a few on my Sustainable Communities or Team email lists or their relatives have had major problems understanding, that while there is a lot of bullshit and argument about how severe climate change is, there is almost no significant uncertainty whatsoever on the amount of ice in the world, and how much ice, and how high the seas would rise as it melts at ever increasing rates.
While I understand some people have difficulty with the idea of the seas rising ~70metres, this is largely due to either not doing geography at school or not paying attention to geography at school.
Greenland is a pretty big island with the Ice Sheet on Greenland ~2,400km long, 1,100km at its widest point with an average of 300-400kms wide and an average of 2.4 kilometres thick. The Wikipedia articles on Greenland and climate change generally appear pretty accurate, especially now you can track who is altering the entries, even the fossil fools aren’t fiddling with them – so for more detail see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Ice_Sheet_Project and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Greenland_Ice_Core_Project
and as you can see from the figures quoted in the IPCC report below, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is significantly bigger than that of Greenland.
Although the scientific consensus that almost ALL governments on Earth subscribe to through the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
is that the melting of all the ice would equal just under 70 metres rise in sea level, this does not take into account the parallel process of the thermal expansion of the oceans as they too warm, that could add another 10 metres.
Concern is developing at the warming of the oceans to significant depths, as this indicating that climate change is having more impact than we thought, and in turn will have significant effects on ocean currents, fish stocks and ecosystems, storms and hurricanes and also hasten the demise of the tropical coral ecosystems and speed up the collapse of the sea ice in the Arctic as is currently happening and the Antarctic.
Although I don’t have recent figures at the moment, I’ll dig some up – the last figures I remember were from an Australian mob who were plumbing the depths of the Indian Ocean and consistently finding a 1deg C rise at 1 kilometre down on measurements taken in the 1950s.
Now for those physicists out there you can work it out, but for the rest of us, it takes a hell of a lot of energy to warm that much water!
now from the figures below
The total ice ~28.92 million cubic kilometres. Now that is a significant amount of ice!
| Table 11.3: Some physical characteristics of ice on Earth. |
(The table does not translate well onto this page, so follow this link
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/412.htm#tab113
Data sources: Meier and Bahr (1996),
Warrick et al. (1996), Reeh et al. (1999), Huybrechts et al. (2000), Tables
11.5 and 11.6. a Including glaciers and ice caps on the margins of Greenland
and the Antarctic Peninsula, which have a total area of 0.14 x 106
km2 (Weideck and Morris, 1996). The total area of glaciers and
ice-caps outside Greenland and Antarctica is 0.54 x 106 km2
(Dyurgerov and Meier, 1997a). The glaciers and ice caps of Greenland and
Antarctica are included again in the next two columns.b Grounded ice only, including glaciers and small ice
caps.
c For the ice sheets, sea level rise equivalent is calculated
with allowance for isostatic rebound and sea water replacing grounded ice,
and this therefore is less than the sea level equivalent of the ice volume.
d Assuming an oceanic area of 3.62 x 108 km2.
