While discussing the media’s desire to bend truth for the sake of a good story, a person (smarter than I, evidently) asked the following rhetorical question:
“If the melting icepacks will cause flooding and havoc worldwide due to the effects of global warming, why doesn’t my cocktail overflow when the ice melts?”
If this effect scales like I think it would, then doesn’t it sound like Global Warming™ will just mean that stock in sleeveless shirt companies will skyrocket?
I await your erudite response while gathering data on the ice/cocktail theory.
(Issues with salinity could possibly blow this whole theory outta the, er, water too.)
“If the melting icepacks will cause flooding and havoc worldwide due to the effects of global warming, why doesn’t my cocktail overflow when the ice melts?”
All that ice is already in your glass, as opposed to some glaciers and such which are sitting on dry land. If you set another couple ice cubes in (to simulate glaciers calving off ice bergs) I bet it overflows just as you might predict.
There’s a flaw in your basic assumption. That is, in a cocktail, all the meltable solids (the ice) are floating in the liquid; they’ve already displaced all the liquid they’re going to. In the rael world, there’s an awful lot of meltable solids (ice and snow) that are not floating in the seas. When those solids melt, the sea level will then rise.
At least locally (Rocky Mountains) seasonal temperatures allow most if not all the water to melt, way up above timberline. I understand that there are places way off in the distance (Asia, Alps, etc.) Where this may not be the case, but I can’t believe that, on a global scale, more ice would melt.
What may happen would be that seasonal cycles would be thrown off, whereby the runoff from the rocky mountains (as an example) would melt off quicker, giving a late summer drought situation. There’s also the whole issue of Summer occuring on one side of the planet, while winter’s working on the other.
I’m also wondering if lunar tides (!) could play a part. If there’s a 0.1% change in water volume, globally, there might be more water for tidal forces to play with, making the tides more dramatic, or just higher.
I believe it’s just a plot for the insurance companies to charge more for flood zones. Or maybe it’s caused by Californian Sweat. (Here’s my theory: California has earthquakes, smog, and mudslides. They all move here…guess what starts happening? Yup! Earthquakes, smog and mudslides. Well, we haven’t had any earthquakes of note yet, but 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.)
OK, we have a couple good answers, and the obligatory anti-Bush rhetoric thrown in for a well-balanced global warming thread. Does a question remain here?
And no, I’m not a f*cking Mod. Just trying to plan my day.
And sniglet? Interesting thought on the tides increasing - I hadn’t ever considered that. Perhaps beach and coast erosion becomes a much more serious problem with a significant melt…
Not only do we have to worry about the ice melting off solid land (Greenland, Antartica) causing sea levels to rise, but the land masses that currently have lots of ice on them will rise after the ice melts, displacing even more water (I forget the geologic term for this). So, Greenland and Antartica get bigger and less icy. North America and Europe get smaller.
“Greenland was called that as it used to be green, and a Viking heaven for food and resources then it turned cold and white.”
Greenland has ice that in places is a mile thick. All that ice built up since the time of the Norse (Vikings)?! I don’t think so! Greenland has always had a small liveable “green” area on the southern coasts and a large expanse of ice inland and to the north.
It was called Greenland as a PR thing by the Norse who discovered it in order to get fellow Norse to settle there.
It’s true that Greenland was a bit warmer when the Norse established colonies there. But this website at the Smithsonian says the temperatures started falling in Greenland by the 13th Century.
There is also the issue of thermal expansion of oceans. Water has a density curve, it is most dense at 4 degrees C and then the density descreases as it warms. Raising ocean temperatures will likely cause some degree of thermal expansion but I haven’t seen it quantified anywhere other than “significant”.
Um, maybe the information presented about Greenland would suggest a cyclic long-term natural trend in global temperatures?
And, ASD, the words of the mighty USEPA, which owes its continued existence to the creation of more new environmental “catastrophes,” ring a bit hollow in my ears. This is the same bunch of folks who solicited eleven independent studies from different universities on the effects of CFC’s on the ozone layer and rejected out-of-hand the ten resulting studies that concluded that use of CFC’s has had no measurable effect, instead declaring as valid only the eleventh study, which concluded that the possibility existed that human use of CFC’s might have some effect. That was just before the cost of recharging my car’s air conditioner hit the ozone layer. IIRC, the price of Freon-12 tripled the very day the USEPA issued its ruling that stated the stuff would soon be banned.
Well, true to a point. However, I point out that ice is significantly less dense than water at 4C. The point here being that something like a melting iceberg which has more ice below the surface than above the surface “might” actually consume less volume once melted.
Which, returning to sniglet’s original question does explain why, I can put a bunch of ice cubes in a glass, carefully add water to the brim of my glass (plus a little more to create a little surface tension), notice that the ice sticks up above the water level, and notice that the water does not overflow when the ice melts… in fact, the water level drops.
I don’t think the thermal expansion of the oceans would be “significant”, as it would probably be contained to a relatively shallow depth. The temperature gradient would fall off rather fast and the thermal equilibrium of the significant volume of water would remain fairly constant.