Fascism in America



Mussolini prophesied that the 20th century would be the century of Fascism -- and libertarians believe that came true.  Fascism was just a Leftist sect and modern-day Leftists have put a straitjacket on what Americans can and must do that is very reminiscent of what Mussolini did.  And the picture above symbolizes that.  It is of course a picture of the platform in the House of Representatives from which Obama will give his State of the Union address imminently.

Note that there are Roman Fasces (bundles of rods) on either side of the picture.  Mussolini too used that symbolism, which is why his political party came to be called the Fascist party.  Obama is as Fascist as any democratic leader today in his endeavour to rule like a king so it is very fitting that he will deliver his speech between two Fasces.

Background on Italian and American Fascism here and here.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

WV Woman Accused of Crime Wave

Amber Rose Garrett
(Charleston, West Virginia)

Amber Rose Garrett, 26, was pulled over by Charleston Police Friday while operating a stolen vehicle.The vehicle was one of two Garrett had successfully stolen in Boone County.

It all started Friday morning when Boone County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to a stolen vehicle complaint in Ashford.

OK

Georgia Woman Arrested for Jewelry Theft

Abigail Lee Kemp
(Smyrna, Georgia) A 24-year-old woman from Smyrna, Georgia, Abigail Lee Kemp, was arrested last Friday for multiple jewelry store robberies.

Kemp was arrested along with an unnamed associate.

Climate Change Is Taking A Toll On Farmers’ Mental Health (?)

The nonsense below simply assumes what it has to prove.  And what it presumes is wrong.  Recent droughts have not been  caused by global warming because there has been no warming.  Drought sure is hard on farmers but that is all that they have to report below.

But, Hey! Let's not be hard on these Warmist galoots.  Let's give them their assumption that warming is happening.  Will that cause droughts?  Hardly.  A warmer earth will mean warmer oceans -- which will evaporate off more water vapour -- which will fall as rain.  So drought is the last thing that warming will cause.  It is more likely to cause floods

So these galoots have got the brains of a slug -- and are just as slimy

The success or failure of a farming operation depends hugely on the vagaries of weather and climate. For a farmer, a single intense rain event or prolonged dry period can mean a year of lost crops and income.

Climate change is expected to make the line between success and failure even more tenuous for farmers in the future. And this uncertainty about growing conditions is having a noticeable impact on farmers’ mental health, according to a recent study out of Australia’s Murdoch University.

To understand how climate change is impacting farmers’ mental wellbeing, Neville Ellis, from Murdoch University’s Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability, interviewed 22 farmers from the Australian town of Newdegate, located in the country’s southwestern corner. A self-sufficient farming community, Newdegate lies in what is known as Australia’s Wheatbelt, an area of high agricultural importance for Australia.

Since the mid-1970s, Australia’s Wheatbelt has undergone an intense period of drying, with a 20 percent decline in rainfall over the past several decades. That trend is expected to continue as climate change worsens, with Western and Southwestern Australia set to encounter hotter, drier seasons in the coming years.

Ellis interviewed farmers in Newdegate throughout 2013 and 2014, which proved to be some Western Australia’s warmest years on record and some of the driest for Southwestern Australia.
They shut themselves off in their properties with the curtains drawn so they wouldn’t have to face the realities outside

After conducting the interviews, Ellis found that increasingly variable weather was having a negative impact on many farmers’ wellbeing.

“The South West [sic] of Western Australia has experienced abrupt and severe climate change in the last forty years,” Ellis said in the study’s press release. “Farmers have always worried about the weather but today that worry is becoming detrimental to their mental health and wellbeing. They feel they have less ability to exert control over their farmlands and as a result are fearful for their future.”

Uncertainty, Ellis said, seemed to be at the heart of the farmers’ concerns. According to his interviews, some farmers would check weather forecasts on their phones “up to 30 times a day” across numerous websites. Ellis also said that he talked to farmers that would track distant weather events, like storms in Africa, in the hope that those rains could potentially make their way to Australia.

