - whoa that is a lot!

How much water does the Mississippi River carry to the Gulf of Mexico each day?  Wikipedia says it averages between 200,000 and 700,000 cubic feet per second.  We need to do more conversions!  One cubic foot holds 7.48 gallons.  Let's use 500,000 cubic feet, close to the midpoint between the two figures given for output per second.  That gives us 3.74 million gallons per second.  How many seconds in a day?  24x60x60 = 86,400.  That means that the Mississippi delivers 323 billion gallons per day to the Gulf of Mexico, so Greenland is giving up about 8 times as much as the Mississippi at the moment.  But wait!  Greenland's melt season is 3 months per year, and the Mississippi flows 365 days!  And the Mississippi is only the 13th largest river by volume.

Let's take a look at how much water cities go through on a daily basis, take for example, Park City, Utah.  I am reliably informed by Bob that the non-potable irrigation water treatment plant processes 9,000 gallons per minute for 12 hours per day.  That comes to 6.5 million gallons of water each day, which keeps two golf courses lush and green.  A modest, single family home in Utah goes through 150,000 gallons per year.  Park City is a small town, how about New York City?  1.3 billion gallons per day, and again, that's 365 days a year, a big city, but still just one city.

What about the droughts reported around the world?  If the runoff from the Amazon has declined due to drought, surely that would mean a drop in sea levels, that the excess melt in Greenland is offsetting.  The magnitude and uncertainty of these calculations mean that very little is known or can be known about the climate, yet this doesn't stop the alarmist coverage, and push for major economic and social reforms, such as the need for us proles to eat bugs. 

All in all, Greenland sheds a lot of water each day during it's melt season.  The rest of the year, it holds onto all precipitation in the form of ice and snow.  The numbers are huge and don't relate to numbers that we think about in our normal lives.  It's designed to alarm and panic the population, to provide our rulers with more servile and compliant cattle.  Remember that EVERY story in the press reflects the general ignorance of the journalist, combined with their imperative to scintillate and control the populace.

(c) 2019 Lynn Lockhart