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January 10, 2010

The Sound Of Settled Science

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

December, 2009...

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January, 2010...

Climate science faces a new controversy after the Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit which suggested that global warming could raise sea levels by 6ft by 2100...


Posted by Kate at January 10, 2010 12:03 PM
Comments

Hide the tide!

Posted by: Sheldon Kotyk at January 10, 2010 12:30 PM

The time comes in all cults when they turn inwards and devour their own.

David Warren nails it . . .

"Al Gore’s visions of environmental apocalypse, spooky beliefs in redemption through “reducing our carbon footprint,” and the various other crackpot environmentalist ideas, have force because they draw on the same old schizophrenia: apprehension of a grand cosmic conflict between “dross matter” and “refined spirit.”

Militant Islam postulates some paradise in which the perpetrators of psychopathic violence will be rewarded with their 72 virgins, or whatever. In some respects this is closer to sanity than the Green postulate, in which the Earth becomes an Eden after the human presence has been, as much as possible, removed."


http://tinyurl.com/yclrl6e

Posted by: Fred at January 10, 2010 12:33 PM

Three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water. Has anyone calculated how much ice would have to melt and flow around the world to raise the sea level? Consider that a lot of the Arctic ice is floating and will not have any displacement value at all.

Anyone? I personally don't believe that there is enough ice at the poles (that could actually melt) to raise the ocean levels more a few inches at best.

If there is a science head reading this, I would really be interested in those numbers.

Posted by: Abe Froman at January 10, 2010 12:34 PM

I once had an enviromental activist protest because we were taking water from a lake to fight a house fire.

He claimed that we were reducing the level of the lake and as such, exposing spawning beds.

When I mathamatically demonstrated that we would have to take 3,000,000 loads of water to lower the lake 1mm, he called me a liar, wanted to work the figures himself, then accused me of being an evironmental destroyer.

Posted by: robins111 at January 10, 2010 12:40 PM

There is a link with Climategate - shoddy science. At least this guy didn't cover up his methodology.

Posted by: Shamrock at January 10, 2010 12:43 PM

Here's a link to a lot of denier science-
http://www.iceagenow.com/Sea_levels_are_falling_not_rising.htm

Posted by: Ian Vaughan at January 10, 2010 12:46 PM

They make it sound like the only water on earth is contained in the oceans, and the ice shelves.
These calculations are all flawed, because they ignore too many variables.

Meteorologists are trained to observe, and base their predictions on behavior. Their predictions have an accepted margin of error. Climate scientists need to observe more, and predict less. If they were to follow that path, they'd be more believable.

Posted by: dp at January 10, 2010 1:04 PM

robins111

A few years ago, a pair of summer students working as forest service fire fighters were barbecued while permission was being sought to bucket water (with a helicopter) from a nearby lake in Eastern Washington State. The Green jackboot has its priorities.

Posted by: John Chittick at January 10, 2010 1:09 PM

The very notion that Antarctica could possible melt is absolute balderdash.
Antarctica arrived by continental drift approximately 50 million year BP and it started to snow on the then forested landscape....and has been snowing every since.
It is unlikely that the Palmer(Antarctic Peninsula) will rejoin with Terra Del Fuego or that Central America will submerge.
All that is necessary is to listen to the warmists "scientists" a very short time and their Global Governance/depopulation beliefs manifest. They just can't help but betray their motives. A poll was taken of warmist "climate scientists" in 2008 and it appeared the concensus had little or no faith in the climate models but maintained a solid belief in CO2 AGW....belief!!!!!
The tidal guages in Tuvalu showed a sea-level decline not a rise----the IPCC dispatched "researchers" who dismantaled the tidal guage....problem solved....

Posted by: sasquatch at January 10, 2010 1:11 PM

Fred. I think if the global warming crowd joins up with the Islamists they could create a more workable cap and trade scheme. Perhaps they could offer virgins for a certain measurable amount of carbon footprint reduction. Then everybody would be happy. With the possible exception of the virgins.

