It’s possible he was removing the house from the ice for the season, though the quote that his buddy told him it was safe is amusing. The lake where my parents own a cabin typically has 16+ inches of ice on it, but there are spots over springs where the ice will only be an inch or two thick. The ice will literally go from over a foot thick to falling through in a matter of inches. Rivers, and Green Bay may as well be one, are notorious for these kind of ice tricks.
I’ve been on ice with a couple of inches of water over a foot of ice, so that fact there is water on the ice doesn’t mean much. More telling is that this winter the number of cold days and really cold nights have been so few that there isn’t a lot of good ice anywhere.
I heard the latest cleanup fee/fine for “pouring gas in the water” is $50,000. Sinking a boat, or car, is not cheap. That number was relayed to me from a boat owner, and when discussing the Coast Guard, DNR or fines their veracity is known to vary.
Maybe the links on this page would be a good primer.
I’d be curious if some of you people are “skeptical” about the insulative properties of the walls of your homes. I wonder if you’re “skeptical” about the transmissivity of the air (and other substances) around you. Do you ever look through a window and think “is visible light really passing through that pane of glass, or are my eyes just lying about it to try to get grant money?”. Do you ever feel the air around the window on your oven and think “is the infrared heat really being held inside this box, or are my fingers lying because they want to attack the big hot pad industry?”. Are you “skeptical” about the preservation of energy? Maybe Newton was a complete hack. Maybe solar energy that is being retained by the different composition of the atmosphere is simply disappearing. Hey, magic might be real! I’m a bit “skeptical” about this whole “cause and effect” thing these so-called scientists keep going on and on about. Are you “skeptical” about the changing migratory patterns of wildlife? Maybe they’ve all been paid off with grant money too!
I am so @#$!ing tired of a one-page article written up in a news magazine almost 5 decades ago being trotted out to “prove” that everything since is BS. Peter Gwynne was the science editor of Newsweek - not a scientist himself - when he wrote a nine-paragraph story about how the planet was getting cooler. His source? Some interviews he did with a handful of scientists. Mind you, this was 47 years ago!!!
By the way, Newsweek later retracted the article. Gwynne himself has come out again and again saying that his article doesn’t mean current climate science is wrong.
In the meantime, those damned money-grubbing scientists landed a probe on Venus (1975), two more on Mars in '76, discovered a whole new ecosystem in the deep ocean rifts in '77, invented data encryption (1978), discovered high-temperature superconductors (87), proved Fermat’s Last Theorum and discovered the first extrasolar planet in 1995, decoded the human genome in 2001. Oh yeah, then there was the whole computer/internet/web thing. GPS? Yup. By the way, do you personally know anyone who has died of polio since 1975? Smallpox? Me neither.
I know I’m not going to change your mind, but please at least consider the possibility that science is actually about asking if our understanding of the universe is right and being willing to change our minds when we see that observations don’t match what is “known.”
As you might imagine, I take it personally when you glibly state that scientists “lie for money.”
I don’t disagree, but any ‘scientist’ that knowingly represents a falsehood as fact is in my opinion not a real scientist.
Happens when a model needs to be described better, usually from a lack of data or understanding. Look at Newton’s physics. It has worked for centuries, well enough to plot orbital insertion - but along came Einstein and gave us a more thorough description of gravity.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that we have difficulty understanding such a dynamic system. You can’t solve a puzzle without all of the pieces, and we are still identifying New ones.
(that link by the way (PBS Nova 2 hr. HD) is probably the best educational video About Earth I ever saw, most of it is what our fleet of Earth observing satellites has taught us. I highly recommend it to everyone. You will never see your planet the same way again)
Science is a term that describes our incremental acquisition of understanding from observation and experiment.
We don’t have all the answers, and until we do, it’s gonna be a long hard slog out of ignorance. Science evolves too.
Absolutely. First to mind is the ‘PhD Geologist’ on staff at ‘The Ark’, claiming the Earth is 6,000 years old and Man walked with the dinosaurs.
Back to my earlier point, ‘Not really a scientist’, I don’t care what his education is.
Very good! Evidence suggests that solar activity was responsible for the Maunder Minimum That’s a great example of an event that cannot be predicted (yet).
(Snicker) yes I doubt it. The model isn’t fully described, but what we think now is better informed than what we thought 45 years ago.
Unfortunately we are Human and fallible. I think Richard Feynman said it best - The first principal is that you must not allow yourself to be fooled, and that you are the easiest person to fool.
And that my friend is why your skepticism is healthy.
