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Floating sea ice is already floating and has displaced sea water equal to the weight of the ice. Solid or melted it does not affect the sea level. Melting land bound ice increases sea level.
Which includes the South Polar Cap, Greenland and portions of the North Polar Cap.
You also have to figure in the fact that freshwater from glacier melt will cause more rising seawater due to difference in density. It floats! It causes MUCH more rise in levels that frozen sea ice melting.
Actually, a single graph is more or less meaningless. Check this out: Sea Level Trends
You'll note that some stations have rising sea levels and some have levels that lower. Gore's IDIOTIC claim - and I really mean IDIOTIC - shows either a fundamental failure of third-grade comprehension or an intent to cook figures to deceive.
Free floating ice cubes in a full glass of water will melt and yet not change the water level in the glass one whit. Try it sometime. We can quickly eliminate floating ice shelves and icebergs from any change in sea levels.
Now consider that the crust of the earth sits on a highly compressed liquid layer. We might consider that when an overburden of ice melts that the ground above that liquid is effectively lighter. That means that the pressures below will act to lift that ground higher than what it was under the weight of the ice overburden. Follow it so far? This is pretty straightforward hydraulics.
The next step is to understand where that pressure comes from. It comes from all the surrounding mass pressing downward. Since the liquid is effectively non-compressible, the additional liquid that has moved under the now lighter mass has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from? The surrounding areas. Now if the liquid has been moved from those surrounding areas, what exactly happens to the level of the land or sea above it? That is correct, it has to subside.
Now we can start to get into some basic math, using the figures supplied. We can ON OUR OWN determine just how factual a claim of a 20' rise in sea levels is, and whether Floridians need to run for the hills. You can follow along with a spreadsheet or good calculator if you want. This isn't rocket science, and I'm rounding figures to make following along easier.
Antarctic ice, which amounts to about 85% of the world's total amount of ice, comprises 27 million billion (27,000,000,000,000,000) tons. If you add an additional 15%, you get roughly: 64,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of ice on the planet. There are roughly 62 lbs of water in a cubic foot, so lets round that to 64 lbs. That means there are a total of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of ice melt if EVERY BIT OF ICE ON THE PLANET melted, including the ice in Al Gore's iced tea.
There are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile. Round it to 28,000,000 square feet. If the ice melt was a foot thick it would cover an area of 36,000,000,000 square miles.
The weight of Antarctic ice cap pushes the underlying continent about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) into the earth’s crust, according to our link. Sooooo, when the ice melts, that volume of it will be removed from any equation of sea rising. (Remember the hydraulics idea from the first part of this post?) The area of Antarctica is roughly 5,500,000 square miles. Multiplying the square miles times the amount of rebound gives roughly 18,000,000,000 that we can subtract from the 36,000,000,000 -roughly half. That means we have 18,000,000,000 square miles of water one foot deep to contend with.
The area of the earth covered by oceans is 139,397,000 square miles. Call it 140,000,000 sq miles. That converts to a layer of water in the oceans 128' deep, right? In a word, no. The additional weight of the water will increase the pressure on the ocean floor and since the weight of the land masses has not increased, the tendency will be to squeeze the liquid under the crust more towards under the land masses, raising them. The seas get deeper, the land gets higher, the coastlines rise or subside based on local conditions. Additionally, we have included in our ice figure all of the floating ice shelves and icebergs, which will not raise the sea levels when melted.
Now just what percentage of ice is melting? The claim is two trillion tons of ice last year. That is 2,000,000,000,000 tons. Sounds disastrous, right?
The total ice on the planet is 32,000,000,000,000,000 tons. That means the melt is 2 out of 32,000. 1 out of 16,000. .00000625. .00625%. What is .00625% of our worst case 128'? About 1/100th of an inch. At the current rate of melt, we could expect to see the seas rise (in comparison to the land) about an inch in one hundred years.
Now, let's return to the article quoted in the original post and the claim made there:
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
Mörner says up to 4 inches. I say expect 1 inch, no more than 2 inches if I am wrong, and you saw the math I used. Al Gore says up to 20'. 'nuff said.