Posted by: gord at January 10, 2010 1:15 PM

John Chittick

I don't doubt it, you should see the angst when they think we are going suck up a fish.

The point is, there's no logic, just sniveling, and when you point out that there argument is impossible, they attack you personally.

I suspect that if anyone other than them ever did the math, you'd find that even if the icecaps melted (unlikely) that the water wouldn't raise more than an inch or so.

Likely things would happen like a flooding of death valley, the dead sea, etc. The Sahara would likely benefit, as would others such as the Gobi.

However, it's hard to get attentionwhen you say, all is well.

Posted by: robins111 at January 10, 2010 1:17 PM

Met Office observes a minute of silence for the late AGW? When lleh freezes over.
...-

"Brrrr, the thinking on climate is frozen solid
Dominic Lawson"

"A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

After reading this I printed it off and ran out into the snow to show it to my wife, who for some minutes had been unavailingly pounding up and down on our animals’ trough to break the ice. She seemed a bit miserable and, I thought, needed cheering up. “Darling,” I said, “the Met Office still insists that we are enjoying an unseasonably warm winter.”

“Well, why don’t you tell the animals, too?” she said. “Because that would mean they are drinking water instead of staring at a block of ice and I am not jumping up and down on it in front of them like an idiot.”"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6982310.ece

Posted by: maz2 at January 10, 2010 1:45 PM

I thought that the Gore said that the oceans would be rising so much that the coastal cities would be flooded by the year 2010. I can't find anything on this first-hand. Does anyone know where it is stated?

Posted by: wallyj at January 10, 2010 2:22 PM

maz2 - while sea levels have not risen and are not rising, clearly the BS levels have been rising and will continue to soar to astronomical heights.

Posted by: blackash at January 10, 2010 2:31 PM

Google returned all of TWO stories for 'sea-level rise Met Office denounce'.

Posted by: grok at January 10, 2010 2:37 PM

I am wondering just how supposedly educated people can be so dumb as to swallow all this AGW and sea-level rise nonsense?

BTW, off chance, we have three canoes ready to go, 1 cedar-strip and two aluminums.

Saskatoon is approximately 1400 feet above sea level.

Posted by: Ken (Kulak) at January 10, 2010 2:47 PM

Posted by: Fred at January 10, 2010 12:33 PM

[Silently chuckling to self as morons keep demonstrating ineptitude]

But wait! We're ruining the planet!

Paul

Posted by: PiperPaul at January 10, 2010 2:57 PM

Abe Froman and subsequent commenters on that fact, that's an excellent point

Posted by: Erik Larsen at January 10, 2010 2:59 PM

Maz2- It's good to see you're spending your time wisely, at your computer, while your wife is chopping ice for the livestock. Well done.

Posted by: dp at January 10, 2010 3:04 PM

'Google returned all of TWO stories for 'sea-level rise Met Office denounce'. '

I think a better search is.
"sea-level rise" "Met Office denounce"

google returns 13.5k and yahoo 227k
google is loosing customers.

Posted by: Celina at January 10, 2010 3:05 PM

Calculations - Has been awhile for me, but I am sure there are thousands of sda readers who are more than capable, if given the raw data.

Volume of a sphere: 4/3 π r3 (radius of earth about 21 million feet.
(Others, please check these crude calculations!)

4/3 * 3.14 * 21,000,000^3 cubic feet

4/3 * 3.14 * 9261 X 10^18 cubic feet

38,772 X 10^18 cubic ft (Volume 1)

Al Gore says a 26 ft rise, but lets use the 6 ft rise of this post.

The new radius (will adjust for earth being 71% ocean surface later) would be

21 million feet + 6 = 21,000,006

Volume of alarmist sphere

4/3 * 3.14 * 21,00,006^3 (volume 2)

I have some snow to shovel, carry on some one, please.

Subtract Vol 1 from vol 2 and we have the volume in cubic feet required for a 6 ft sea level rise.

Increase this by 1.41 (1/0.71) as the earth is 71% ocean.

