Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
December, 2009…
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…
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
December, 2009…
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…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.