Where will the water really go?

Question

People worry about global warming, the cutting of trees in the rainforests, melting north pole ice & rising sea-levels. What do you think will really happen with the water? I've heard that it is really lowering the risk of big hurricanes, blowing their tops off, and the south pole's ice is actually increasing, overall: will that make the earth bottom-heavy & stop tilting? (Heh.) What would THAT do for us, y'know? Would the extra moisture simply evaporate, turn to rain and fall in other areas, perhaps turning deserts into arable farmlands & forests? If so, wouldn't that be a good thing? Warmer weather? -- I dislike cold winters. Could it be a blessing for the poor and an increase in liveable places on an earth with a growing population? What else??

Answer 1

The short answer is that the water will stay on Earth. It may be distributed differently of course, but it will still be here. As usual, the devil is in the details. And no computer climate simulation is good enough to accurately tell us the details. The Sahara desert could get bigger and dryer or get smaller and wetter. Most of the people who say we must make great efforts to stop using fossil fuels say the changes will all be bad. But they have written their simulations with that bias in mind, so of course that is what they predict.

Answer 2

The ice in the poles are fresh water, when they melt into the sea it turns into salt water. Not real good for people that need fresh water!!

When the sea level rises it takes away land also, again not real good for us people.

It also changes the rotation of the oceans warm water and actually could cause another ice age.

Not a good deal for us. The planet will be fine, we are just s******g ourselves!!

Answer 3

More water will evaporate, so it seems likely that there will be more droughts, a net increase in desert landscapes, and it will rain harder in some places.  Since human agriculture has adapted over hundreds of years to subtle microclimates, change is highly unlikely to be beneficial.

The water cycle will essentially have more energy inserted into it.  Here too a redistribution of precipitation will challenge human adaptation to current water supplies.  For example, what happens when the Himalayan glaciers supplying 2.4 billion people in Asia are gone?  

Antarctica is losing ice and the melt is accelerating:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

Increasing Amounts Of Ice Mass Have Been Lost From West Antarctica

ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — Increasing amounts of ice mass have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years, according to research from the University of Bristol and published online recently in Nature Geoscience.

Over the 10 year time period of the survey, the ice sheet as a whole was certainly losing mass, and the mass loss increased by 75% during this time. Most of the mass loss is from the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica and the northern tip of the Peninsula where it is driven by ongoing, pronounced glacier acceleration. In East Antarctica, the mass balance is near zero, but the thinning of its potentially vulnerable marine sectors suggests this may change in the near future.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2006) — University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have used data from a pair of NASA satellites orbiting Earth in tandem to determine that the Antarctic ice sheet, which harbors 90 percent of Earth's ice, has lost significant mass in recent years.

How would warming of a couple of degrees change winter?  It may challenge human agriculture and economies, but it's not going to anything to magically ban seasonal weather changes.

You have some very attractive dreams, but they don't describe current situations or likely outcomes for the future.

Answer 4

If the ice is going to melt then it will affect us because the ice is a freshwater and it will increase the saltwater level when it joins the ocean then it will affects the land area where the most population of the world lives so it was harmfull to the human beings not only for human beings and most of the living things will be affected. If it is going to affect humans only then no problem but why the other living things has to pay the price for our error.

EDIT:

This is for JS please U dont worry the Himalyan Glaciers wornt melt it was the House of LORD Shiv of the HINDUS. So he will take care and Himalayas is in hindu nations only.

Answer 5

Yes.  You are right.  There cannot be any possible negative things that will happen if the Earth warms up.  

Man, there have been some *great* questions the last couple of days.  All you skeptics have your thinking caps turned up to 11 or something.