This should be (baring mistakes, heh!) the volume of melted ice required on Greenland and Antarctica. Increase by 10% (ice vol to water vol)

Now, the hard part: Take your measuring tape and go to Greenland and Antarctica because we cannot trust National Geographic or Scientific American and surely not CRU or Al Gore to hand over accurate icecap data!!


Posted by: ron in kelowna ∴ at January 10, 2010 3:05 PM

They are failing to see the silver lining in this. The rise is sea water (caused by CO2) will solve the acidification of the oceans (also caused by CO2). No carbon trading, regulation or new taxes required.

Even Good Old Mother Nature knows that the solution to pollution is dilution.

Posted by: LC Bennett at January 10, 2010 3:09 PM

LC Bennett, yeah. Like the old saying, the solution to high prices is high prices, the solution to too many people using fossil fuels will be too many people using fossil fuels. All of this charade is a bit silly.

Posted by: Erik Larsen at January 10, 2010 3:19 PM

It doesn't always work though. For instance, what is the solution for too many politicians? More politics? Ugh.

Posted by: LC Bennett at January 10, 2010 3:36 PM

"Sea level rise may be even more urgent than previously thought"

Or maybe not, as it never was as urgent as the Alarmists said it was in the first place.
Yawn.

Posted by: Oz at January 10, 2010 3:44 PM

Abe and Ron...I may be wrong....but hasn't it been proven(by REAL scientists)that as the ice caps and glaciers melt,then the resulting lose of weight causes the earth to rise?(Any geologists out there?).And again,as we did 40 years ago in grade 6 science....fill a glass of ice cubes with water,then set aside and let melt.How much ovrflows?Archimedes was not stupid.

Posted by: Justthinkin at January 10, 2010 4:52 PM

Archimedes - true for ice that is floating but not for ice on land, such as Antarctica and Greenland.

As with all scams and hoaxes, the "best" ones are the ones that have lots uncertainty. Hard to prove, either way.

1) Will the ice melt?
2) How long will it take?

Only fifteen thousand years ago, there were mile thick glaciers covering most of Canada, Russia, Europe, ect - with a resultant huge drop of sea level, about four hundred feet. Imagine what that would do to all the world's great harbors !!

How would dry harbors in New York, London, Rotterdam, Los Angeles effect the world's economy and trade? And Al Gore's sea side San Fran property?

Posted by: ron in kelowna ∴ at January 10, 2010 5:17 PM

O's AGW Report: Da proof.
...-

"Robert Gibbs: Record Cold Is Result of ‘Climate Change’ (video)

Minister Of Propaganda Gibbs:"I would say that even in places that are used to getting very cold weather, record cold...our weather patterns have been affected by change in our climate."

(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.tv"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2425363/posts

Posted by: maz2 at January 10, 2010 5:24 PM

Awhile back Bill Good was pandering to some screaming hysterical greenie who was going on & on about a recent research study that figured out that the annual ice melt in Antarctica was in the order of 57,000,000,000 tons.

57 BILLION he explained with concern. Such a huge number, we are going to die . . . yadda, yadda yadda.

Took about 2 minutes of research to figure out that that big scary number translates into a melt rate that would take 185,867 years to rid Antarctica of ice.


Posted by: Fred at January 10, 2010 5:25 PM

Is Al Bore's sea side San Fran condo a high rise or is he wearing high water pants?

Posted by: Liz J at January 10, 2010 5:25 PM

Count the ways their lawyers instruct the media to 'ass-cover'.

[ Sea level rise may be even more urgent than previously thought.]

Terms such as *may be* and *previously thought* are worth dikall.

In court, the media editors will simply claim it was to 'the best of their knowledge' - IOW, they were just mouth pieces for idiots. aka, yelling fire in a crowded theater - which is a crime.

Posted by: ron in kelowna ∴ at January 10, 2010 5:26 PM

Hmmm.

This is certainly not one of the finer moments in the comment history at SDA. The post is fine but the comments are certainly sub-standard.

