[lurk]

49 feet? Over the whole jillion square miles of the seas’ surfaces? Pity the person who believes this stuff.

[GraceG]

49 feet? Over the whole jillion square miles of the seas’ surfaces? Pity the person who believes this stuff.

360 million square kilometers is the coverage of the oceans, X 49 feet in meters which is 15 meters...

360,000,000,000 Meters square * 15 meters = 5,400,000,000,000

5 trillion, 400 billion CUBIC meters of extra water....

is needed....

An ice shelf is already in the water...

These alarmists are NUTS!

[fwdude]

49 feet? Over the whole jillion square miles of the seas’ surfaces? Pity the person who believes this stuff.

Really. Sounds like someone learned the "new maths" in school where you can "feel" the answers that you want.

[SampleMan]

To get a 1 ft sea level rise requires that ~34 ft of above sea level ice melt off of all of Greenland and Antarctica.

So they are predicting 1666 ft of ice melt over the next 500 years. That is 3.3 ft per year.

Given that the average summertime temp of Antarctica is about 50 degrees below freezing, I’d say these folks a completely full of rat crap.

[Oberon]

Okay, so I did the math on this...

The entire continent of Antarctica comprises 14,000,000 km squared, or 1.4x10⁷ km². The area of the earth's salt water (all seas, oceans, bays, and so forth, taken together) is approximately 3.8x10⁸km² (numbers are from Wikipedia and so not authoritative, but probably in the ballpark).

So to keep my units the same I converted 49 feet to meters (it's 14.935m) and then to kilometers (1.4935x10^-2 km). I then figured out the volume required to add this number to the world's sea levels (assuming the boundaries of the salt water remain the same, which is intensely conservative) and arrived at:

3.6x10⁸km² x 1.4935x10^-2 km = 5.3766x10⁶ km³.

...that is to say, 5.3 million cubic kilometers.

If we were to assume, then, that this much water were evenly distributed over the area of ALL of Antarctica, then the height of it would be 5.3766x10⁶ km³ divided by 1.4x10⁷ km² (the area of Antarctica), or 0.384 km, or 384 meters.

So the ice all over Antarctica would have to be four football fields deep, and all of it would have to melt in order to do what they say.

These numbers are not out of reason. The premise may be false, but the numbers are reasonable given the premise.

[BatGuano]

Pity indeed. These pseudo scientists better stop drinking their bathwater or they will scare someone into doing something rash. Also, strike off UMass Amherst and Penn State as potential schools for your loved ones.