History will judge us badly, when they sit down to discuss what idiot coined the term ‘global warming’. The real problem is not the heat - as ever, we have under-estimated our environments mechanism, and forcast a far too simple model to predict the effects of industrialisation - but humidity. As the green house gases warm up our planet, it reacts to adjust this heat with cooling rain.
Idiots who talk about biblical floods from the ice caps melting, are forgetting that ice, and water at room temperature has the same volume, the ice cube simply floats in water, and thus takes up the same space. So polar caps melting will not raise the sea, but may eventually lower it. the big problem is the North Atlantic conveyor, a stream (gulf stream) of warm water that helps keep northern Europe mild in winter. if too much fresh water is dumped into the north Atlantic, then this could affect this current. the result is an ice age, not Mediterranean climate for the UK.
in the meantime, the planet is correcting all the silly adjustments we make with our industries, but the cost is more extreme weather. The frequency of force 4 storms - New Orleans… must be enough of a warning for America to sign up to the Rio summit proposals, and to stop thinking that they can somehow spend their way out of this with some wonderful new (as yet undiscovered) invention.
[size=10pt]Global warming is not a myth, [color=Red]it is a poorly named reality
When water freezes it EXPANDS there fore if the ice melts it should not raise the sea level…BUT there are miles of Ice and snow both in the North Pole ans South pole that are above sea level… when we see pictures of Ice DROPPING into the sea surely this will raise the sea level… am I correct or am I missing something.
This is a good thread… take care … Frederick
I’ve worked with atmospheric scientists for years, commissioned by UNEP, so I do claim to have a little knowledge in the science.
Terminology: “global warming” is a misnomer and is no longer used in scientific circles (exceptional legacy: the GWP or global warming potential of gases). The term used by both scientists and politicians is “climate change”, because we know that some places will suffer a climatic reduction of temperature. The body that examines this is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The legacy term “global warming” is still used by the media and ecopolitical NGOs for sensationalist purposes.
In the Antarctic (and in Greenland), most of the ice is on land, so any melt-off into the sea will theoretically raise the sea level.
In the Arctic, one has to distinguish between floating ice and permanent ice. One must realise that ice is essentially fresh water and thus much less dense than sea water. Floating ice is formed annually and includes break-off. It is true that an iceberg, for example, displaces its own weight of sea water, but its volume is greater than the volume of the displaced sea water, so even floating ice will cause the volume of the sea to increase, with a consequent reduction of salinity, when it melts (all other things being equal). More important, the permanent polar ice cap does not satisfy Mr. Archimedes, as parts of it are jammed over islands and is thus not floating. In fact, this jamming, combined with ice flow, have created hills, often hundreds of metres high, which the sparse snowfall has, over millennia, actually produced glaciers. Thus, there is more ice above where a purely floating ice cap would physically explain. I don’t have any figures, but I would hazard a pure speculation that the mass of water trapped in the ice is between 10 and 20% more than mass of sea water displaced by the ice cap (and the volume more than this).
I would not bother too much about the hydrological cycle because there are strong negative feedbacks within it. The average amount of water (mostly as vapour) in the atmosphere has been substantially constant for at least a millennium despite all the minor changes in climate and the various natural cycles. Of course, it varies from hemisphere to hemisphere and seasonally, but averaged globally, it does not change much. I’ll even tell you how much water there is in the atmosphere: 12 x 1012 tonnes, representing 0.035% of the earth’s fresh water budget. One reason why it is constant is the atmospheric residence time of water is short, only about 10 days from evaporation to precipitation (the residence time is defined as the folded-e lifetime or 1/e or the time when only 36.79% of the original gas remains).
I cannot emphasise too strongly the difference between climate and weather. Also, there is a difference between a microclimate, local climate, zonal climate and global climate. We can see changes in weather and weather patterns. Climate change, even at a micro- level, is usually imperceptible in less than several decades (not counting where man deliberately changes things by planting concrete jungles over large areas). For example, we have observed an apparent increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes reaching the S. and E. coasts of the USA in recent years. We know that tropical storms, to reach high hurricane intensities, require to travel over sea at a temperature exceeding about 27.5