It is valid to critique the entire idea of catastrophic global warming and it is also valid to doubt man-made global warming and even man-made climate change. It is also fine (and even commendable) to argue against the statist "solutions" proposed by the UN types.

It is also alright to ask intelligent questions of the form: "If the average temperature of the earth rises by X, how many decades or centuries will pass before the ice sheets (Antarctic and Greenland) are melted?" It is OK to point out that the theoretical melting of the Artic polar ice cap will not change sea levels at all because the Artic ice cap is not land based.

However, you should know that the volume of the two ice sheets in question is well known. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by about 20 feet. The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels by about 180 feet. The two ice sheets melted would raise sea levels by about 200 feet. Now, no one even in the alarmist camp is suggesting that either sheet would melt completely. We should concentrate our criticisms on the questions of what is the predicted temperature increase and the predicted ice rate melt. Because these two are both predicitions, they are not well known quantities. We should not write as though we do not understand the volume of the ice sheets, for we do have approximate measures of these.

For what it is worth, I am both an Engineer and a Geophysicist.

Posted by: Brent Weston at January 10, 2010 6:28 PM

Al Gore's Weather (AGW) discovered by TOGMail.

Copy/pastes AGW Report from AssPress.
...-

"Europe grapples with fierce winter weather"
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe-grapples-with-fierce-winter-weather/article1425810/

Posted by: maz2 at January 10, 2010 6:45 PM

yes brent...

but they ain't melting and they won't be melting....and anyway i don't believe your numbers....and as you surely know one can take ALL the continents and place them in the Pacific Ocean and still have BAGS of room left over....there's a mort of melting polar ice caps necessary to even put a dent in the Pacific Ocean mean sea level...

for what it is worth i am a railroad engineer and a boatbuilder....and my mom says i'm pretty darned clever...

Posted by: john begley at January 10, 2010 6:46 PM

since the UN declared a 2 degree limit-useless to declare anything more or anything less. its the efing law.

Posted by: cal2 at January 10, 2010 7:17 PM

We've heard this kind of thing before from all kinds of doomsday fanatics- population, food, water, Y2K, the ozone. There must be some sort of pathological need to imagine catastrophes.

Posted by: Osumashi Kinyobe at January 10, 2010 7:22 PM

AGsW is now performing across the MSM: It's a hit.

Thanks to Al Gore's Weather (AGW).

Do you believe this?
"On Friday the agency reported that the Baltic Sea was covered by ice that was 40 centimeters thick in places."

>>> The German mice are freezing? Schnauzers next?

BTW, Hope ButtCrack Karl is keeping mitt der warm in da prison.

...-

" ed says:
January 10, 2010 at 7:48 pm

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100109/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_europe_snow

“At the German-French border near Freiburg, hundreds of trucks were stuck for hours when French authorities closed the highway because of heavy snow.

Britain: the country is in the midst of its longest cold snap in three decades, and transport has been disrupted in many areas.

Heavy snow forced the cancellation of all flights at Dublin Airport in Ireland

On Fehrmarn, another Baltic island, farmers were being asked to use their farm machinery to help clear the roads, said Volker Kluetmann, an island official.

“The snow is so high that even the snow plows get stuck,” Kluetmann said.

In Berlin, even the mice were desperate to escape the cold: Swarms of them have taken over the Bundestag, the country’s parliament, …

Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute: on Friday the agency reported that the Baltic Sea was covered by ice that was 40 centimeters thick in places.”

Glo Bul Warming."

http://www.bluelikeyou.com/2010/01/10/msm-mission-statement-thou-shalt-not-have-balance/#comments

Posted by: maz2 at January 10, 2010 8:02 PM

For what is worth Brent, I am a Rancher and a Farmer, so indirectly I keep your little tummy full, and I call bulls..t, the mere fact that this great lie could have wasted the countless billions of dollars while children(oh yes, think of the children), are starving is unreal. The liars called scientists have damaged science to its very core, who will believe these clowns in the future? Their dogs will not even respond to their drivel from now on. Al Gore/ Suzuki and on and on should hide before they have to return their solen billions, and they should, they are no different than Madoff and all other scam artists. To think there are people stupid enough to waste the time doing the math you wasted time on Brent shows the level of your critical thought process, there is none. This scam has to be thrown in the y2k recycle bin before any more BORROWED money is wasted on this communist plot to break the west if is still not to late! Governments that have bought into this hoax should fire every minister that has been stupid enough to entertain any of this crap!