According to Ellis, one subject referred to the state of farmers’ mental health as akin to seasonal affective disorder — except that instead of suffering from lack of sunlight, farmers are suffering from a lack of rain.

“The farms are more than just a business for these farmers – it’s their home, their personal history. There is no escape if they have a bad day at work,” Ellis said. “Some I talked to had become completely disengaged from the predictions and the forecasts – they shut themselves off in their properties with the curtains drawn so they wouldn’t have to face the realities outside.”

In the United States, climate change is expected to force similar shifts key agricultural regions, especially in the Midwestern Corn Belt, where climate change will likely bring longer periods of dry heat coupled with intense rains. In 2014, the USDA created seven regional “Climate Hubs” aimed at helping farmers obtain up-to-date information about climate and weather. In collaboration with other USDA agencies and land-grant universities, the Climate Hubs are working to create tools that can give farmers the most accurate and up-to-date information about impending weather and climate shifts.

“What farmers really want to know is what is going to happen in the next five to ten days,” Allison Chatrchyan, director of the Institute for Climate Change and Agriculture at Cornell University, told ThinkProgress. “What we’re working to do [at Cornell] is develop some online decision tools that take the long term weather data that we have, as well as the climate projections, and give farmers a tool that they can use to make more informed decisions.”

SOURCE


Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Illinois Woman Steals $1 Million

Le Anna Kelty
(DuPage County, Illinois)

A woman who allegedly stole more than $1 million from the Naperville law firm where she worked pleaded guilty Friday to theft charges, authorities said.

Le Anna Kelty, 55, formerly of Wilmington, entered a blind plea of guilty to an amended charge of theft of more than $500,000, a Class 1 felony that makes her ineligible for probation, DuPage County prosecutors said.

OK

 Can a few degrees of global temperature change make a big difference?

It is rare to get fact-based comments from Leftists on any of my blogs.  As other conservative bloggers will confirm, enraged and irrational abuse is what one normally gets.  Which tells you a lot about the Green/Left.  Their rage and hate make the horrors of Soviet Russia and Maoist China understandable.

So I was surprised and interested to find that, although he was abusive, one commenter did actually make an apparently rational argument. He said:  "The average global temp of the last ice age was only a few degrees cooler than the 20th century".  And from that he argued that a few degrees of change is all that is needed for big effects in general.  So a few degrees of warming could also  have a big effect.  As we know, Warmists have quite arbitrarily set a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius as the knell of doom so are they right?  Could even that small change have a big effect?

But does that argument hold up?  If a few degrees of cooling made a big difference, would a few degrees of warming also make a big difference?  I think we can all see instinctively that "It ain't necessarily so" but let me flesh that perception out.

The earth as a whole is actually a rather cold place relative to the freezing point of water (zero degrees Celsius). The average global temperature at present is approximately 14 degrees Celsius.  And the average global temperature in the last ice age was around 9 degrees Celsius.  So the difference is only 5 degrees -- which does indeed sound alarming.

But any average implies a range above and below it so an average of 14 degrees will mean that there are a lot of places where the number is a lot lower than that.  An average of 14 degrees tells us that there will be a lot of places on earth where the temperature is a lot cooler than that. For circumpolar regions, the temperature will be getting close to zero degrees.

So that makes it very clear why we had an ice age.  Lots of the globe was already pretty cold so a drop of 5 degrees pulled a great part of it below the threshold for ice formation (zero degrees Celsius).

But there is no similar situation for warming.  A couple of degrees of warming is unlikely to cause anything to cross any threshold. It might melt a bit of sea ice but melting floating ice leaves the water level unaffected -- As Archimedes demonstrated about 3,000 year ago.

So yes.  A few degrees can make a big difference but only if you are near some threshold -- and it has not been shown that we are.

FOOTNOTE:  My academic background is in the social sciences.  I am no paleoclimatologist.  So when I first saw the argument by the Warmist, I was nonplussed.  I could see that the argument was invalid but I could not put my finger on why.  But my research background kicked in immediately and I said to myself: "What are the numbers?"  And when I looked up the numbers, I had the answer to the puzzle.  In science, the numbers make all the difference.

