Global warming and rising sea levels all a load of rubbish?

Question

Hi, i was reading a news article on bbc about rising sea levels at the meditranian sea, and it came to my attention that it mentioned melting ice and warming sea waters expanding?

but i thought that when ice melts it takes less space because its more compact, and ok warming waters do expand but what about the water at the artic? its like -2*c (an estimate i jst made up but it is below freezing) and when this water warms up it takes less space untll it gets to 4*c and then on it expands, so where is all this water coming from that makes the sea water levels rise? surely when the water is warmer it will evaporate quicker? so this will mainly turn into cloud and rain etc, so the expansion of the warm water will make even more clouds? .... it just keeps on going....

Answer 1

The climate changes every day, every week and every year.

It is an interesting argument between this notion of creeping ice sheets that cover the world and Dr. Hapgood's theory of earth crust displacement being what causes ice ages.

I personally will believe Dr. Hapgood over Al Gore and the new religion that is global warming. It is because he had evidence, not just a theory.

If you have not read Dr. Hapgood's theories then in my opinion it is impossible to consider or discuss what is probably happening with sea levels and glaciers.

Without at least knowledge of the opposing idea all we have are people reinforcing a point of view that has little evidence to support it.

In the end all you need to know about "Global Warming" is this:

It is brought to us by the same people who were in a panic over "Global Cooling" in 1975 when the first Earth Day way held.

These people can't predict the weather with any accuracy 24 hours in advance and now i am supposed to believe they can predict it very accurately 100 years in advance?

yea right.

Answer 2

does your mother know you are being silly in public

Glaziers ,green land Antarctica .tundras are all with ice outside the water ,which will go into the seas.

this has been asked and explained too often to be funny any more

Answer 3

You said ice takes less space when melts if you take some ice cubes in a glass containing water you will see as soon as it melts the water level rises and may flow out of the glass.Already some of the places near Europe have submerged with sea water.

Hey i have collected this from various books.Do not complain that this is big.

Rising global temperatures are expected to raise sea level, and change precipitation and other local climate conditions. Changing regional climate could alter forests, crop yields, and water supplies. It could also affect human health, animals, and many types of ecosystems. Deserts may expand into existing rangelands, and features of some of our National Parks may be permanently altered.

Most of the United States is expected to warm, although sulfates may limit warming in some areas. Scientists currently are unable to determine which parts of the United States will become wetter or drier, but there is likely to be an overall trend toward increased precipitation and evaporation, more intense rainstorms, and drier soils.

Unfortunately, many of the potentially most important impacts depend upon whether rainfall increases or decreases, which can not be reliably projected for specific areas.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has developed 3-D computer animation showing the retreat of the west Antarctic ice sheet over 20,000 years, speeded up into a few minutes of dramatic video footage.

"The purpose of the visual is to emphasize the changes that have taken place," said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"During the last 20,000 years, the west Antarctic ice sheet lost two-thirds of its mass and raised the sea level 10 meters. It still contains enough ice to raise the sea level by another 5 meters if it were to lose the remainder of its mass,' Bindschadler said.

During the last 30 years, scientists have become increasingly concerned about the effects global warming might have on the west Antarctic ice sheet. Specifically, some researchers have expressed concern that rapid melting of the sheet could contribute to a catastrophic rise in sea levels around the world.

The majority of the west Antarctic ice sheet sits atop dry land, while the east Antarctic ice sheet is grounded below sea level. Changes in the east Antarctic sheet would have little effect on sea levels since the ice displaces water, but a complete melt of west Antarctic ice would pour new water into the oceans.

Bindschadler said there is evidence that the west Antarctic ice sheet may have melted and reformed several times during the past 11 million years.

The computer animation begins with Antarctica at the peak of the last Ice Age about 20,000 years ago, and shows the gradual shrinking of the west ice sheet.

"About 12,000 years ago, it began a dramatic retreat," Bindschadler said. "We're not sure if the retreat is still taking place -- that's one of the main questions we're trying to answer."

As you fly here from New Zealand the immensity of the ice is overwhelming. For the last two hours of the eight-hour trip, practically the only thing visible out the airplane window is ice. Only a few bare mountain peaks hint that Antarctica is made of anything but ice.

Imagine the 48 states and maybe half of Mexico covered with ice and you have Antarctica. (Related: Understanding polar ice).

It is a continent of about 5.4 million square miles, which makes it about one and a half times as large as the USA’s 48 contiguous states.