Posted by: bartinsky at January 10, 2010 8:13 PM

For what it is worth, I am both an Engineer and a Geophysicist.
~Brent Weston

Good stuff Brent!

There was an optimist, a pessimist, an engineer, and a politician who observed a glass of water.

To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

To the politician, the water is irrelevant.
The glass is endangered by CO2, which is man-made, and until the CO2 is completely controlled by the politician, nobody gets to use the glass except at the politician's discretion.

Posted by: Oz at January 10, 2010 8:25 PM

OZ@8:25PM...well said!!!!!
And in case Brent did not understand it....the climate has been changing for at least 3.5 BILLION years,and will continue to do so.If you want to send your money to the Gore cult, do so,go ahead.Just don't try to steal mine to send also!

Posted by: Justthinkin at January 10, 2010 8:39 PM

Gore and Hansen are weathermen. Here* is their explanation, aka Da Proof of da proof of da AGW.

No mention of ursa polarisses.
...-

"NASA’s version of the 2010 winter"

"NASA's Earth Observatory explains*:

"Throughout December 2009, the North Atlantic Oscillation was strongly negative, said the National Weather Service. This image shows the impact of the negative Arctic Oscillation on land surface temperatures throughout the Northern Hemisphere as observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Cold Arctic air chilled the land surface at midlatitudes, while Arctic land, such as Greenland and Alaska, was much warmer than usual."

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/285378

BTW, Leno took it on the chin, eh?

Posted by: maz2 at January 10, 2010 9:02 PM

waiting on the blog owner to release my calculation.

anyway Brent dont call me as a geophysist to do a time structure. your numbers dont add up

Posted by: cal2 at January 10, 2010 9:19 PM

Meanwhile Bagdad Bob Gibbs there in the white house is busy claiming climate change, ya think Bob. Just go outside in your undies for an hour Bob and you will be wishing for those dyna-gaunchies that little Mohab was wearing on the airplane you morons were warned about. Give it up theives.

Posted by: bartinsky at January 10, 2010 9:24 PM

From a quick google search you can get the estimates of cubic miles of ice on Antarctica and Greenland. On a similar search you can find out how much surface area there is on the earth. If you divide a volume by an area you get a depth. In this case it works out to about 200 ft.

Of course its a meaningless number since the ice isn't melting and a 2 degree increase in temperature isn't going to melt much ice in Greenland or Antarctica. My uneducated guess is that if AGW is a fact (cough cough) it is just as likely that the ice sheets increase since evaporate more warmer oceans ev

Posted by: Joe at January 10, 2010 10:19 PM

Yeah, but Joe, the potential is there for a 200 ft rise if both ice shelves melt. It's not hard to believe that 1% of the full potential rise, that is 2 feet, can easily happen within 20 years.

That 2 feet would be a severe effect for many people. Just ask the people of Ft. Elgin NB, they would be the among the first to float away.

Posted by: Canuckguy at January 10, 2010 10:47 PM

In the last, say 50,000 years, has sea level been;

a) 200 feet higher

b) 200 feet lower

answer; lower

That is the one I would worry about. (if any)

Think; where would all that missing sea water be ? On top of your head in the form of ice !

Posted by: ron in kelowna ∴ at January 10, 2010 10:55 PM

A couple of considerations when trying to calculate the amount of sea level rise:

1. The sheets on Greenland and antartica are not of uniform depth.

2. Ice and snow are less dense the water (unless the ice is extremely compressed by thousands of feet of other ice weighing down on it. Then the voids are squeezed out. Ice berg ice actually sinks in a glass of fresh water). Therefore a foot of ice melting will not result in a foot of water.