And the numbers make a lot of Warmism look absurd.  The annual announcements that the year just past was the "hottest", "third hottest" etc. sound important until you realize that the differences being talked about are in hundredths of one degree only. We actually live in an era of exceptional temperature stability.  It takes the perversity of the Left to call it an era of dangerous warming

Technical note:  I have given 9 degrees as the temperature of the last ice age but that is very much an approximation. It is however a fairly conventional approximation and serves well for the purposes of illustration. There are lower figures, depending on how you balance out the different times and places in the era concerned.  And the whole concept of an average temperature for the earth is a pretty hairy one anyway. -- JR.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Mississippi Teacher Arrested for Sexual Misconduct

Megan Morgan
(Southaven, Mississippi)

A former DeSoto Central High School teacher and choir director is charged with two counts of sexual battery of a minor after the student's family filed a police report.

According to Southaven Police Lt. Mark Little, Megan Morgan, 29, was arrested and booked into DeSoto County Jail on the charge.

Morgan as released on $25,000 bond.

Is there an inverse relationship between caution and emotionality?

I think it stands to reason that there is.  Emotion can easily make you throw caution to the winds and you need to be pretty  level-headed to be cautious.  Caution is about thinking ahead and weighing up the possibilities. And that requires cool reflection.  You cannot reasonably do that in the heat of emotions

And that explains something basic about the Left-Right divide.  Conservatives have always characterized themselves as cautious -- as wary of rushing into things -- whereas Leftists are clearly in the grip of strong emotions and throw caution to the winds.  I think we can show that Leftist beliefs and policies make no rational sense but they do make emotional sense. An example of emotionality that any conservative blogger will be familiar with is the choleric rage that Leftists hurl at him or her in the form of emails and online comments.  By contrast, conservatives are less emotional and are thus able to provide an anchor of rationality to public discourse.

The Leftist obsession over equality can only be called a passion.  Equality between different people has never happened, cannot happen and will not happen.  But a push for equality pervades Leftist thinking and policy.  And Leftist are prepared to break heads to achieve their aim of equality. From the French revolution to Soviet Russia and Maoist China they slaughtered millions in support of the deeply felt need for equality that they obviously felt.

Soviet Russia was in fact grossly elitist. Only the Nomenklatura had access to living standards that were normal in the West.  The rest of the population lived very restricted lives with abysmal accommodation and very limited choice of food and clothing.  Even mass murder could not carve a path to equality.  But Russian Leftists were prepared to go to that length to achieve it.

And global warming is another belief that can only be explained by an emotional commitment.  The correlation between global temperature and CO2 levels has repeatedly been shown to be zilch yet Leftists still believe that CO2 causes warming.

And, of course, conservatives are often amazed by the way in which no presentation of facts can budge the beliefs of a Leftist.  You can't reason with emotions.  A Leftist's beliefs serve his emotional needs so a presentation of facts that challenge that belief is met with anger rather than interest.  So the conservative habit of opposing Leftist beliefs with facts is futile.  In doing that, one is challenging deeply felt emotional needs.  The Leftist NEEDS to believe the crazy things he does in order to legitimate deeds and policies that he NEEDS to carry out.

What the emotions are will of course be variable.  Many Leftist voters are presumably genuinely compassionate people who are so deeply moved by what they see as evils in the world about them that they will vote for ANY policy that purports to ameliorate the evil concerned.

Leftist leaders, on the other hand, may start out that way but because of their greater involvement with the issues concerned will either become wiser and swing Right (as Churchill and Reagan did) or will become bitter and angry at the impossibility of great change in the world's existing arrangements -- and will conclude that no progress towards the Good is possible until the whole existing system is smashed -- which is what drove the French and Russian revolutions.  The Leftist becomes so frustrated at the impossibility of bringing about his dream world that he comes to hate the existing world and to be angry at those who enable or defend it.

