OT: Get out your parka...

A mondegreen, almost. If you've not come across that word, look it up on Wikipedia, it's interesting.

"Oooooooh, me ears are alight", as Desmond Dekker once sang.

Cheers

A classic teen level mondegreen...

"It was Christmas and everyone was feeling merry. Then Mary left." ...Jim Thompson

I have run into the word, but it's an interesting Wiki entry regardless.

;-)

Of course it's sometimes dialect-dependent. In my rhotic dialect, "saw" ("I am going to saw the wood") and "sore" ("my arm is sore") are quite distinct words, but that's not universally true.

A classic example is the Mary?marry?merry merger

And in my area, the complete phonemic merger of "cot" and "caught", another slightly Scottish-sounding twist.

Wonderfully captured by Russell Howard :-

I volunteer to conduct the study! Fund me, fund me!

-Tom

It takes a bit more than that. First you have to work out who might fund yo ur research project, then you have to write - and cost - a research proposa l, and show how it is designed to answer some question that hasn't been ade quately answered by earlier research (which you'll have to identify).

Then you will have to submit your proposal and wait for the grant-funding a uthority to have it assessed, and effectively compared with all the other r equests for research grants that have come in this year.

IIRR about one in twenty proposals get funded, and the grant-funding author ities have been known to complain that they don't have enough money to fund more than half of the proposal that get really positive assessments.

My wife once got an amazingly positive assessment, but still didn't get the grant ...

I did that at Ft' Rucker Alabama in '72. They got six inches, the first significant snowfall in over 20 years. Some people were without electric for over three weeks because of all the downed power lines. Not just secondaries, but the main feed across the southern end of the state.

Here is the original source of the information, which shows a steady decline of polar ice at a rate that will hit zero in 30 more years if the trend continues. When we have only 1% of the original ice (as of 1983), a 60% increase will just bring it up to 1.6% of what it was in 1983.

Getting all excited about an out-of-context factoid in a UK equivalent of the "National Enquirer" is rather juvenile and serves only to diminish your credibility [even further]. This does not deserve posting in any more than two newsgroups. Perhaps I should add alt.kooks!

Paul

The trend you refer to is only arrived at if you ignore history pre 1980.

Most of the material in ...articseaicenews... is compromised in the same way.

Look a bit further back and the picture is more complex.

Michael Kellett

Wattsupwiththat.com is a trifle suspect. Anthony Watts is affiliated with t he Heartlands Institute. He apparently attended Purdue University, but neve r graduated and his point of view is unsophisticated (to put it kindly).

The Arctic sea ice area would have been expected to change with the Atlanti c Multidecadal Oscillation

and the coupled Pacific equivalent

We should finally be getting some kind of handle on this from the Argo buoy data. Watts is right in claiming that there were fluctuations in Arctic ic e cover before anathropogenic global warming had got underway, but he's wro ng in discounting the fairly dramatic decreases we have seen recently. We'v e been sailing around the edges of the Arctic ice sheet for quite while no w and the recent fluctuations have been dramatic and unprecedented.