Two meter sea level rise unstoppable: experts
- Thread starter danmand
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Temperatures in the Northern hemisphere have to do with ocean currents. It is far warmer in Canada and Europe than it really should be, due to ocean currents bringing warmth up from the tropics. If those ocean currents stop bringing that warmth up it gets colder here, a lot colder.
As a result you could see average temperatures rise around the world and at the same time it would likely get a lot colder where we live, due to the ocean currents changing.
You have to be careful not to concluse "global warming" with "local warming". Global warming refers to the average temperature planet wide, which can be quite different than what is going on in one particular spot.
As a result you could see average temperatures rise around the world and at the same time it would likely get a lot colder where we live, due to the ocean currents changing.
You have to be careful not to concluse "global warming" with "local warming". Global warming refers to the average temperature planet wide, which can be quite different than what is going on in one particular spot.
Tell that to the people of Florida, the shoreline would move about 2 miles inland.
I believe there are satellites in orbit (GEOSAT, or LANDSAT series I think) that measure changes in land elevation so I believe that if there was significant amounts of subsidence going on they would know.
I still say that since previous interglacial periods have been warmer than what we are going to experience in the next few centuries we'd be better off spending our money figuring the best way to relocate the people and facilities that are going to be affected than to spend ourselves into the ground trying to become carbon-neutral. (especially if such efforts are not 100% globally initiated - does no good to shut down manufacturing here if it only springs up in China)
Phil's at it again. We've had this discussion recently, but someone's short term memory is failing. Remember the Maldives PS.
How do you expect me to sleep at night knowing that Halifax and Moncton and Montreal and Kingston and Sarnia and Windsor and Sault Ste. Marie each has only a few hundred years to figure out how to deal with this??
Ho hum, here we go again. Ok lets see what things we might have to change.
We could start by evacuating all the low lying pacific islands. Maybe we should do Australia while we're at it. That drought might just last. Oh, and how about the Dutch, don't know how long those dikes will hold.
Oh, and there's a recent article suggesting all rainforests are doomed within 100 years. Oh, and what about the end of commercial fishing predicted in 50 years. So get everyone away from the coasts, they'll be flooded anyways and out of the jungles.
And what's going on in the arctic, who cares about the polar bears, maybe we should just invite all those other folk to move up there and start some orange groves. Baffin Island vineyards, anyone? Ok, maybe we'd have to take all the soil from down south with us, but that's better than trading in the hummer.
Don't forget about your point about previous warm periods. Just because one of them killed off the dinosaurs and 90% of all life on the planet doesn't mean we can't be part of the 10% this time. That would take about 7 degrees C, and just because that's the upper range of predictions doesn't mean we should consider it.
Killed the dinosaurs? I think that was a meteor strike. And it would have been the cold that killed them. Think instant ice age.
Yep, small blue dude, land does sink. Geologists call it isostatic depression. In layman terms, that means the land sinks into the upper mantle of the earth (which is kind of plastic, not solid rock, because of pressure effects). Does the fact that land does sink help out those who claim sea levels are not going to rise, or that even if they do there's nothing to get your shorts in a knot over, or that sea level rising has nothing to do with pumping CO2 into the atmopshere? A big fat NO, and I emphasize big and fat. Why?
Because the main cause of isostatic depression is ice sheets, that is, sheer weight pushing the land down. If the glaciers recede, there will be some isostatic rebound (land rises), but that will take an exceedingly long time and will only be for the land that was covered in ice. If you're in the Netherlands, Florida, any coastal area, that's not going to save you from buying gumboots.
I just love this kind of reasoning. Let me replicate it. Heh world, there's nothing to worry about with anything. I mean, take any problem, extract some tiny variation in how you measure the problem, and that measurement band of error means there is no problem. For instance, we could say the world is full of stupid people. But after trying to measure stupidity, we find that there can be small variations in how we think about stupidity, so there is no such as stupidity. This certainly helps small meat for brains. It also helps anyone who notices that subtle noise in their car engine when driving home from work today. I mean, it is just a small variation in the engine noise. There's clearly no possibility, on the "non-exact measurement" theory, that anything at all could be wrong. I mean, zero possibility.
