Voiceless and bored

The voice is still crap.  It's starting to get in the way of things.

It's very difficult to hold a phone call with anyone and painful afterwards if I do.

Two more radiotherapy sessions to go on the hands  - today and tomorrow.  The staff at the hospital are lovely people.  One of the radiotherapists is a keen musician - asked if I could bring the psaltery in today to show him (took in the concertina on Tuesday as he was interested in that too).

It's been too wet to go down the allotment the last few days and that's resulted in me feeling bored a lot.  I'd love to go and call on one of the neighbours, but until the voice picks up, it isn't really an option.

I've got a new sore spot on my right hand - I hope it's not another Dupuytren's lump forming. (I think it's actually something muscular as the left hand is a bit achey in the same place - but I can't think what I could have done to strain those particular muscles)

Arctic sea ice melting ever faster

Arctic sea ice is melting faster than any year on record (though we only have about 30 years of accurate records as people weren't compiling data before then.  However, older records of sea ice from sailors are being studied to give some ideas of past conditions and the general picture is of more sea ice historically, not less.  The existence of species like polar bears that have evolved to live on sea ice also shows that there has always been at least enough sea ice to support a top predator.)

The problem is that it's part of the positive feedback mechanism that is heating up the planet.  Greenhouse gas emissions cause temperature rises which heat the planet (for complex climatological reasons, the Arctic gets a higher proportion of the temperature rise than other areas - so rises are greater here).

The temperature rise melts ice.  This changes the Earth's albedo and makes us absorb more heat, melting more ice, lowering the albedo still further.

Incidentally, here's a rather nice graph showing the contribution of different factors to climate variation.  If you combine the effects of solar variation, CO2 emissions, atmospheric dust, sulphate pollution, etc, here's what you get.  (For a discussion of how the graph has been derived, see here)  This graph only goes upto the early 90s, so the effect of albedo changes not shown - I suspect predictive graphs for the next decade would show an impact.

London

I'm heading towards London either Friday or Saturday.  If I go in Friday, the time I head in will likely depend if anyone fancies going round a museum/art gallery/general sight seeing with me.

Anyone interested?

I need to decide fairly quickly as I've another hospital appointment tomorrow morning and it makes sense to catch a train on the same trip if I'm planning on leaving early Friday.