Am i right in thinking that it isn't too much of a problem if the north pole melts as the whole lot has no landmass below anyway so is already floating? I.e. you fill a glass to near the brim then put an ice cube in and it is the brim, when that ice cube melts it stays at the brim. Obviously it's bad for wildlife, but not us right? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8307272.stm
You're kind of right in a not-very-right-at-all kind of way. Sea levels will rise, and places at or below sea level will dissapear. No more cheap stag weekends in Amsterdam!
Lots of fresh water in the sea isn't great on many levels, disturbing currents and disrupting the pH. It isn't always about volume and mass Whether it is anthropogenic or not is another thing, and always gets the most assured answers from the people with the least applicable knowledge
I can see where your logic is coming from, but remember all the ice is in once place, where if it were all melted it would be more evenly spread around the world. edit: I firmly resume my position as about the whole matter
Sea levels will only rise when the ice/perma frost melts on places like Greenland. Whereas an iceberg displaces the same amount of water that is contained within it.
Doesn't it displace slightly more? So if all the free floating ice melted then sea levels would fall slightly?
Without the ice in the Artic, does this mean that there would be a shortcut created for shipping between Western Europe and the Orient? Just head North through the Artic Ocean and pass through the Chukchi sea towards Bering Sea and no Suez Canal charges, good news on one front then.
It's all the explorers and climate researchers going up there that's melting it, all those packet foods and cups of tea
Have a watch of "An Inconvenient Truth". Also the current claims to territory there are more about shipping/transportation routes than sub-surface oil/minerals. Yes fishfingers, that's correct.
I assume you mean to watch and then ridicule? Even hard nosed CC consensus based climate scientists gafaw at the mockery that is Al Gore's creation. To be able to show it in school's, the top panel of climate scientists insisted to the government that teacher's make it clear that what it contains is only Al Gore's opinion, not fact.
My favourite article of the week; http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/...-on-the-yamal-tree-ring-affair-plus-rebuttal/ The remaining cornerstone of the IPCC's Climate Change report has turned out to be worthless. The entire study was based around 10 trees. And the most abnormal tree possible was chosen to represent Climate Change. ONE TREE HAS DECIDED CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY ON A GLOBAL SCALE. I knew 'Climate Science' was a sham, but this takes the biscuit. Anyway, have fun reading about hocus pocus and nonsense!
One of the main potential problems of the north polar cap melting is that the fresh water locked up in the ice will melt, desalinating the north Atlantic. As salt water is denser than fresh water, the gulf stream will drop and return south at a much more southerly latitude. This in turn will mean that we will get colder weather.
Yup, that's been causing a poostorm among my dept at Uni (Env @ UEA, where CRU is). Cherry picking data is a big no-no. Think you will find that they picked ~10 trees that showed the trend, neglecting about 30 others, which when added show no signs at all.
The arctic melting won't have a direct effect on sea level but the thermal expansion of water indicated by such an increase in temperature will*. A more serious problem for us is that dumping large amounts of fresh water into the ocean may well shut off the Gulf Stream which would cause a rapid and marked drop temperatures in the UK. It could be very bad for us. * - you may have heard that water is most dense around 4 degrees C and expands when it's cooler or warmer than that. This is only true of fresh water, salt water carries on getting denser until the point it freezes at close to to -2.
