Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
#7 & #8
You're doing it again, you're making an energy statement by using a power context without the corresponding duration.
None of that is helpful. That's like saying in 1 day, my body gives off the full power of the sun, but conspicuously leaving out how long the sun burns to equal the same power output as my body.
It's not a useful frame.
In the same way, how long something had persisted is also uninteresting because it lacks any relevance to the future. Smallpox had existed for at least 3,000 years, and then it stopped existing in 1980.
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1) It's an energy density phenomena over the temporal span of 30-years.
2) We've warmed the tropospheric ocean of air we live in.
3) If you take the Earth's surface to be the 'sea-floor' of the troposphere, the heat has been mixing into the atmosphere, creating a homogenously-heat-mixed- air 'ocean'.
4) This warmer air has been climbing the mountains, 15-feet per year, year after year, pushing the 0-degree C freeze line upwards with it.
5) The glaciers are stranded in place. They can't emigrate. They can't escape as the heat comes to meet them.
6) They just sit there exposed to more and more heat, which hadn't existed in the Holocene for 11,000-years, and back into time before the Holocene began.
7)By 1979, the anthropogenic heat flux, at an elevation of 18,000-feet was intense enough that the' highly-reflective' bright snow began to melt, and phase-shift into 'darker' ice.
8) This change in energy, experienced by the snow was equivalent to moving Earth closer to the Sun. It's a straight-forward inverse-square-law mathematical calculation, which I provided in it's entirety.
9) When all the snow was gone, ice melting proceeded at an accelerated rate, with nothing to buffer it from the onslaught of energy per unit surface area.
10) By 2009, all the ice was 'gone.' Exposed rock exposed to 1100-watts/sq-meter, just 'cooking' up there. This rate of energy absorption per square-meter is identical to what the ice would have experienced if parked at 63-million miles from the Sun.
It's just a different way to think about Earth's energy budget and energy balance. Of which Keith Mountain is an authority.
These exercises help me get a handle on the thermodynamics of the cryosphere.
Watch our mission to Mars, and what the spacesuits the colonists wear look like. In the cold of Martian days, you may see darker 'clothing' to help the teams soak up all the feeble sunlight they can possibly get there.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory can design the suits, there in Pasadena, using the same inverse-square-law and stellar constant.