Posted on 03/22/2019 3:15:09 PM PDT by The Archer II
Say I want to raise the sea level one inch, how much water do I need?
If I am understanding what you wrote, you are calculating how many falls similar to Niagara it would take to raise the oceans one inch IN ONE YEAR.
Another way of saying that is that it would require 2,620 years for enough water to flow down Niagara Falls to raise the oceans one inch.
The catch there would be that I don't know that the watershed feeding Niagara contains that much water. If not, then the watershed would have to be replenished by rain occasionally. That rain water would then have to come from, you guessed it, the oceans.
This then suggests that one way to stop the rise of the oceans would be to build a dam to stop Niagara Falls. I'll let you calculate how large the lake behind the dam would have to be.
Who knew that solving global warming could be so much fun.
You would have to include some factor for land area.
The land surface is not impenetrable. Water can seep in and raise the water table.
“Say I want to raise the sea level one inch, how much water do I need?”
Climate “scientists” claim the oceans are rising not so much from melting ice but from thermal expansion caused by warming waters.
“Ican’t Tell you how much water would be required but I CAN tell you how many dollars the Democrats will claim they need to prevent it.”
—All of them, of course. All of them.
To calculate how much water to raise the oceans by 1 inch...simplified.
Volume of sphere: V = 4/3 x PI x Radius^3 (cube of radius)
Volume of the outer 1” ...V = 4/3 x PI x [(Radius + 1/12 foot)^3 - Radius^3 ]. (using 1/12 of foot instead of 1 inch...so that answer is in cubic feet vs. cubic inches.)
Given that radius of earth is about 4000 miles ...times 5280 ft per mile .
NOW - that is covering the entire surface of the earth 1 inch...but since the earth is 70% water and 30% earth - then take the computation - and multiply by 0.7 to get the volume to increase water level by 1 inch - but we are not putting water on the land mass to any appreciable amount.
Big numbers. Once you get volume - then convert volume to gallons? 1 cubic ft. of water is approximately 8 gallons.
That is it, using ‘back of envelope figure.
Floating Ice melting changes nothing in the ocean level as you say. Only ice on land melting can affect ocean levels and 99% of the ice on land is in two places: Greenland and Antarctica. Both are below freezing so they aren’t melting. Land subsiding is the only cause of existing sea level rise.
In terms of time it would take the Niagara flow rate roughly 30,000 years to raise the oceans 1 inch. By then we’ll be in another ice age.
For the ice to melt there must be warming. There was warming during the Middle Ages, which Michael Mann conviently omitted from his temperature graphs. The Earth warmed between 1 and 1.5 degrees Celsius.Yet the human population prospered in those years. There were no reports of coastal towns going under water.
Here’s another angle for you to this question since you got me interested in playing with some math….specifically as it relates to the thermal expansion of water.
A temperature of 39.2 happens to be the point where water is the most dense (8.3452 lb/gallon). This also happens to be very close to what various scientists have determined is the overall average temperature of the oceans. Let’s assume the ocean average temperature climbed 0.8 degree to an even 40 degrees F. At this temperature, the weight of the water would be 8.3450 lb/gallon or to put it another way, if a gallon of water was originally at 39.2 degrees F and it was allowed to warm to 40 degrees F, it would occupy a volume that is approximately 1.00002 x larger than its original volume of one gallon. The average depth of the ocean per NOAA is 12,080 feet. Let’s say the entire ocean went up in temperature by 0.8 degrees F. This would increase the volume such that it would rise to an average height of 12,080.24 feet….. in other words, about 3 inches. This of course does not take into account that any rise in water would be spread out so it actually would be less.
So to follow up my post 29,if you want to raise the entire ocean by 1 inch, you would need to increase its average temperature by 0.8/3 or approximately 1/4 degree F....
Great analysis! How much would you have to tweak it, to account for the weird way water behaves between 32*F and 39.2*F? (Or whatever the corresponding figures are for sea water.)
Would the Earth’s circumference go up 6” if the oceans rose 1”?
Good question… The density of water at 32.2 degrees F is 8.3452 lb/gallon so the increase in ocean height if the entire ocean temperature dropped from 39.2 to 32.2 degrees F would be to 1.00013 x 12,080 which is 12,081.57 feet. In other words, if the temperature of the ocean dropped from its densest point to the point just before it began to freeze, the increase in height would be 1.57 feet (18 7/8”).
You did raise a good point though which is not something I took into consideration in my earlier posts (or this one for that matter)….. the data I used is based on regular good old water, not sea water. For the record, ocean water has a typical salinity of approximately 3.5% which means that it is approximately 2 ½% more dense than standard water. The other thing about seawater is that the salt lowers its typical freezing temperature into the 28 degree F range so its density at that point would actually be a bit lower than the aforementioned density at 32.2 degrees F (if just taking into consideration the impact of temperature alone.) Bottom line is that to do all this in a highly precise way would need to take into consideration that the density of ocean water depends on three things… temperature, salinity and depth (which affects the pressure it is under). Having said that, I don’t think that any of these three have much impact on what I suggested my earlier posts which was just a quick and dirty estimate. However, somebody wanting to do this in a detailed way will of course be taking into consideration the fact that these three things will make some difference to the calculation….but at a first glance, not an appreciable difference.
I haven’t verified this but here is an online calculator I found that dials in the above three factors when calculating water density…. http://www.csgnetwork.com/water_density_calculator.html
True, factorially true... and that increase in itself would be a danged complex calculation, thinking out loud. One farm pond... if its edges are not “overrun” with a vertical quantity of rain— say a pond that has a 12 inch above highest waterline concrete straight up wall. But to over run sandy (absorbent and not) shores all over the world. Esta non possible’.
And then that irritating concept of the worldwide daily and nightly evaporation of surface water into the atmosphere (water vapor being the MOST important factor in climate warming... not CO2). So there’s that as far as “rise in the ocean levels”. All of these factors are precisely why the entire concept of this looney prediction is not readily provable, nor possible to link it with.... warming, and melting... as in, why not re-freezing even if you say it is warming? This is fun.
Better to invite people to keep their plastic away from ocean
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