Arctic Tipping Points - #3: More About Feedback

This series is a follow-on to my 3-part series Arctic Ice 2010.  It begins with part #1: Background And Recent History.  In Arctic Tipping Points - #2: Some Feedback Mechanisms I wrote:

Analogies are a powerful way to explain complicated scientific concepts. I use them as much as I can whenever I describe particle physics in this blog or when I give a outreach talk in a school. However, good ones are not always easy to find. One usually needs examples from everyday life, which are simple to describe and which do not possess distracting features.

Today I wish to try my luck with you, to see if you come up with an analogy which is better than the one I could find to explain a feature of weak interactions. I must say I am not dissatisfied with my own find, but it is always good to subject oneselves to external judgement.

Eyjafjallajökull, Gígjökull, Jökulhlaup, Gosmökkur

The world is suddenly faced with the need to learn how to pronounce Islenska, the Icelandic language.


With much of European airspace closed due to volcanic ash in the skies, people are most commonly asking how long it will last, and if it may get worse.  Also, the media continues to confuse the issue with talk of an eruption under, variously, a glacier, an ice cap, an ice sheet.

There is a world of difference between an ice sheet kilometers thick, and the Gígjökull glacier and the Eyjafjallajökull ice cap.

Team Plans To Row To The North Pole - Media Claims

A team plans to row to the magnetic pole next year.


Proving once more, if proof be needed, that the media can't publish a story without incorporating 'added value', the media is misreporting a valiant team effort to reach the geographical North pole next Summer.  The public needs to know that this has nothing whatsoever in any shape or form to do with the possibility of rowing to the geographical North Pole.


Its the magnetic pole, ok?

Arctic Tipping Points - #2: Some Feedback Mechanisms

In part #1: Background And Recent History I wrote:

The global warming trend observed in direct measurements and a very wide range of proxy data since about 1860 has led many climate researchers to discuss the possibility that we humans are engineering a new tipping point through our profligate use of fossil fuels.

Of particular concern is the possibility that if the Arctic is ice free in summer, or if the Greenland ice sheet shrinks, or worse: both, then climate change may be inevitable and irreversible.

by Amanda Siekierski (student)

I once read that "age doesn't matter, unless you're a cheese." This somewhat comical phrase is referring to the process of cheese production where various milks, depending on the type of cheese, are coagulated to concentrate specific proteins and fats that makeup the final dairy food product. Specifically it is saying that, like many wines, most cheeses improve in terms of flavor enhancement the longer they age.

Some Notes On Data Smoothing


The topic of data filtering can be pretty obscure for the general public.  Taking raw data and smoothing out the lumps can seem like deliberate falsification.  It isn't.


In the early days of space exploration it was only possible to produce images of fairly low resolution.  Special techniques were used to enhance the images.

In the first image, below, I have colorised a block of 9 pixels to demonstrate a simple set of image enhancement techniques.  Each pixel in an image is compared to its immediate neighbors and an operation is performed to filter the picture.  It could hardly be simpler.

This is to inform you of the new luminosity record set today by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab. The machine has been working excellently, improving its performance as the machinists found ways to obtain higher stacks of antiprotons, reducing inefficiencies in the transport of the beams from one accelerator to the other in the injection process, or finding better beam tunes. A painstaking work that brought increasing returns, it seems.