So I predict that if a good measure of emotionality can be devised it will be shown to differentiate the Left and Right well. Conservatives will be shown to have milder emotions that enable them to think things through while Leftists will be shown to be emotion dominated.  And I am sure that there are degrees of both orientations and that both extremes are maladaptive.  I have met  Right-leaning people who are so emotionally insensitive that  they are social misfits.  And I have met very emotional Leftists who are a neurotic mess.

Self-report measures of emotionality

There are of course some existing self-report measures of emotionality but self-report measures of politically-relevant variables cannot withstand the characteristic Leftist talent for defensiveness, particularly the defences of compartmentalization and denial.  Leftists are largely incapable of admitting anything dismal or adverse in their thinking.  They usually cannot admit their anger and the bleak thoughts it inspires.

I found just that in my many years of research into attitudes to authority.  I have probably done more published research on that than anyone else alive or dead.  A liking for authority is definitional of Leftism, with Communist countries being the indubitable example of that.  But even in Western countries it is Leftists who are the big advocates of more and more government control over practically everything we do.  They need central power to bring about the changes they want.

Their latest craze is to cut off all reliable sources of electricity in the name of their global warming fantasy.  But no-one in the modern world would voluntarily leave themselves without a reliable source of electricity. So the big problem for Leftists is that, left to themselves, people don't behave in the way that Leftists dream of. So they must be FORCED to do as the Leftist wants.

And only a very strong central government can achieve that.  Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian.  Mr Obama's declaration on February 16, 2008, that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America was nothing if not authoritarian. And what could be more authoritarian than one of the more intelligible utterances of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the founder of European Leftism and  guru to Karl Marx? Hegel said:  "All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."

And, just judging by what they advocate, a Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not

So in questionnaires about attitude to authority Leftists should show a distinct tendency to approve of authority, even a love of it.  But they don't. I repeatedly found in my surveys that Leftists were no more likely to approve of authority than were conservatives. And the reason for that is plain.  Authoritarianism has a bad name.  Everyone knows about Communist brutality. So putting yourself anywhere in that league is resisted.  If they are to have any credibility or popularity at all, Leftists have a desperate need to dissociate themselves from authoritarianism.  So any liking for big authority has to be denied.

The denial is so strong and so fundamental that even social desirability indexes don't pick it up.  Leftists genuinely believe that they are good people and don't think they are faking anything in claiming that.  The evil side of their wishes is brushed aside into a compartment that they don't enter.  They don't confront the viciousness of which they are capable. They desperately need to think well of themselves, as T.S. Eliot observed long ago.  So self-report indexes of emotionality just cannot work.  We will have to await developments in neurology.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

Ohio Woman Accused of Pretending to be Nurse

Kristin A. Sweet
(Alliance, Ohio)

A woman claiming she was a licensed nurse and a new hire allegedly deceived employees of an Alliance nursing home into letting her assist during a midnight shift.

Kristin A. Sweet, 30, of 12100 Beech St. NE in Washington Township, was arraigned Friday in Alliance Municipal Court on felony charges of unlicensed practice of nursing, identify fraud and using deception to obtain a dangerous drug.

Sweet was booked into the Stark County Jail.

California Teacher Accused of Sex with Teen

Danielle Matko
(East Palo Alto, California)

A female teacher at an East Palo Alto charter school is facing several charges that she performed sexual acts on two teenage male students over a two-and-a-half-month span last fall, authorities said.

Danielle Matko, 33, of Belmont, was arraigned Tuesday with four counts of lewd and lascivious acts covering three encounters with the boys, who are both 15 years old, in her classroom at East Palo Alto Aspire Phoenix Academy on Garden Street, said San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.

Matko has bail set at $250,000.

Having a big family makes your children either badly behaved or low achievers at school, study claims

The academic article underlying the popular report below is "The Quantity-Quality Trade-off and the Formation of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills". In my usual pesky way, I have had a look at it

I don't have the time to look in great detail at this quite  complex study so I will content myself with a couple of basic observations.  For a start, the finding is unusual.  Other studies have found no effect of family size.

