Yes, I know, I keep harping on about this stuff. Mostly because I "believe" it is a crock of shit - alarmist crap designed to put you into a state of F.U.D. and make you worry about nonessentials instead of essentials. Like the bloody wars going on and the steadily-rise in our costs of living despite the government-manipulated statistics (go look at Shadow Stats if you want the real CPI rise).
So here it is again: Extent of Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches Record Levels, Scientists Say
So there's more ice happening down here in the Southern Hemisphere (about 3x the size of Australia). This is supposed to be happening because warming due to depleted ozone layers is changing weather patterns. (Yeah we're still supposedly melting the icecap, even though it's creating more ice though. Sometimes you just can't fucking win. This trend should reverse in the future.)
By the way, the UN says the Ozone layer is showing signs of thickening. So it looks like we have done something towards the restoration of our planet. This actually makes me feel good about humanity for once.
Now I just want to know why the projected 70m (230 ft) rise in sea levels (according to the alarmists - and some say 260 ft) is nowhere evident down my local beach. I mean, I've only been going to the beach for the last 48 years.
For more F.U.D. and scientific doubletalk - well don't ask me, I'm not a scientist. I'm merely a computer professional. And a skeptical bastard at that.
70m is the max estimate, isn't it? It requires all of continental shelf glaciers from Antartica and Greenland melting. This scenario supposedly happened before, but it had increasing volcanism triggering changes. I have no descendants nor I intend to produce any. I will be long dead a thousand years or more in the future, when it might happen again, anyway. I let others, who have some skin in the game, worry about it.
ReplyDeleteAztec priest performed human sacrifices to keep the whole 'show' going. Be glad we don't do this kind of nonsense anymore. ; )
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Another 'alarmist' link to your collection.
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Typos again.
After reading your first link more thoroughly, this is what I garnered from it: more sea ice coverage impedes surface water mixing, which slows both carbon dioxide from the air dissolving in the water and phytoplankton photosynthesis there (less nutrients - both from deeper sea layers/blown in by wind from the nearby land - mean less carbon dioxide assimilation into biomass). At these temperatures, it's going slow anyway. As the volume of ice is concerned, sea ice is quite thin (meters, as opposed to kilometers of continental ice), so it affects sea levels only a little.
ReplyDeleteWell, your guess is as good as mine...
Actually floating ice takes up no more room than melted water. The reason being that 90% of it is in the water, the rest is in the air. Thus floating ice makes no difference to the sea-level - unless it came off a calving glacier or the like.
DeleteA good point. Only the part of free floating ice that is in the air lowers the relative sea level, right?
DeleteNope, it's volume/density. Water has a density of 1, ice has a density of 1.1, and the bit sticking in the air is the 0.1 - no extra or lesser water displacement, unless it should somehow be forced entirely under the water. Or something like that, anyways.
DeleteDammit, or is it 0.9 density for ice? I know what I mean anyway - it's why freezing water expands and cracks rocks, etc. Even though its the same amount of water: 1cc water becomes 1.1cc of ice, except that 0.1cc of the ice sticks outta the water when floating. So the amount of water displaced is the same when it's frozen, as if it were still liquid.
DeleteMeh I've never been good at explanations.
So the operative word is 'free-floating'. If not elevated above water by other means than buoyancy, then the ice doesn't affect the sea level directly. Interesting though - even there was no glaciers left anymore in the past 'global warming' periods, the rising ocean temperature (bulk mass, not only the part above the thermocline, as of now) caused the rise in sea levels - as any material being warmed has the tendency to expand (I know about the water density dropping anomalously below the 4 degree Celsius).
DeleteWiki to the rescue. Well, I have learned something new today. Damn, why wasn't there anything so handy when I was still in school?
DeleteIt is interesting all right. What's also interesting is that near-boiling water is still denser than ice is. A very surprising liquid!
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ReplyDelete...thickness of meters, as opposed to kilometers...
Yet another 'alarmist' link, this time about the North Pole.
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