I have to explain global dimming to people. And when I do they seem genuinely scared of it. And they should be! And they don’t understand why they never heard of it. My only thought on that is that “they” know if they focused on cleaning up the atmosphere, we’d roast from the global warming. So I guess it’s a matter of cleaning up one man-made disaster at a time.
Hold on folks, this post was really only meant to give you some insight as to the unusual weather I am receiving, the raised expectations that I get to start lasering again, and then the dream getting dashed by another expected drop in temp.
Let’s simmer down on the serious talk, please (can’t we all just get along?)
With our efforts in renewable energy, we will slow and eventually be able to begin repairing the damage we have wrought in out technological adolescence.
It’s unfortunate but true that we have to be a caterpillar before we can be a butterfly.
Hey y’all, apologies if anyone felt I was being contentious, my perception is that we were enjoying a spirited conversation on science. It was not my intention to offend any of my friends.
All we hold true is based on our individual experience, our perspective. It is the only lens available to us, and it is ours alone. Because I don’t agree with someone else’s, or they with mine doesn’t invalidate either one.
“I could agree with you but then we would both be wrong”
Hopefully there is no dispute on whether climate change is occurring, the question is how much are humans contributing… If we can help then I believe we owe it to our children, and everyone else in the future, to try and improve the situation.
It would be easy to just leave it to chance that nature will sort things out, but little is lost by humans also helping by curbing excessive ways - especially the continual dumping are carbon in to the atmosphere.
To my mind if everyone focuses on the science of trying to prove something then we may miss the bigger issue of doing something about it… The economic cost of change is high, but it also throws up throws up huge opportunities. But I guess not everyone likes change or the potential impacts.
In Australia this year we have had the hottest January on record and it looks like February might be same. In Sydney last week it was 40 degrees C (104F), places in NSW were 44 degrees C (111F). Two days later we had tennis-ball sized hail!!!
Sorry, got carried away. “Unusual weather” was the driver there.
Wife’s family is from Northern Minnesota. Man, the humidity! Cutting logs with a chainsaw and the perspiration wouldn’t evaporate. Drenched with sawdust sticking to every crack. It was miserable!
Give me the high dry plains of Colorado.
You know the old saw: Scientists discover things, Engineers figure out how to use them. I’m not sure Glowforge is big enough to keep their own mad scientist on payroll.
The solution then was to heat things up. They were talking about attempting to trap heat, build space based solar reflectors, melt the ice caps…
The problem is important because the solution is different. Pretending it doesn’t matter because they both result in climate change is nonsense. I care less that my house is going to come crashing down than I do about how - pretty sure I’d need to take different measures for fire vs earthquakes.
At the end of the day I don’t think we’re going to “fix” it. I think we’re going to adapt which is something we’ve usually been very good at. I wonder what we might grow in the breadbasket of Canada’s vast central spaces.
I agree you poked the tiger but it shouldn’t elicit a drawn out angry response from everyone that “know” everything. I couldn’t disagree more with climate change! I have to admit I believe it is changing but I don’t know if it’s unusual or not, no one does. The North Pole has tropical vegetation under the ice so unless aliens started polluting the atmosphere to start warming us up I would say maybe just maybe we don’t know what the weather patterns are or what they are supposed to be. I believe in cyclic weather which most people believed in before the government started handing out grant money to research global warming which is now climate change.
But who cares if I am right or wrong? I mean for the last two years wv has had the coldest and snowiest years in history and that was climate change and this year it’s warm and that is climate change. I just rate it up with the acid rain nonsense in the 90’s, it’s just as real as that.
My main point is that it doesn’t matter what you believe it will change in 20 years or so. The earth is flat, the stars are close, the titanic will never sink, acid rain will eat the paint off your car, little ice age is coming, hey we have 9 planets, sun is expanding at an alarming rate!, eggs are bad for you, and etc.
The list is literally endless, Ok have fun at my expense now lol
An interesting scientific experiment was conducted on 12-SEP-2001. Let the date sink in a moment. Got it? Let’s move on. There was a unique opportunity that was presented that day. Planes were grounded. The entire day. Almost no flights. The fascinatingly-scary result? A 1º F decrease in the world-wide temperature! For those who might not know, 1º is a significant change when talking about the average temperature of our planet’s atmosphere. We truly are the masters of our own fate.
The model isn’t fully described, but what we think now is better informed than what we thought 45 years ago.
my fault. Knew I would be poking the tiger. Need to find a better use for my stick 
maybe I should just get a glow forge and engrave it!
