Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Able to melt 200 Billion tons of Ice in 3 years

Or the equivalent 1 million aircraft carriers of ice.

Commission pencils done. Now I'll do the color.
 Cleaned up

Tom sez:
Bringin' it back to comics 'cause all roads lead to Kirby.
Kinda like this Ellis?
A world naval force made entirely of ice, ready to fight Klagg!
Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving everybody!



Colors. WIP

17 comments:

Tom Moon said...

This is a super drawing Ellis! Love the line work. But is it Superman falling in love with Supergirl, his first cousin?

Tom Moon said...

I'm still not debating global warming. I'm not qualified to do so. Just doing math.

If you want an alternative ice visual, you can calculate the volume of 200 billion tons of ice with this nifty weight-to-volume calculator: http://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/weight-to-volume.

200 billion tons of ice is about 73.4 cubic miles. By comparison, Mount Everest is about 365 cubic miles (Everest isn't made of pure ice of course).

http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_mass_of_Mount_Everest

So the article is claiming that about one-fifth of a Mount-Everest's-worth-of-ice has melted over the course of three years.

You are free to judge the absurdity factor as you will.

Is it true? I have no comment, except to say that in my experience, resolving complex science problems requires more than just intuition. That's why they actually do the math and run the experiments.

MrGoodson2 said...

It's the commissioners girl friend. So she will be in her favorite color, pink instead of blue. I guess yellow will still be good choice to go with pink.

I like my visual of 8 across aircraft carriers wrapping the world circumference. Cubic miles doesn't really convey the same register of "how much." I may even do an apology linkage to my old outrageously wrong post to a new post where I do that 8 aircraft carrier abreast stretching to and beyond the horizon.

Or not.

Tom Moon said...

Ah, but the cool thing about Mount Everest is that you can use Google Earth to go and look at the mountain in relation to the whole earth, in 3D no less. One analogy I read said that Mount Everest relative to the Earth is like a grain of sand on a baseball. How big a grain of sand, it didn't say, but it's a good image, the truth of which becomes obvious on Google Earth.

Tom Moon said...

Oh! "The commissioner's girlfriend"! At first I thought you meant Commissioner Gordon in the comics had a girlfriend who was a pink Supergirl!

Davis Chino said...

Tom: "...resolving complex science probs requires more than intuition..."

So beautifully and elegantly put.

MrGoodson2 said...

Here's some more elegance.
total water on earth Also shows how cubic mile visualization doesn't help drive home absurdity.

Yes, we are but pin pricks of influence on this Earth.
But somehow driving the climate to a furnace level.

I'm more tree huggery than anybody when it comes to what mankind can do to an animal population. They can easily pull off extinctions. Man won't be changing Earth's climate, period. Little intense booger we laymaen call the Sun will decide what the climate is up to.

MrGoodson2 said...

I like the comic book page.

MrGoodson2 said...

And I like the Thanksgiving message. Happy Thanksgiving! I bought a pecan pie and whip cream. I'm ready.

And I'm thankful. Things could be worse.

Pecan pie may be illegal next year. Might be a felony to own one.

MrGoodson2 said...

Another thing about man as ineffectual pin prick related to Everest. I'm fascinated that as much trouble as typically goes into retrieving human remains, that there is basically a pile of human bodies no one can bring off the summit of Everest. Can't be got to with anything but manual labor and amounts to too much of a task at those extremes.

Tom Moon said...

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Thanks for that link to the "total water on earth" article Ellis. It was interesting and it provided a chance to do more math.

You know that if you click on that article's link "U.S. Geological Survey", it takes you to the government website from which it gets its info: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

And there is a table that breaks down the distribution of water on Earth. The total amount of water in "Ice Caps, Glaciers and Permanent Snow" is 1.74 percent of all the water on Earth, and the volume of that ice in water form is 5,773,000 cubic miles. (Ice is less dense than water so that's an underestimate of ice volume, but never mind.)

So now we have a new perspective: The 200 billion tons of ice (73.4 cubic miles worth) claimed to have been melted in three years is indeed a lot of ice, but it is only 74 cubic miles out of almost 6 million cubic miles, a mere 1/78,650th of the total ice in "Ice Cap, Glaciers and Permanent Snow".

Tom Moon said...

Oh, and the color version of your drawing is looking great. Thanks for posting the photo of the girlfriend. I think your client will be very pleased!

MrGoodson2 said...

You've convinced me you don't have a bias Tom. The UN is definitely not going to be using your thimbleful math to justify the trillion or so wealth transfer they'd like to see occur.

Tom Moon said...

Well, you know, I have my opinions on global warming, but they aren't part of this discussion.

Opinion and bias are two different animals. A trial jury should be free from BIAS, but in the end it needs to render an OPINION based on evidence.

Skepticism, intuition and gut feeling are fine, but these are only starters. In the end they need to be backed by data and reason.

Whatever one believes about global warming, no personal or political attacks should be allowed in the discussion. Politics shouldn't be part of science.

If everyone would agree on that, I think the world would be a better place, yes?

MrGoodson2 said...

It would be nice if black could be black and white could be white. Couldn't agree more. But there is an entire political movement based on the truth being as malleable as repeating a lie until it is accepted as truth.

MrGoodson2 said...

And as far as intuition trumping me getting on a lab coat and doing the math. I'll use my intuition that the Sun will always be our climate driver and that any effort or lack of effort by man fades in insignificance.
We'll have cooling or warming entirely ( 0r 99.9 percent) based on solar activity for as long as there is life on Earth.

MrGoodson2 said...

I really don't want to be taxed on breathing. That is global warming in a nutshell. It is taxing what is available to tax from the republics. Not the commies or the autocracies of course. Only the wealth of the infiltrated republics.