Arctic Urban Legends

Update 2: the New York Times highlights here the opportunities & challenges in global warming opening up the Northwest Passage for shorter routes.

Update 1: this follows on another update on the Northwest Passage here.

An update to a Northwest Passage blogpost posted to the Facebook Remembering Franklin Expedition Group here, elicited a response from @aaron.spitzer. I post his comment below, which I thanked him for citing the fact my stories were from conversations that weren't fact-checked. That in turn got me to fact-check another story from the same 1986 summer in the Arctic Islands from my now-defunct original website reposted at bottom.

Cumbria classic revisited, Appleby-in-Westmoreland

Almost four years ago, a story map here showed the Skelworth Fold area of the Lake District for a friend, using advanced mapping and Environment Agency digital elevation.

"AI for the rest of us", Part VII

Update: the last of a series, follow my recap blog post here incl. Medium Channel posts on AI.

Note: the last post on my personal Medium channel shows how I used Copilot AI to good effect for fact-checking. 

Last we showed here how to create "quick & dirty" graphs while chatting on ur mobile. Now we'll see how we can create summaries, not from "text to hand", but from that cribbed off the internet. 

Having left socials, I'm down to corresponding at Extinction Rebellion "Media Tell the Truth" WhatsApp group. Jon Fuller there is also at "Climate Genocide Act Now" here. I was a scientist for Extinction Rebellion, and blogged here about the pandemic against the lies of the British government, as well as about floods and rising sea levels in East Anglia. I didn't know GCAN, however, as I'm no longer active.

"AI for the rest of us", Part VI

Update: Part VII here follows w using ChatGPT to summarize off the web direct.

 Part V (here) showed elaborate (mis)use of AI. Here is a super simple example whipped up in Google Gemini on the phone during a chat about value change over time. Notice all along, adding less & less detail shows AI perists previous prompts.

Northwest Passage Reloaded

Update 3: read here about further stories & urban legends of the High Arctic.

Update 2: see here an update on Beechey Isl. site discovered the year before my visit below

Update 1: right on cue, a photo exhibit on Arctic Life and Climate Change in Budapest HU on Euronews.

Here is an old webpage from 1996 I had to retire a couple years ago. It smacks of urban legend, had I not been told by airport staff in Resolute on Cornwallis Isl., the Arctic Canadian hub (read on):

Hurricanes, tornadoes and sea level rise

Update: see @ bottom example of a Cyclone (Wikipedia) as they're called in the So. Hemisphere.

 Further to our explorations in AI here and to the previous post here, this is a 'conversation' with Copilot, Microsoft Bing's AI extension. Conversation means that you can daisy-chain questions without repeating them, either to extend or to zero in:

Global sea level rise revisited

Update: so follow-on here with definions and relationsips among these topics

I posted here 3 yrs. ago among a series of DIY map notes to encourage Citizen Science, how to use NOAA global digital elevation data to model sea level rise data on straight geometry. See also here for an explanation referring to East Anglia. Here is what it looks like from the DIY document:

"Where in the world is Andrew?", updated

I posted a decade ago here re: creating dynamic maps where my travels can show on video. I have since improved on the original Mercator maps that smear out the poles and make N Hemisphere land mass look a lot bigger than it really is. 

Mercator projection (Wikipedia) started with mariners, whose maps allowed to plot sailings in straight lines. It was later kept by Colonialist Europe and Cold War North America, because it increased the size of colonizers and reduced that of the colonies, or conversely made the Soviet Union look bigger & more threatening.

Global harmonization of climate & temperature data since 1850

Update: a post in SciTech Daily shows that ocean  atmospheric science - shown in this and previous post - is alive and may help with assessing climate change: it's about the doldrums driven by downdrafts not updrafts; at a localized scale, downdrafts  were dramatically reported in passenger flight incidents here or the sinking off Sicily of a superyacht here, and updrafts in increasing mid-Atlantic hurricane generation here. 

CLIWOC tall ships sailings from captains logs

Update: global harmonization of climate data since 1850 follows next.

"CLImatological database of World OCeans" was my first outing using Esri tools as personal project. I found this fabulous dataset with ¼ M points! Detailed here, it came from a 5 yr. EU project to scan captains ships logs for climate data in the 17-19th c. before weather data were recorded. Tall ships were mainly British, Dutch & French, Portuguese notably absent due to Lisbon archive destruction in the 1755 "Great Earthquake" (Wikipedia).