3. If the earth were to warm and shrink these ice masses the average air temperature would be higher and thus be able to carry more moisture - not all of the melt water would remain in the liquid phase - thus a sizable amount of it would become air borne and not raise the sealevel.

Now, how much do you trust those with a vested interest - IPCC gore Suzuki et al - to take all three of those factors into account when making their predictions?

I don't trust them at all either.

Posted by: Gord Tulk at January 10, 2010 10:58 PM

Well, Brent Weston, Engineer and Geophysicist, I happen to know a couple of engineers of impeccable credentials and long service myself, and they call bullshit- (but they really like to toot their horn when they come to all those railway crossings)!
This scaremongering regarding catastrophic icecap
disappearance is reprehensible- it won't happen!.... at least not in the next few dozen generations, barring some devastating solar eruption that will wipe us all out anyway. Then we're toast!
The threat we do face is the rampant rise of naive greenie activism, a brainwashed generation product of our leftist educational system, and a never-analysing, never-questioning of the MSM.
And why are those of your ilk so willing to throw your support to these shyster loonatics when it won't make an inkling of difference in the whole scheme of things? If you've got too much money, do something magnanimous... instead of spending it on yourselves, how about putting it to the homeless or disadvantaged, medical research, community infrastructure?
Why has everybody forgot how to use the faculties that God gave them?

Posted by: Snagglepuss at January 10, 2010 11:22 PM

If, at present, the ice is at, say -45 degrees and it warms to, say -40, will the ice melt at that temperature?

If the world warms slightly and the atmosphere holds more moisture, could it possibly snow more and grow the glaciers ?

That is what has been happening lately in the antarctic .

Posted by: ron in kelowna ∴ at January 10, 2010 11:26 PM

Glug,glug ..... glug!

Posted by: larben at January 10, 2010 11:50 PM

Go to the bar, order a rye and water. Does the water rise in your glass when the ice cubes melt? I find its usually the other way around. Cheers!

Posted by: Joe Citizen at January 11, 2010 12:03 AM

i am struck by the images of these two scientists accompanying the article. the photograph of Stefan Rahmstorf (promoting catastrophic sea levels) has the signature of slick marketing all over it (maybe from a book cover) - in contrast to the utility head and shoulders shot of Jason Lowe who (politely) points out (and cautions against tasting) that the other guy's theory looks and smells like it.

in the first image(up to the hips in water) i can't get away from the evangelical showbiz aspect of it.

this isn't a criticism of evangelicals, but along with everybody else here, i'd rather have good numbers with my scientific theory than wild guesses dressed up with sugar and pretty pictures.

Posted by: johnnyonline at January 11, 2010 12:39 AM

Abe and Ron,
Another way to very roughly calculate how much the earth's ocean's would rise if all ice on the planet melted is as follows:
First we ignore all ice shelfs and floating ice because of the old ice cubes in the glass of water experiment. Next we ignore all but the two main ice sheets which as you know are Greenland and Antarctica.
Now according to that corrupted fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, the Greenland Ice Sheet covers an area of 1,710,000 km2 and is just over 2km thick. If you multiply these two numbers you end up with a volume of 3,420,000km3 for the Greenland Ice Sheet. Next Antarctica which Wikipedia quotes as covering an area of 14,000,000km2 with an average depth of 1.6km. Multiply the two numbers and you get a value of 22,400,000km3 for the volume of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Add the two volumes and you get a value of 25,820,000km3.
Returning to Wikipedia (I am so ashamed of myself) we find the area of the world's oceans to be 361,132,000km2. Divide the area of the earth's oceans by the volume of the two ice sheets or 361,132,000/25,820,000 and the result is 13.9865 etc. Since this is a rough calculation we will round up to 14.
So if we had 14 times as much ice as occurs in Greenland and Antarctica we could raise the oceans by 1km but as we have only 1/14th of that amount we divide 1km by 14 and we end up with a value of 71.4285 etc or in other words an ocean rise of 70m or just over 230ft.

