Posted on 08/11/2006 10:49:56 AM PDT by cogitator
Yup, cold water will do that.
"You leave Pittsburgh traveling towards NYC. Your train is going 30mph. Ben R. leaves NYC traveling to Pittsburgh on his motorcycle (helmet on) going 88mph. Which traveler will cause more ice to melt in Greenland?"
Gary Coleman, of course. Next!
"Could it possibly be "SUMMER""
Uh, they have Summer every year in Greenland. This is a story about increased loss of the icepack.
You may not believe that increased climatic temperature is a human-cause thing. I don't either. However, I'm not ignoring what appears to be a fact...that the climate is warming, and that there will be effects caused by that.
Climate does not know about political sides, you see.
I suggest sending Mr. Gore there to personally investigate the problem and that he remain on the ground in Greenland coordinating international efforts until a proper solution can be found!
The unsustainable demographics of Europe and the pendng collapse of their nanny-state system of economic entitlements will cause a far, far greater disruption of European economy than a warmer, longer, wetter, more fertile growing season will.
The world is an unpredictible place. Even if all of the doomsayers about global warming are correct (and that's a very, very big "if"), the fact is that the world will continue to change, sometimes drastically, with or without human intervention. Sometimes it'll be climate change, sometimes it'll be a new disease, sometimes it'll be the development of a new kind of weapon, sometimes it'll be the detection of an Earth-bound asteroid.
It is suicide to overspecialize into a particular climate configuration, a particular geographic configuration, etc., and then try to exert Herculean effort to maintain that particular configuration for all eternity. Human beings are smart critters, and that intelligence gives us the capacity for survival through adaptability. I suggest you use it.
So, while you wring your hands and scream, "We have to DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!!!", I sit back and calculate the potential value of ocean-front real-estate holdings in West Virginia. All the money you spend on imposing restrictions on factories and power plants, you can instead spend on researching hardier foodcrops that will fare better in a wider variety of climactic conditions. That way, not only do you prepare yourself better for THIS potential crisis, but you also leave yourself in a better position for handling future potential crises as well.
"Climate does not know about political sides, you see."
No, but climatologists do.
It's been a long time since Greenland - other that a coastal strip - has been "Green"; the ice sheet covers around 80% most of the land mass, and formed in the since the late Pliocene or or early Pleistocene - roughly 1.6 million years ago.
The oldest ice currently present is around 110,000 years old, that's why cores of the sheet - some go down 3KM - are useful in determining the Earth's past climate.
There is no general consensus among climatologists regarding the cause of the apparent current warming trend.
That's great. We can farm Greenland pretty soon.
Wrong! It was cow flatuance. Greenland was overrun with cows back then.
I get the speed. It's 60 cu miles / year out of a total of 600,000. As for fresh water disrupting the gulf stream, that will take quite a bit more water to do that. If you assume 60 cubic miles is spread over 2000 by 1000 miles of atlantic, that's 2 inches of fresh water.
FReund, you were getting your neck-tie buttered the other day! How do you say, "glutton for punishment" in Deutsche?
But series, once the glaciers melt--then come the four-fanged, polar rake-snakes. I share your concern . . .
Snakes on a glacier!
Sweet... is there oil under there?
I think that would be .05 meter or just less than 2 inches.
Cool a couple of more years and I have beachfront property.....Yeehaaa!
Not only that, but if it was floating and then melted, the ocean level would...remain unchanged. This is because, according to the law of bouyancy, a floating object displaces it's own mass of water. Since melted ice *is* water, the level doesn't change. This also means that if the Arctic icecap melts, ocean levels won't change a bit.
However, the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet are both on land and will cause ocean levels to rise if they melt. If the Antarctic sheet were to completely melt ocean levels would rise about 500 feet.
There isn't a consensus among climatologists that there exists a real warming trend.
When you've got field scientists whose continued grants from the NSF depend on them being able to find conclusive evidence of global warming, they will find it, and they will do so in a repeatable and peer-reviewable manner.
Take the claim, for example, that global sea levels have been consistently rising 0.1" per year. First of all, where on Earth, literally, did they perform measurements fine enough to detect a 0.1" fluctuation in a five-mile-deep ocean? Where on Earth did they find tectonic plates that move slower than 2" per year, thus introducing a margin of error over 20 times as large as the magnitude of their measuremented deltas? Second of all, how long has this "consistent" 0.1" rise been going on? Have the oceans consistently rise 0.1" per year for the last... erm... year? I'd be very interested to know what next year's measurements would report.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.