Ice, averaging 1.6 miles deep, covers 97.6 percent of Antarctica, giving it 90 percent of the world’s ice and 70 percent of all of the globe’s fresh water – in the form of ice.

If all of this ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise by about 200 feet.

Fortunately, even the most drastic scientific scenarios for global warming don’t envision Antarctica warming enough to directly melt all of this ice for at least hundreds of years, if ever.

In fact, one of the first effects of a warmer climate could be more snow for Antarctica, which would more than make up for melting ice. This would happen because warm air carries more water vapor to turn into snow.

National Science Foundation

John Wright works on the snow bridge above a crevasse in Antarctica's ice sheet. Scientists working on the ice have to watch out about crevasses hidden by thin snow bridges that wouldn't hold their weight.

Still, we can’t be sure all of Antarctica’s ice is going to stay frozen as the world’s climate warms, whether naturally or because of gasses humans are adding to the atmosphere.

While straightforward melting isn’t going to send water from Antarctica’s ice washing through the streets of New York City and London, nature may have other ways of putting water from some of the ice into the world’s oceans.

The weak spot could be the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But even under the worst scenario with much likelihood of happening, ocean-front property owners won't have to worry about water from Antarctica any time soon.

Scores of scientists, technicians, and others are now living in tents and huts on that part of the ice, trying to determine just how much a threat it is to the world’s coastal areas. Antarctica’s "summer" from November into February is the research season on The Ice.

The Transantarctic Mountains separate the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The West Antarctic sheet covers the part of Antarctica south of the Pacific Ocean inland to the mountains and contains about 11 percent of the ice that sits on the continent.

Water from a melted West Antarctic sheet could push global sea levels as much as 20 feet higher than they would otherwise be.

Scientists say the West Antarctic sheet is more likely to collapse than the large East Antarctic sheet because its bottom is mostly below sea level. East Antarctica’s ice is mostly grounded above sea level.

Ice moves slowly

Ice moves slowly – a few feet a year - toward the edges of Antarctica much in the way pancake batter spreads out as you pour it on a griddle. Much of the West Antarctic sheet’s ice moves onto the Ross and Ronne ice shelves, which are floating on the ocean. These range from around 4,000 feet thick where they are connected to the ice sheet to around 600 feet thick at the ocean end. The Ross Ice Shelf stretches about 450 miles from the ice sheet to the ocean and is about 600 miles wide. The Ronne Ice Shelf is a little smaller.

If these shelves melted, as they could in a warmer world, ocean water would be able to lap directly at the bottom of the ice sheet, undermining it and allowing large chunks of ice to fall into the sea to melt.

The shelves could melt while the main ice sheet stays frozen solid because the are in warmer parts of Antarctica and because sea water eats at them from the bottom as well as the edges.

Icy rivers

Many scientists feel the key to figuring out how likely the West Antarctic sheet is to collapse any time in the next 200 years lies in the rivers of ice called "ice streams." Instead of moving toward the sea like one huge glacier, West Antarctica’s ice moves in streams; rivers of ice running between banks of ice.

Jack Williams, USATODAY.com

NASA scientist Robert Bindschadler sits in a Jamesway hut at the Siple Dome Camp in 1999, preparing one of the GPS satellite receivers to be put on the ice.

"Since the ice is coming out in streams, it moves much faster and can respond more quickly. This might also give it the capability to go into a collapse," says Robert Bindschadler of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., one of the scientists working in Antarctica this month.

Bindschadler and those working with him are placing Global Positing System receivers, which use satellites to determine location and elevation within inches, on the ice. Data from these instruments will show details of ice stream movement.

Another group headed by Barclay Kamb of the California Institute of Technology, is using hot water to drill to the bottom of the ice near the edge of one of the ice streams.

They will learn more about the ground up rock and water that seems to make it easier for the ice to slide over the underlying rock. Heat from the Earth below warms the bottom of the ice sheets to around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to melt ice that’s under great pressure there.

While the hot water drills blast a hole to the bottom of the ice in a day or so, other researchers are using special drill bits to pull up cores of ice that span from the top to the bottom of the ice sheet. This ice began as snow that fell on Antarctica thousands of years ago. Its chemical makeup and the dust and other materials in it have stories to tell about past climates, which could shed light on the future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Right now scientists aren’t sure whether the total amount of Antarctic ice is increasing or decreasing, but either way, it’s close to being in balance. Icebergs, sometimes huge icebergs, are always breaking off, or "calving" from, the ice shelves. At the same time, snow falling on Antarctica is replacing the ice that floats away in the icebergs.