Now as I said at the start this is a very rough calculation. It does not take into consideration such factors as the volumetric thermal expansion/contraction coefficients for water/ice (Sorry I am not an engineer). As I am sure you know equivalent masses of ice and water have different volumes as ice is less dense than water. So we can expect the 70m to decrease since water is more dense than ice, however it should be noted that glacial ice is more dense than other ice. Also when the water warms to above 4C it will start to expand and increase the depth.
Nor does this calculation consider the additional area the oceans will cover as they rise. And if we want to really be accurate we need to conduct an airborne electromagnetic survey to map the base of both ice sheets to get a more accurate volume.
Furthermore as other posters have noted if you melt all that ice you will get isostatic rebound of those areas previously covered by glacial ice. At the same time in other areas close by there will be susidence of the earth's surface. This is currently occuring in Europe where Scandinavia is rising due to glacial/isostatic rebound but in the Netherlands and east Britain the land is subsiding or sinking (Ever wonder why the Dutch keep building bigger and bigger dykes ?). Also you need to remember gravity because a large ice sheet produces its own gravity field which will attract water towards it resulting in depth changes to the ocean close by and even thousands of kilometers away.

As I am sure you will agree there are an awful lot of things to consider. However the predicted ocean rise of 200ft if both the the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets melts is probably not a bad estimate all things considered.

Posted by: redneck at January 11, 2010 5:52 AM

Just in case anyone read my above post I would like to add that I do not believe in the hypothesis of AGW based on man made CO2 emissions. Nor do I believe, as does Al Gore the ex-Vice President with the Sasquatch like carbon footprint, that the north polar ice cap will be gone by 2013. All I'm saying is that the estimate of a 200 ft sea level rise, should both the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets melt, is not all that bad.

Posted by: redneck at January 11, 2010 6:30 AM

redneck
"200 ft sea level rise"

ya think?

Adios Niagra Falls.

Maybe 20 ft. if all of Greenland or all the Antarctic completely melted which can never happen.
Nor could both poles melt simultaneously since they're on opposite poles. That's just my grade 6 education talking out loud though.

Posted by: blanks at January 11, 2010 12:41 PM

An Inconvenient Truth: The Ice Cap Is Growing

By jim_robbins on Jan. 10, 2010

A report from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado finds that Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007. But didn't we hear from the same Center that the North Pole was set to disappear by now? We all deserve apologies from the global warming fanatics who wanted to reshape the world in their image and called those who objected to their wild theories ignorant deniers. They were so convinced the world was ending and only they could save it, yet now they have been exposed as at best wildly idealistic and at worst frauds. They should have to do public penance for their hubris. I suggest they sit on blocks of melting ice and ponder their limitations. Either that or let the polar bears deal with them.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/watercooler/2010/jan/10/inconvenient-truth-ice-cap-growing/

Posted by: Bruce at January 11, 2010 4:03 PM

This link takes you to the satellite pictures from the Canadian Ice Service showing the minimum ice in mid September, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, I trust what I see not bar graphs or graphs with hockey sticks;

Minimum Sea Ice Extents - Mid-September 2005 to 2009

http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?Lang=eng&lnid=34&ScndLvl=no&ID=11886

Glo-Bull Warming is just that, nothing but BS, the fraudsters must be brought before the courts.

Posted by: Bruce at January 11, 2010 4:42 PM

blanks,

If you are doubtful about ice melting at both poles check out the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. It is hypothesized that at that time 55.8 million years ago that the earth was essentially ice free. As the earth has been ice free in the past there is no reason to believe that it won't happen in the future. Of course I wouldn't expect it to happen any time in the next couple of million years. And I certainly woldn't expect man to be resonsible for causing it. After all when you compare humans to the forces of nature we are pretty puny.

Posted by: redneck at January 11, 2010 6:55 PM
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