The problem, if there is one, appears to be an artifact of social class, though the authors are not allowed to mention that naughty word, of course.  The effect seems mostly found among the poor, who are also less bright and who are also more likely to have big families.

And here's the tricky bit: Mention of poverty in America immediately calls to mind the naughtiest word of all: race.  Did  the authors control for race?  Would the effect drop to insignificance if you looked at whites only?  The Abstract of their current paper does not mention that word. But here's the kicker.  There is also online what appears to be a preprint of the paper.  And that DOES mention the word.  And they DID find that race had a big effect.  The effect of family size was primarily seen among persons of sub-Saharan African ancestry ("blacks" in non-academic language).

And the effects overall were not large.  The word "IQ" is another word that may not be mentioned in polite circles.  It is too easily understood.  But their statistics can be translated into IQ.  And the result is that we are looking at only about an IQ change of 1.5 IQ points.  So the whole thing hardly matters anyway.

The takeaway is that in most families parents can have as many children as they like without concern about dumbing their kids down

Finally: I don't like to do this but I feel that I must place this study in the context of the current uproar in psychology about the high rate of unreplicable results and the associated topic of research ethics. It is now clear that many scientists do not tell the full truth about their research results -- for various reasons.

In that context, any concealment of findings calls into question the integrity of the research and the integrity of its authors.  And since scientific communication depends heavily on trust, any attempt at concealment of findings -- as we see in the published abstract of this study -- strongly suggests that the work was not honestly reported and should therefore be disregarded.  I am not being cynical in saying that the abstract IS the article for most readers of  academic journal articles.  Only specialists in that field plough through the whole thing

In the circumstances it is open for one to conclude that the real findings concerned blacks only but that was too unpalatable ("politically incorrect") to publish.  So that problem was "worked around" in one or more ways


A new study has found that for every additional child born, the others are more likely to suffer poor cognitive abilities and behavioural problems afterwards.

Boys were more likely to misbehave while girls saw their performance in maths and reading skills dip.

Using data from 1986 to 2012 taken by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and by the Children and Young Adult Survey, three economists analysed how older siblings performed before and after a younger sibling was born.

They looked at the number and timing of births into a family and matched these to various mental and behavioural traits.

Levels of parental engagement were also crucial - with factors like how often families eat meals together, one-on-one time with each child, affection and the safety of the home also affecting how a child performed.

As families got bigger, the time spent with each child reduced, which has been linked to worse outcomes for children, they found.

'Our fixed effect estimates indicate that the arrival of a younger sibling reduces measures of parental investment as well as cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of older children by approximately one-tenth of a standard deviation,' the research paper said.

The study was conducted by economists Chinhui Juhn, Yona Rubinstein, and C. Andrew Zuppann, who questioned whether the 'quantity' of children would effect the 'quality' of their upbringing.

It discovered that parental investment in older kids fell by 3 percentile points after a young child is born, while cognitive scores fell by 2.8 percentile points and behavioural problems increased.

'We have documented a significant trade-off between quantity and quality of children for NLSY mothers and their children. 'On average, children in larger families have lowered parental investment and worse cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. '

Other factors found to influence the outcomes was the mother's intelligence and economic well-being.

Mothers were asked to take the Armed Force Qualification Test (AFQT), used by the military to assess skills including reading and reasoning.

Those who scored badly saw a larger drop in cognitive scores when they had their second child.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). 

Greens Opposed to Sterilization of Wild Horses

(Boise, Idaho)

Animal lovers sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to try to stop it from sterilizing a herd of wild horses in southwestern Idaho.

The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign and others sued the BLM in Federal Court on Monday on substantive and procedural grounds, claiming its plan would violate the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

The groups challenge the BLM's Jarbidge Resource Management plan for the 95,000-acre Saylor Creek Herd Management Area (HMA).

The BLM wants to sterilize "all wild horses in the Saylor Creek HMA," at the behest of ranchers whose cattle graze in the area, according to the lawsuit.

