The greenhouse effects not working or what?

18. april 2011... Looking out of my bedroom window... snow outside in late April and my woolen socks in the foreground

I somehow thought spring was coming couple of weeks ago - but I was wrong - terribly wrong.

Yesterday I actually was out on my racer bike but this morning we had some brand new snow in the city!

My new watch

Just to help me following the deadlines for all my projects!

..............

On a lecture in meteorology last Monday the Meteorologis Einar Sveinbjörnsson made diagram shoving the average wind in Reykjavik from year to year since 1940 something. And it showed how much it have decreased since then. He said the reason was all the new city building in Reykjavik. For comparison he was talking about the two airplanes. One in the middle of Reykjavik and the other in Keflavik where there are not so many big buildings as is in Reykjavik. He suggested we would look at some real data for this.

In Iceland all weather data is very reachable since it is all on the web page of the Icelandic Meteorologic Office so I checked it out. I will not describe why but I used the data for Reykjavik (not the airport) and for a small town, called Stykkishólmur.



Ég svindlaði örlítið og tók ekki flugvellina, heldur Reykjavík og síðan Stykkishólm til samanburðar. Hvor það er alveg eins og flugvellirnir er reyndar ekki alveg ljóst en niðurstaðan er merkileg samt.

Rauða línan er meðaltalsvinur fyrir 5 ára meðaltalsvind í Reykjavík og sú bláa er fyrir Stykkishólm. Það er greinilegt að línan fellur verulega fyrir Reykjavík og mun meira en fyrir Stykkishólm. En það sem er kannski undarlegast í þessu samhengi er hvað línan fyrir síðustu 15 árin er lík fyrir Stykkishólm og Reykjavík en þá minnkar vindurinn verulega á báðum stöðum. Það sem sker Reykjavík helst úr er e.t.v. það hvað meðalvindurinn minnkar mikið á áttunda áratugnum í Reykjavík á sama tíma og hann er að aukast lítið eitt í Stykkishólmi.

Skiing with my rescue team

I have been long enough in the rescue team with out going skiing with the people there. Finally I managed to go skiing with some of the newbies there in Blafjoll area where we went almost 20km. Great day in variable weather. The weather was not always bad in the beginning when Sigþóra came smiling but still complaining over my continuous photography.



And then again the weather was not so good and people were falling down all over the place.

Not doing so badly

Igla... the monster worm eating my trees!

I'm perhaps not doing so badly. There are weekly exams or so in two of the courses. I have not yet got any result from one of those courses but I have got test results from the other one. And I can say I'm not doing so badly there at all!

In the environmental course I'm working on a project about the climate change regime with 5 other people. Before I started this study I had no idea what those International regimes really were but now I'm reading the UNFCCC document and tht Kyoto Protocol to find out the norms of the regime. I hope I have some success in that.

The photo above is related to the climat change. That insect is coming more and more common in my forestry in Myrdalur. That worm will change to a butterfly or some kind of an ugly moth but not before it has eaten some leafs or one tree of the tree is small. Since it is really getting warmer in Iceland those creatures are becoming more and more common in the south part of the country and even they are beginning to spread over the whole seashore of the country.

What did you learn in school today

Anthropocene

What have you done?

I have some doubt about if the courses I'm attending make any integrated knowledge base I can use in the future but two of them connected surprisingly this morning.

One is about history of the Earth and the professor holding the lecture began telling us about a new article he is writing about the newest period he think has begun some decades ago and he wanted to call it "Anthropocene". That is the age of the human being and began when the man started to have serious effect on the Earth, effect that will never go back.

Later I was reading an article in the environmental course and there was talked about this Anthropocene as some kommon knowledge!

Better now

The illness in first week of the year was really very bad. I got high fever, almost 40°C and had this debate with the illness for the first week of the year.

And now I'm the schoolboy. I'm not sure what on Earth I'm doing there but I hope it will be OK. I'm now in four classes and they are all somehow different and the people in them as well. Two of them are geology courses and one is geology. The fourth is from the Environment and natural resources line. That is the line I' going for. The difficult thing is that I think I have to quit one of the courses and at least until yesterday I liked least the environmental course. That course is teach in English and it is very different from the other courses and in that course I Have to think a little bit different than in the other courses. But perhaps that is the best. I don't know exactly. This blog in English is moreover at the moment some playground for me to practice my English writing. I just hope I'm not totally hopeless in that!

Last Friday I went with some of the students from the environmental line to a science trip to the Icelandic electric power company Landsvirkjun. It was strange to be there a guest since I used to work for them as a consultant. The people I met there didn't know me at this time. I got to know some of the other students. They are a little bit strange as myself so that's perhaps not so bad.

More things to tell about... on the photo in the beginning of this blog entry is me and Anna Maria when we went on out bikes along the shoreline in Reykjavik yesterday. Below is a photo from my current knitting project. A new brown sweater that is supposed to have a hood. I will be a renewal of my favorite sweater that has become teared down on the sleeves.

A new year beginning with illness

I have been busy for the last couple of days or more.

Christmas time was just great. I was at my sister's home on Christmas eve (24th of December) and on Christmas day my people including Anna Maria came to my home and had some icelandic traditional smoked lamb meat for dinner - called hangikjöt.

On Second Christmas day I was with Anna Maria at her house with her boys and her mother. All went very well. The days that followed I was very busy selling fireworks for moneymaking for the rescue team I participate in.

On New Year's Eve I in a great party with Anna Maria's family and now I have my first illness of the year. I'm not very often ill but I began feeling something not so good in my stomach yesterday when visiting my brother. I had to leave very early to go home and throw up and lie in my bed with fever as well as the throw ups.

Since it was coming out of both ends it is something we call Gullfoss and Geysir here in icealnd. Geysir going uppwards but Gullfoss (The Golden Waterfalls) is going downwards.