Those who study the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have many opinions about what it’s likely to do.

But, "one outcome that may be put aside for the moment, because no convincing model of it has been presented, is a sudden collapse that causes a level rise in the coming century," says Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Oppenheimer is not among the scientists working on The Ice, but wrote an article for the journal "Nature" last May summing up the state of West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

No matter what happens, he says, "it would take at least several hundred years for the ice to melt. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight."

Rising water

About the worst scenario those who study the ice see is for a warmer climate to cause the Ross Ice Shelf to quickly grow thinner and disintegrate. Without it, the Ice Sheet begins collapsing and melting ice causes global sea levels to rise as much as 20 feet in 250 to 400 years.

Another possibility is that the ice sheet is inherently stable. Under this scenario, the over-the-ice streams slow down, which reduces the amount of ice going into the ocean. The extra snow falling on Antarctica from warmer air more than makes up for the melting ice and actually slows sea level rise.

Oppenheimer thinks the most likely scenario is for melting to gradually increase during the coming century with the Ross Ice Shelf finally gone in about 200 years. During this time the Antarctic contributes up to seven or so inches a century to global sea-level increase as warmer air continues adding more ice to Antarctica.

But, other effects including the expansion of ocean water as it warms up, increase sea levels by much more. With the Ross Ice Shelf gone, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet begins collapsing, which takes another 500 to 700 years. During this period, melting Antarctic ice adds around 20 to 50 inches a century to global sea levels.

This seems like a long time away. Why worry about it now?

"My son is six months old, Oppenheimer says. "Assuming he has children when he's 30, and his children live 75 to 80 years, my grandchildren will be here" when a melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could begin affecting the world. "The grandchildren of people living today will be affected. We have an obligation to them."

If the Ice Melts

Despite a lot of science and even more debate, scientists don't have a clear idea about whether the ice in Antarctica as a whole is growing or shrinking. They do worry, however, that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might shrink enough to raise global sea levels appreciably in the coming centuries. The worst-case scenario is a complete collapse of the sheet, which would jack sea levels up by as much as 20 feet.

Below, see what would happen to selected coastlines around the world if such a disintegration occurred. See also how these coasts looked 20,000 years ago at the height of the Ice Age, when seas were 400 feet lower than today, as well as how they would appear if the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet were to disintegrate. No one believes this tremendous dome will disintegrate anytime soon. But if it did, it would raise seas around the world by as much as 200 feet. (To play it safe, these images depict a conservative rise of 17 feet if the West sheet collapsed and 170 feet if the East sheet did. Note that black lines represent current coastlines).—Peter Tyson

Hey if you are living near coastal area pack up your things by 2100.

Answer 4

NO... BUT:

The ice sheets in Greenland are not "in or on" the sea, but on a continental layer meaning that they will add to the level. Parts of antarctica are also on a continental layer higher than the sea level.

So it´s not like an ice cube melting in your glass but rather adding one into your glass.

Answer 5

Global warming is a farse, and it has been proven.... but Al Gore and a bunch of yuppie leftists want to stay in the limelight and bring about this whole global warming thing. It has been proven false a few years back by a team of scientists......

Answer 6

Not all of the ice is floating. The ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica are on land.

Answer 7

Floating ice melting does not result in rising sea levels since the ice takes up the volume of the water it displaces (Archimedes Principle). This applies to Arctic ice but not the ice on Greenland or the Antarctic since this is currently on a land mass. Naturally as it melts it flows into the sea and causes rising sea-levels. The consequences are huge for people living in low lying areas (Holland, East Anglia, Maldives, Florida Keys etc.)

Answer 8

Brilliant mate, you know thousands of experts around the world have failed to think of this. If only they had watched a bit more TV and spent less time at university. You doofus. I can not even be bothered to start explaining this....try google and see what you come up with....Jesus...

Answer 9

Sea water can get a lot colder than zero degrees.  I think the 4 degree temperature you quoted is for pure water and the characteristic of sea water would be different, but the principle would be the same, when water it expands before it freezes.  

The sea level really is rising, and it's been doing that ever since the end of the last ice age and it's going to keep rising no matter what people do.  They've been a lot higher and alot lower in the last hundred thousand years or so.  The media genarally doesn't mention that when they talk about the sea level rising.