Now do you begin to understand why some of us are crying Bull****! to the doomer Global Warming crowd? Gore's Nobel prize should have been given for creative fiction.
------->>> Lots of impressive mathmatics but your pseudo-science is just hooey and would be refuted by 99% of real climate scientists. I'm not one but I'm a geologist and already see major mistakes. For one, the ice cube in a glass in not an analog. In the north polar ice cap the analog works because the ice is over water like icewater in a glass. However, a major fraction is over the bedrock of Greenland. The ice really does melt and add ocean water volume. The same to a many-fold degree with all the south polar ice over the massive continent of Antarctica. This melt will cause a HUGE increase of sea level. Combined as much as 300 ' or more in 2 or 3 centuries albeit.
Also, your point about the ice pushing down the land they are on is true. However this actually means an INCREASE in the sea level raising effect! Isostatic rebound means the portion of Greenland and Antarctica below sea level will "bounce up" tectonically and replace water volume.
------->>> Lots of impressive mathmatics but your pseudo-science is just hooey and would be refuted by 99% of real climate scientists. I'm not one but I'm a geologist and already see major mistakes. For one, the ice cube in a glass in not an analog. In the north polar ice cap the analog works because the ice is over water like icewater in a glass. However, a major fraction is over the bedrock of Greenland. The ice really does melt and add ocean water volume. The same to a many-fold degree with all the south polar ice over the massive continent of Antarctica. This melt will cause a HUGE increase of sea level. Combined as much as 300 ' or more in 2 or 3 centuries albeit.
Also, your point about the ice pushing down the land they are on is true. However this actually means an INCREASE in the sea level raising effect! Isostatic rebound means the portion of Greenland and Antarctica below sea level will "bounce up" tectonically and replace water volume.
I love it when fear-mongers try to call basic math skills "pseudo-science." If nothing else, it proves my point that those claiming such gloom and doom are clueless and invested in following the crowd instead of using independent thought.
As blind cleric points out, post glacial rebound is real, and has a mitigating effect. The seeming immovability of bedrock has been shown time and time again to be a false assumption. Little things like the Grand Canyon and the Himalayan uplift happened to "bedrock." You might want to invest in a refresher course on plate tectonics and plasticity.
In the meantime... if you can show and detail where the math is wrong, please do so. Calling it by pejoratives is not going to win any debate.
Oh, get real, OP! The front page of the Sunday paper today had a photo of coastal roads in the SE underwater. Cars were driving on the highway anyway, but it was under a couple of inches of water. And there's a tribe in Louisiana that has to be relocated to dry land, because the island they've inhabited for generations is mostly underwater, and the causeway connecting it to land is under water too often for the kids to be able to attend school reliably. All their former hunting grounds are under water permanently, so they've depended on fishing and shrimping and so forth, but during storm surges, their homes get flooded now, which never used to happen. So they got hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate to high ground in the interior of the state. They're the first rising sea-level refugees in the US.
Why is this topic in Green Living, anyway? Shouldn't it be in the Politics forum?
This is the strangest Green Living forum..... :shakes head:
Actually, a single graph is more or less meaningless. Check this out: Sea Level Trends
You'll note that some stations have rising sea levels and some have levels that lower. Gore's IDIOTIC claim - and I really mean IDIOTIC - shows either a fundamental failure of third-grade comprehension or an intent to cook figures to deceive.
Free floating ice cubes in a full glass of water will melt and yet not change the water level in the glass one whit. Try it sometime. We can quickly eliminate floating ice shelves and icebergs from any change in sea levels.
.
Warmer water expands. That's all that's needed to cause sea levels to rise.
Your little experiment with the cubes in the glass fails to take into account that the ice sheets are not in the water. They're on land! The Greenland ice sheet, however, is melting at a much accelerated rate over what was anticipated, and it's taking out bridges, equipment, buildings, in its rush to the sea.
Oh well. Back to the drawing board with your "thought experiments". Better luck next time.
Why are you fixated on Gore, btw? This has nothing to do with him. Scientists have been predicting this since way before our time. It first came to the attention of the public in a big way in the 70's, but global warming due to increased emission of greenhouse gasses after the Industrial Revolution was first reported back in the 1930's or 40's.
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