Text 13277, 71 rader
Skriven 2008-03-20 17:18:44 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
     Kommentar till en text av Ward Dossche
Ärende: Re: Ice and flooding
============================
WD> "Scientists believe ..." "scientists estimate ..." "scientists guess..."
 
WD> Actually you did prove nothing but don't take this as a personal remark.
 
Nothing personal taken, I understand your point.  But there's no way any
scientist can truly know how much ice is there.  You have to admit that there
is a whole lot of ice, and that much ice turning into water means the sea
levels are going to rise more than a little.  If it all melted, that is.
 
 
WD> As you quite well pointed out, the Antarctica and Greenland ice is
WD> fresh water ... it will indeed cause the seas to get colder and the
WD> intricate pattern of seacurrents will be disturbed.
 
WD> As a result the overal temperature will drop making it colder, creating
WD> more ice, making the sealevel drop, making it warmer...
 
WD> That is fact.
 
I won't debate you on ice eventually reforming.  But how long?  It could take
decades, or centuries, of the cold weather you mentioned.  That's why it's a
problem.
 
 
WD> The uncertainty lies in the lack of knowledge about the balances and the
WD> interactions of the mechanisms. As you more or less wrote yourself with
WD> different words.
*snip*
WD> The waters along the Irish west coast have never been as warm ... it
WD> doesn't compute.
 
As you pointed out, balance has something to do with it.  Water currents can
completely change paths as ocean temperature changes, and/or new ones can form
elsewhere to attempt to compensate for various temperatures.  This can cause
havoc, such as ice melting faster in some places, to other normally warm land
masses actually becoming iced land masses.  We assume these sorts of things
from studying the previous ice ages.
 
 
WD> Antarctica is not melting. The temperature on a yearly basis hardly goes
WD> above -30øC (-22øF). Very difficult to melt. Some of the coastal regions
WD> may hover for not more than a month or two around freezing, but that is
WD> it.
 
One place will say it is, another place says it isn't.  I think
howstuffworks.com said it wasn't, and was similar to what you said about how
cold it was and being difficult to melt.  Other websites I found said it was
melting faster than people expected.  These are rather drastic differences of
opinion.  I've always been more inclined to believe ones like this:
 
http://tinyurl.com/kewgu
 
T'was just one of the first results on Google for "antarctica melting", minus
quotes. It actually returns lots of articles about it.
 
To be fair, here's one which says the opposite:
 
http://tinyurl.com/2ddf4w
 
So who even knows.
 
 
WD> What I see in none of the equations, is the melting of the Siberian (and
WD> to a lesser degree Alaskan and northern Canada's) permafrost. To me that
WD> is a much bigger threat than Greenland shaking some ice.
 
Things which I myself have rarely seen mentioned.  But again, people can read
lots about it with "permafrost melting" in Google.

--- D'Bridge 2.99
 * Origin: FyBBS (1:229/500)