OK

Sex Attacks in Germany

(Germany)

Groups of men sexually assaulted women in Frankfurt on New Year, police report - as the number of complaints of sexual assault in Hamburg has risen to nearly forty.

In scenes similar to those in Cologne, several women have reported New Year sexual assaults to police in Frankfurt.

In one case that took place shortly after midnight a group of around ten men encircled three women and touched them in a massively inappropriate manner, Spiegel reports.[…]

The men were of north African appearance who spoke in broken English with strong Arabic accents, police said.

OK

NY Couple Sentenced for Kidnapping

Stephen Howells and Nicole Vaisey
(St. Lawrence, New York)

The couple convicted of sexually abusing six children, including two Amish sisters they kidnapped from a roadside stand, were sentenced on state kidnapping charges Tuesday afternoon.

Stephen Howells and Nicole Vaisey were sentenced separately to the maximum 25 years in prison for two counts of kidnapping, according to WWNY-TV.

Reportedly, the couple made sex tapes and had a sadomasochistic relationship.

Minnesota Woman Sentenced for Sex with Juvenile

Kelly Lilee Petersen
(Benson, Minnesota)

An Appleton woman who pleaded guilty to having sex with a juvenile male will be on probation for 15 years and must register as a predatory offender.

In a sentence handed down Tuesday in Swift County District Court, Kelly Lilee Petersen was ordered to serve 180 days in the county jail, with credit given for the 115 days she has already served.

Petersen pleaded guilty to one felony count of criminal sexual conduct in the second degree.

Another hokey percentage agreement with Warmism

Now it's about the opinions of  economists -- but not any  economists.  A Law school surveyed "economists with climate expertise".  Is it any surprise what they found?  No economist with half a brain would risk his livelihood by going into that field if he was a global warming skeptic.  All that the survey showed was that Warmists believe in Warmism.  Not exactly startling

The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University (NYU) School of Law recently published a report summarizing a survey of economists with climate expertise. The report was a follow-up and expansion of a similar survey conducted in 2009 by the same institute. The key finding: there’s a strong consensus among climate economics experts that we should put a price on carbon pollution to curb the expensive costs of climate change.

The survey participants included economists who have published papers related to climate change “in a highly ranked, peer-reviewed economics or environmental economics journal since 1994.” Overall, 365 participants completed the survey, which established the consensus of expert climate economists on a number of important questions.

In the 2009 version of the survey, the respondents were asked under what conditions the United States should commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 57% answered that the US should cut its emissions no matter what actions other countries take, while another 38% said that American emissions cuts would be warranted if many or all other countries commit to reducing theirs (as just happened in the Paris international negotiations).

In the 2015 survey, the number of expert economists saying that the US should cut its emissions no matter what rose to 77%. A further 18% said that if other countries agree to cut their emissions, the US should follow suit. In other words, there is a 95% consensus among expert climate economists that the US should follow through with its pledges to cut carbon pollution in the wake of the Paris international climate negotiations, and more than three out of four agreed that the US should take action to curb global warming no matter what.

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Florida Woman and Decomposing Body

Tammy Shereese Wright-Conner
(Jacksonville, Florida)

A Florida woman was charged last week after police say they discovered the corpse of man decomposing on her porch last spring.

Police in Jacksonville charged Tammy Shereese Wright-Conner, 41, on Thursday after the discovery of the body of 48-year-old Ronald Trotter on her porch June 10.

Wright-Conner faces a murder charge.

Hong Kong Booksellers Missing

(Hong Kong)

Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers said Sunday that they will press the government for answers after a fifth employee of a publishing company specializing in books critical of mainland China's leadership went missing.

Lawmaker Albert Ho said the city was "shocked and appalled" by the disappearance of Lee Bo. Like the four others who have disappeared in recent months, Lee is associated with publisher Mighty Current.

While there's been no official word on what happened to the five missing people, Ho told reporters that it appears their disappearances are linked to the publishing company's books.