But here's a hint: please ask scientists what replication means. Even those against global warming as caused by human industry would admit, in their own experiments, that replication means non-exactness. I might be a left-wing nutball, but at least I live in the real world.
True, some predictions have the fresh water from the melted ice causing the gulf stream do become submerged thus making England have its rightful, latitudinal, climate = that of Newfoundland.
What JH's data says is that the rise in sea level over the past few years is almost entirely due to the thermal expansion of water and not ice caps melting.
OK, I won't revisit my explanation on constrained surface area vs volume but I will let you in on another theory that I am developing. A simplified view of Newton's gravitational forces equation (which was later fine tuned by Einstein) states that gravitaional force is proportional to the mass between the two bodies and the square of the distance (F = G m1*m2 / r^2). In order to reverse the warming, it is simply a matter of affecting the earth's orbit to increase the distance from the sun. To do this, we must increase the mass of the earth. If everyone gained 10 pounds per year, I calculate that the earth's distance to the sun would increase by about 8300m within 20 years, enough to reduce radiant heating by 1 - 2 C. Problem solved. Everyone go eat a pizza and help solve global warming.
Lmfao!
Good one plunker! ;-)
(But I'll skip the pizza... unless it is homemade by Mrs. CG!)
Good one plunker! ;-)
(But I'll skip the pizza... unless it is homemade by Mrs. CG!)
The quote that you are disparaging is stating that the measurments used to determine the thesis might be wrong . Most scientist are on the bandwagon that says the ground level temperature readings are in fact wildly inaccurate. More recent satelite temperature readings are showing little or no ocean temperature change outside of norms.
The land based readings were taken from thermometers in weather sites that had not been updated or even inspected for years and in some cases decades.
The bottom line that large numbers of scientists yes even a large number of the people who "signed off" on the ICPP report of a couple of years ago now admit that We JUst Don't Know what the climate is doing, it is far to complex to model with any confidence, in fact all the variables involved in the idea of the climate as a system still are not know.
The basic fact is that unless you have an agenda beyond science the only answer to the question what is the climate doing? is I DON'T KNOW.
Any body on either side of the argument who states anything else has an agenda of some description.
It would perhaps behoove us to find out what is going on before we bankrupt the industrialized world trying to fix a problem that is actually not a problem.
I know I have tried to make this EXACT point in the "other" GW thread, but as usual, some else has come along and said so much more eloquently than I ever could. Thanks landscaper! This is exactly my point.
It is a point but wait foir the screaming from the usual suspects.......I know I have tried to make this EXACT point in the "other" GW thread, but as usual, some else has come along and said so much more eloquently than I ever could. Thanks landscaper! This is exactly my point.
The problem is that once it starts rising, the water rising in and of itself melts more ice, which causes water to rise, which melts more ice.
I read somewhere awhile back that the sea level rise will not be uniform around the world. You would intuitively think the sea is the same level everywhere, but it's not. There are odd gravity effects at play at the planetary scale.
Specifically the ice caps represent so much mass that they literally pull water towards the poles, and specifically, to the southern pole. As the ice cap melts that gravitational attraction diminishes. It is the same effect as the tides ,where the mass of the moon attracts water. The ice caps have enough mass that they have a sort of tidal effect.
Water in some areas will therefore rise for two separate reasons: First, it'll rise because there's more of it. Second, it'll rise because it'll flow from the poles to other areas.
The worst hit areas will be mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. In places like New York and Washington a 2-3 meter average world rise in sea levels may translate into a local rise of 5-6 meters.
The PAcific ocean is a couple of inches higher on average than the atlantic .
PArt of the issue about the melting ice caps is the fresh water flowing into the salt water due to density and freezing point differences there is a concern that the salinty/density difference will reach a tipping point with the north atlantic conveyor, moving it further out to sea causing a massive temperature drop across the northern mid latitudes. Woods Hole is doing a study as we speak, results to follow eventually.
