THE ICE FAIRIES ARE AT IT AGAIN

By Larry Pickering

The Australian Government Department of the Environment, Antarctic Division, has again departed for the southern ice cap, this time to count penguins, test the sea for “acidification” and find some more evidence of global warming.

Apart from the Australian Government Institute of Marine Science and a few other marine biodiversity agencies, has there ever been a bunch of more expensive wankers with more expensive hobbies bleeding the public purse?

Yes, I understand we do need a presence there to justify the unjustified area of ice we claim as Australia’s, but fair dinkum, advertising for people to count bloody penguins?

“The work involves helping to ‘teach’ computers to accurately recognise individuals, which can be very difficult within large, crowded colonies”, a spokesman said.

At the last count some poor bastard was up to 18,346,211 when his girlfriend rang and he had to start again.

The Antarctic ice sheet has been expanding rapidly, confounding the exasperated warmists and forcing them to come up with a reason for the record cold. “It’s temporary” they say, “… something to do the wind.”

The Antarctic is an expanding area twice the size of Australia and these little ice fairies are determined to justify their existence on this planet by proving something… anything.

It’s like drilling test holes on a little beach in the Kimberly trying to prove that a little beach in Bateman’s Bay is suffering irreversible seaweed loss, or acidification.

Another frolic of ice fairies is trying to prove increased CO2 levels at the northern cap, so they drilled down to 10,000 years ago but actually found increased levels of CO2 in the core samples. Shocking!

Because the samples of carbon dioxide were in defined brown layers, they reluctantly concluded it was due to volcanic activity, so they too decided to count penguins.

Unfortunately they couldn’t find any (they were probably hibernating) so they are now counting walruses instead.

The reason ice has expanded to record levels at the southern cap is due to sea temperatures, not the bloody wind, although the wind plays a minor part.

Now, I‘ve been interested in this stuff for decades and there’s no way I would try to explain it to the ice fairies, but you guys might be interested.

Three quarters of this planet is three-dimensional salt water up to many miles deep, and none of it just sits there.

It is continually distributed around the globe via a thing called the Giant Conveyor.

Now, the ice fairies don’t understand things like size, volumes and time. On our one-dimensional land, all waste products eventually biodegrade and become mostly valuable carbon anyway.

But in the oceans, everything including carcasses, fish poo and plant life, sinks to the sea floor and sits there dissipating and degrading in a bacterial bath… trillions of tons of the stuff, continually being replenished.

Okay, so oceanic bacterial breakdown produces energy and allows for little-known life to thrive without photosynthesis or light. But the process also produces massive amounts of comparative heat and, as with air, heat tends to rise, and it does.

Surface water is actually colder due to the wind-driven evaporative process.

Stay with me here because it gets a bit complicated. Salt water is more dense and therefore sinks more quickly than less salty water.

The less salty surface water (it’s less salty at the surface because of convection, rainfall and cyclically melting fresh-water ice) stays at the surface until the bacteria-heated deep water rises to the surface and replaces it.

As with rising heated air, it must be replaced with air that is relatively colder compared to the ambient temperature. That’s why it’s colder on cloudless nights when solar generated and geographically retained heat rises, unimpeded by inversions, to be replaced by the sinking colder air.

That violent movement of air, like we have now, gives us our storms and our October Equinoxial Gales (winds) to distribute seeds for Spring regeneration.

It’s the same heat exchange process in the oceans that creates currents (sea winds) within the Giant Conveyor.

But the oceanic process, although seasonal, is not as dependent on seasonal temperatures for regeneration as is the land. So it is a rolling never ending, never starting, permanent process.

Due to varying oceanic temperatures, ice caps will continue recede and expand cyclically over hundreds of years as they have done for four billion years.

And guess what that warmer, deeper oceanic water brings to the surface with it? YES!!! Trillions of tons daily of that awful bacteria-generated, life-giving carbon dioxide.

And still there are a few galahs left out there who think buying and selling carbon credits will cause the planet to cool.

Well, let’s hope they are not successful because cooling will stop growth as quickly as a diminution in carbon dioxide will.

Then those publicly funded ice fairies will have more to worry about than counting bloody penguins.