The disappearances seem to indicate that Beijing is tightening its grip on the former British colony to clamp down on dissent.

Texas Jail Counselor Accused of Sex with Boy, 16

Selena Marie Baxter
(Hidalgo County, Texas)

The Texas Rangers have arrested a juvenile jail counselor accused of having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old Hidalgo County boy.

After a six-month investigation, the Texas Rangers arrested 29-year-old Selena Marie Baxter, who worked at Lake Granbury Youth Services -- a juvenile jail southwest of Fort Worth.

Baxter faces charges of violating the civil rights of a person in custody, and indecency with a child by sexual contact.

Greenland icecap discovery

I don't know much about glaciology but nor do glaciologists, it seems.  Ice lenses (isolated masses of ice) are familiar in rock and soil but glaciologists seem to have discovereed only recently that they exist in glacial firn (semi-compacted snow) as well. And they have figured a way to see that as promoting the Greenie scare of sea-level rise, as they would of course.  That's a great basis for a big juicy new research grant.

Most interesting, however is their discovery that ice lenses are becoming more massive in firn.  But what does that tell us?  What makes water into ice?  COLD, low temperatures.  So if more ice is forming lately that means that it must be getting colder at the site concerned.  Have they discovered global cooling?  Seems like it!

I like the last sentence below


The rate at which water is released from the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating, according to a multinational team of scientists.

Studying the upper layers of snow on the island's glaciers, they found the compacted snowy frosting on the ice cap, called firn, is losing its ability to absorb meltwater.

This is due to the formation of 'ice lenses' beneath the surface, indicating that the sponge-like ability of the firn to soak up melting surface water is being lost.

Experts fear this could lead to increased release of the meltwater into the oceans.

Firn can be up to 260ft (80 metres) thick and is an integral part of the Greenland ice sheet, which is second only to Antarctica in size and is up to 14,000ft (4.3km) thick.

It contains ice formed up to 100,000 years ago, created by snow that gradually built up and compacted.

Snow is regularly deposited on top of the ice cap, and previous studies have shown that snowfall is increasing as a result of climate change.

The new study, from a team of Danish, American, and Swiss scientists, shows that current atmospheric warming is changing the firn layer and allowing meltwater to be released faster than previously seen.

'Basically our research shows that the firn reacts fast to a changing climate,' said Horst Machguth, lead author of the study by the University of Zurich.

'Its ability to limit mass loss of the ice sheet by retaining meltwater could be smaller than previously assumed.'

The researchers travelled to Greenland to investigate the impact of recent atmospheric warming on the structure of near-surface snow and ice layers.

Over the course of three expeditions, they mapped the structure of firn layers with a radar unit and drilled 66ft-deep (20 metre) cores into the top layers of ice, including sites where cores had been drilled 15 to 20 years ago.

Earlier research has shown that the firn layer acts similar to a sponge.

It stores meltwater seeping down from the surface in what are referred to as 'ice lenses’ - pockets between soil and rock.

Comparison of the new and old cores revealed substantially more ice lenses than in the past, the study published in Nature Climate Change explained.

Cores at lower elevations showed 'exceptional amounts' of meltwater which formed a 'surprisingly massive' ice layer close to the surface.

‘It appears that the intensive and repeated entry of meltwater formed numerous ice lenses, which ultimately hindered percolation of further meltwater’, said Dirk van As, a co-author of the study from the Geological Survey in Denmark and Greenland.

As a result, many small lenses join into an ice layer several metres thick, acting like a lid beneath the surface of the snow.

This means that surface meltwater is diverted into new rivers at or just below the surface, travelling to the sea more quickly and contributing to sea level rise.

Mike MacFerrin of the University of Colorado at Boulder said: 'In contrast to storing meltwater in porous firn, this mechanism increases runoff from the ice sheet.'

He said the process has never been seen before in Greenland and that 'the total extent of this ice lid capping the ice sheet firn remains unknown.'

'For this reason, the amount of additional ice sheet runoff associated with this newly observed process cannot yet be quantified.'

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).