Ice meteors, climate, sceptics

Grant wrote:
Brian Sandle wrote:


Unless there is some sort of vortex.



not sure how a vortex would affect my arguments


And you wouldn't get a clear chunk of ice anyway by this mechanism;
you'd get a big porous mass of ice crystals.


Like hoar frost? It's incredibly patterened, but quite solid, not porous, I
think.


"Feathery" is the word that came to mind the last time I examined thick
hoarfrost.

Though `feathery' gives the impression that it would be easy to break. But
it is soldily attached to whatever it grows on.

Porous in the sense that you have needle-like or dendritic
crystals growing into a feathery mass, as opposed to a uniform glaze of
ice.

Though not crushable as I have seen it, there were not filaments
projecting into the air.

Note by the way that hoar froast, which grows by sublimation from
the vapor phase, is different than rime ice, which is less porous. The
latter involves the accretion of supercooled droplets and requires a
visible cloud. It's the same process involved in hail and graupel
formation, whereas hoar frost is more analogous the formation of snow.

What I saw was a tremendous pattern on a car roof top where there had been
very slight air movement.

Where are the data about upper atmosphere temperature and global warming?


Here's a factoid that might help put things into perspective: typical
water vapor concentrations in the upper atmosphere are below 4 parts per
million, relative to air. And air at, say, 50 km altitude has a density
on the order of 1 gram per cubic meter. So to grow a 10 kg chunk of ice
at that altitude would require you to figure out a way to quickly
condense onto one object *all* of the water vapor in 2.5 cubic
*kilometers* of ambient air.


Any reason for 50 km? Most of the air where vortices could do anything is in
the troposphere.

If tropospheric vortices are involved in producing large chunks of ice,
then they're also producing clouds. I thought the issue at hand was one
of ice chunks falling out of the clear blue sky, and more specifically
out of the stratosphere. But maybe I haven't been reading closely enough.

I don't think the original article mentioned stratoshpere, though I guess
that is the part of the atmosphere which would be cooling under global
warming? Your argument about the amount of water vapour there is quite
convincing. However what about clouds that form at 50km over the polar
regions?


Bottom line: I tend to think the stories about chunks of ice out of the
clear sky, while possibly true in some sense, have nothing to do with
meteorology in any form, let alone global warming.


Could someone be deliberately tossing junks of ice out of passing
aircraft?


I have heard of frogs raining down. Seemed genuine.


I think the prevailing view on that is that the frogs were probably
swept up into the air by a tornado or waterspout.

Yes. How far could they be thrown?

Although I have to
admit that most such accounts have aspects that are hard to explain, IF
you take them at face value.


Recall the crop circle "mystery" -- it eventually was

acknowledged to be a hoax -- by the hoaxers themselves - after countless
"experts" had been quoted as saying, "it can't be a hoax."


Ha ha, yes. It became quite a hobby of the `sceptics' or pranksters to show
how it could be done. How did they hoax the real crop circles in which the
bent over wheat is said to keep growing - it is not trampled? Enlightenment
please.

That's precisely one of the arguments the "experts" used. And then the
hoaxers showed that it's really not that hard to bend the stems without
breaking them.

Do you a ref? It seems the bend looks more like the sort in a plant which
has been grown in a pot then turned on its side. Though I cannot verify
that except pass the ref, which also gives they are produced very rapidly,
and the confusion engendered by "sceptics"' film arrangements.


Linkname: Discovery Channel Crop Circles
URL: http://www.oregonuforeview.com/discchancrop.html
Last Mod: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:22:04 GMT
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