{OT} shrinking glaciers

Why do the seasons change? Because of ireegularities in the way the Earth circles the sun.

Now, extrapolate this to the entire solar system, and the galaxy.

Nothing is a 'perfect circle', and over the course of thousands of years there are bound to be irregularities.

Yes, but at least this one is still basically on target, re: its subject line!

We got

What are CU?

all over this night. I hope I don't loose power or

Heed any warnings that noaa issues! And unplug your computer if necessary, of course. Hmmm.. maybe I should check TWC or the noaa website, to see what's going on out there (in other parts of the country).

I could never, ever live in tornado alley. They are very infrequent here, but scare the hell out of me. Or lightning alley for that matter - nope, no thanks. I'll take a huge nor' easter blizzard & lake effect snows any day over either of those.

Cathy

Not actually, because the Earth is in some places still retaining the cold from the winter months. It takes time to heat a mass like the Earth, and that's what causes the warming to continue even after the sun is moving away.

In the winter months, the sun is over the Northern Hemishpere so high that there is a week or two of NO darkness in Alaska.

Why doesn't the Equator cool in this period of time?

However, when the sun is over Alaska, Australia is in winter, right?

The sun swings from one hemisphere to the other drastically, but passes the Equator twice as often. The Equatorial areas don't get a chance to cool, since as they are throwing off the retained heat, the sun is on it's way back again, from one extreme to the other.

You can't compare the mass of the Earth and the rock crust underneath the top layers to a pan full of water. Or can you?

Boil a pan of water, and watch the temp rise after you remove the heat source with a thermometer (this is one of the experiments they have you do in Geology classes to explain the phenomenon...)

No, it's the crust beginning to cool.

Yes, I know, & agree. But I was talking about events which may not have happened in the past - or which may occur completely at random. An asteroid slamming into the earth - just as it was rebounding from a previous cataclysmic event, or getting closer to what this thread is about - the negative effects that are arising from people. Since the relatively very recent advent of the industrial age, the earth hasn't ever before had to deal with the likes of the pollution we've been dealing it.

Cathy

They are big towering clouds. Cb is big towering clouds with a flat top. Some of these CU clouds are maybe CB clouds with tops up to 60 K feet tonight! We had softball sized hail just 20 miles South of me this afternoon. Monsters of mother nature.

Lightning scares hell out of me. I know what lightning can do. Florida, Arizona and maybe Colorado has most lightning strikes and perhaps most people hit by lightning. I don't live in Fl.

Oh, cumulonimbus?

Cb is big towering clouds with a flat

The nasty (in terms of weather - huge electrical storms, hail, etc.) anvil-topped ones - got it.

Some of these CU clouds are maybe CB clouds with tops up to 60 K

The biggest hail I've ever seen has been only pea-to-nickel sized. However, there was a mean hailstorm approx. 10 years ago here; although the pieces of hail were relatively small, there was a lot of it & it did major damage - beat house siding to a pulp, made craters all over cars' surfaces, stripped the laves off trees, etc. Nasty. I've seen reports of golf vall & softball sized hail, but never IRL. Thank goodness.

Exactly; I have a very respect for the stuff. (Ben Franklin was one very lucky man! Wasn't Jefferson the one who invented lightning rods? Smart man.)

Neither do I. ;-)

Cathy

That is my aim. Keep the thread ON-TOPIC to the OFF-TOPIC subject!!!

for example see

Kinda vague, don't you think. This is the kind of thing Rush might say and a ditto head would repeat it.

I'd be surprised if I had only one dead.

No, Franklin invented them.

Florida evidently gets more strikes than anywhere else in the US. The hotspot is right where the Kennedy Space Center is.

Well, yes, the Earth's orbit has an aphelion and perihelion, but what really causes the seasons is the axial tilt of the earth.

On one side of the Earth's orbit around the Sun it's like this:

/ O

The "/" is the earth with its tilted axis and the "O" is the Sun.

On the other side of the Earth's orbit we have:

O /

Since the Earth's orbit takes 1 year, the two "pictures" above are separated by 6 months, and you can see how the Sun is closer to the Northern Hemisphere in the first one and closer to the Southern in the second.

Think of the Earth as a meatball on a skewer with the skewer being tilted. The tilt always points in the same direction as the Earth orbits around the Sun. So one one side of the orbit the tilt points towards the Sun and on the other side of the orbit it points away from the Sun.

That's not entirely true. Volcanic eruptions can release a lot of the same gases and pollution as human activities do. There have also been massive wildfires in the past that release a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.

We're certainly not helping things along, and we can prevent some of what we're responsible for, so it's worth doing so.

One bad thing is that human activity has tended to release some chemical compounds that don't normally occur in nature, and a lot of these are very toxic to living organisms. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are in this category. DDT is also, and is what prompted Rachel Carson to write her famous book _Silent Spring_.

Plutonium is also. It's highly toxic, and I suspect you could poison more with a bomb's worth of it than the bomb would actually kill.

you got more than one dead one pal.

I was assuming that's why he pointed out that he doesn't live in FL - the existence of Lightning Alley!

Cathy

Yes, and... these problems have arisen after the advent of the industrial age, right? (Notice I didn't say they were directly related to industry - although, come to think of it...)

Cathy

I wasn't arguing, just adding more information. :-) I saw a program on TV dealing with lightning at Kennedy, and the measures they've taken to detect strikes and prevent damage.

Volcanic eruptions and wildfires have been around since before the industrial age. :-)

I was simply pointing out that not all of man's activities are things the Earth has never had to deal with.

Right...and I bet the same thing happens in the Solar System's orbit around the sun.

Long after we're gone, the Earth will repair itself. Just like it did from the massive forest fires that happened before man came on the scene.