Global Warming

[Rat Faced]

Is this the UK of the future?

[bigboab]

You forgot the 'link' RF.
Did the Board 'Flood Control' prevent you posting it?

[lynx]

That picture is what would happen if sea level rose by 83 metres. That's if the antarctic icecap melts and the whole of the water in the ocean expands as it heats up. Presumably just before it comes to the boil. I believe the next picture in the series is what happens if sea level rose by a "more likely" 7 metres.

It's an old trick. Produce a prediction which is clearly preposterous and it makes your alternatively seem much more believable. While tactics like this may have an impact on the gullible, they do little to promote their ideas among those who have access to reasonable scientific data.

As long as garbage like this continues to be churned out it is hardly surprising when some people respond by saying that the whole idea of global warming is rubbish.

[Rat Faced]

84 meters, and if all three ice caps melt

7 meters is if only Greenlands melts

and i think its 13 meters if Greenland and one of the Antarctic caps melts (cant remember which one though, and im late for work now so it'll have to wait until this evening )


Boab, its copied from The Scotsman newspaper..

As Lynx says though, its only one of a series of possible senarios, and the news jumped on the last one

Much more likely and would happen much sooner is the Gulf Stream "Turning Off" because of all the extra fresh water in the North Atlantic... this would give the UK the climate of Alaska

[manker]

one of the Antarctic caps melts

There's more than one

Perhaps you meant sheets. Anyway, I finally found the source which you may have to sign up to see. It's actually rather reasurring, less the attention grabbing picture of a submerged UK.

I like the way that The Scotsman reports that it's possible Peterhead and Ullapool will be lost to the waves but makes no mention of low lying foreign settlements ... like London

[lynx]

I'm afraid some of these people haven't done their sums.

The most "likely" thing to occur is the melting of the arctic ice sheet. But since it is composed of fresh water ice and is currently floating on top of salt water, if it melts the resulting fresh water will occupy less space than the salt water the ice is displacing.

The result would be a drop in sea level. I don't have enough information about how much ice there is and therefore how much the drop would be, but simple physics shows that this would be the result.

The people who make these forecasts work out how much ice there is and assume it will all go into the sea, yet they neglect some significant facts:

1. Ice is much bulkier than water, so the volume of the water will be much less than that of the ice it comes from.
2. When you combine salt water and fresh water, the resulting volume is less than the total of the original volumes when separate.
3. The land under the antarctic and greenland ice caps isn't flat. If we assume it is typical of land that has been under ice for a long time it will be covered in large hollows. It would be quite likely for extensive lakes to form.
4. It isn't quite as easy to melt ice as seems to be suggested.

Apply the same amount of energy required to melt a block of ice to the water produced after it had been melted. You will raise it's temperature to 80C. Once the ice caps have gone there will be nothing to absorb the heat we are supposedly producing, and global temperatures will rocket. Since there isn't already a dramatic rise in temperatures we have to assume that the ice caps are already absorbing most of the excess energy.

But that isn't a reasonable assumption. Ice is a relatively poor conductor of heat. It is extremely unlikely that the temperature of the ice more than a few feet below the surface is being affected. What is really important to these calculations is the change in core temperature in the ice caps, and that is unlikely to have been affected. More significantly, no-one even seems to have bothered to go and measure it. I wonder why not.

[Rat Faced]

one of the Antarctic caps melts

There's more than one

Perhaps you meant sheets. Anyway, I finally found the source which you may have to sign up to see. It's actually rather reasurring, less the attention grabbing picture of a submerged UK.

I like the way that The Scotsman reports that it's possible Peterhead and Ullapool will be lost to the waves but makes no mention of low lying foreign settlements ... like London

The latest paper suggests this new, fast-melt scenario would lead to a rise of six to seven metres in sea levels that would drown the centre of London and leave cities and towns including Edinburgh, Newcastle, Scunthorpe, Bristol, Plymouth, Norwich, Peterborough and Bournemouth waterlogged.

In the highly populated London area, it would mean a massive relocation project, with much of the boroughs of Southwark, Lewisham, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets, Bexley and Barking under water, along with large areas of south Essex and north Kent.

Lynx, the whole point of Geo-Thermal electricity production is that its a constant temperature just a few meters under the ground, which is largely unaffected by the Air Temperature... I would assume this to be the case in the Antarctic too? (I dont know, just assuming)


As to the large volume of Fresh Water... thats why i said that we're more likely to have an Alaskan Climate, as the Salinity of the North Atlantic is what keeps the North Atlantic Drift Current moving. The Fresh water could stop that circulation, and if that happens it will happen virtually overnight in real terms, and there will be nothing anyone could do about it.

The amount of energy in the form of heat, that is carried from the Carribean to the North Atlantic (inc the shores of Britain) has been put at the equivalent of 1 Billion Power Stations and is the reason our winters are so mild in comparison to cities of a similar Latitude around the world.

eg: Irkutsk, Moscow, Calgary, Edmonton and Juneau (Alaska) ... all these Cities are in the same Latitude as British Cities.

[manker]

There's more than one

Perhaps you meant sheets. Anyway, I finally found the source which you may have to sign up to see. It's actually rather reasurring, less the attention grabbing picture of a submerged UK.

I like the way that The Scotsman reports that it's possible Peterhead and Ullapool will be lost to the waves but makes no mention of low lying foreign settlements ... like London

The latest paper suggests this new, fast-melt scenario would lead to a rise of six to seven metres in sea levels that would drown the centre of London and leave cities and towns including Edinburgh, Newcastle, Scunthorpe, Bristol, Plymouth, Norwich, Peterborough and Bournemouth waterlogged.

In the highly populated London area, it would mean a massive relocation project, with much of the boroughs of Southwark, Lewisham, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets, Bexley and Barking under water, along with large areas of south Essex and north Kent.

Of course, I was referring to this part:

In a doomsday scenario ... Edinburgh, Dundee and Inverness, and smaller settlements such as Peterhead and Ullapool, could be wiped off the map completely.

A doomsday scenario, but we're only mentioning the bits that may affect Scots

It put me in mind of the famous (at least if you live near me) headline in the Western Mail circa 1912:

Two Welshmen Killed at Sea - SS Titanic sinks.

[Rat Faced]

Theres another way of showing that headline?

[manker]

I agree, we're pretty damn important.