Following taken from another poster..
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.
Here is our Global Warming source of some of the basic info:
Global Warming 101 - How much ice is on Antarctica?
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
"hc - the water level in the glass rises when the ice cube is put into the glass. Your example had the ice already in the glass. That is the fundamental flaw in your argument. The water from the land bound glaciers melts and raises the sea level. As the globe gets warmer and the glaciers melt the sea level gets higher. Pretty simple."
Actually, that was a minor part of the argument. What I was referring to was pack ice, which forms the block to the northwest passage, floating shelves in Antarctic regions, and other polar areas.
Teachers' Domain: Ice Shelf and Ice Sheet Simulation
This fellow seems to have done something similar what I just did, but he did it earlier, in more detail, and has slightly different figures that he is working with. He also has some nice images. Enjoy.
"What if all the ice melts?" Myths and realities
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