192 comments on DrumBeat: February 19, 2007
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192 comments on DrumBeat: February 19, 2007
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IIRC, the Greenland icesheet has enough water to raise sea-levels by 23 feet, the East Anarctic sheet by 17 feet, and the WEST ANARCTIC BY OVER 200 FEET!!!! When you consider that a glacier doesn't actually need to melt, but rather may be "discharged" when enough melt water accumulates below to grease the skids, you have a conceivable scenario for relatively abrupt, catastrophic coastal flooding. I haven't heard any climate types actually model when an ice sheet (more likely segments) may discharge. I'd wager no one has a handle on it.
Aha... so the real threat isn't someone dropping an ICBM on us, they just plant one in the ice...
How did Tom Clancy miss this one???
Good heavens, do I sound THAT doomerish? Does someone need to give me a dope-slap?
FWIW, I don't think a nuke on ice has enough energy to melt enough water to make a difference. (No, I didn't run the numbers).
Your reply makes me a little queasy; after the recent flood of verbiage pollution likely intended to disrupt/misdirect/discredit TOD, such a flippant remark makes me worry about vandalism (of the thread). I'm not party to this level of discourse. I'll assume you were tongue-in-cheek.
No... you don't sound doomerish.
And no... I most definitely wasn't trying to take the thread into la-la land. Or start a sub-thread on WMD's etc... It was a poor joke. I am sorry.
That would make a good Clancy novel! The primitive types of A-bombs Iran and North Korea are striving for are big and heavy. The first H-bomb wasn't even a bomb, it was a building full of equipment. Assembling them in the middle of “Nowhere” Greenland would mean no pesky neighbors.
Of course, in reality moving all those men and equipment to the middle of the hostile environment of the ice sheet would be impractical. The extreme temperatures would adversely affect everything you did.
Now on the other hand, a half dozen hijacked Russian H-bombs.............
(Just kidding!)
"the East Anarctic sheet by 17 feet, and the WEST ANARCTIC BY OVER 200 FEET". I think you have these two the wrong way around. The West Antarctic ice sheet - the only one of the two which is in remote danger in the foreseeable future - is much the smaller of the two. The East sheet is very high, cold and climatically isolated. Just as well as it makes up most of the continent and is up to 3km thick.
Of course the big danger is the recent discoveries on Greenland of how meltwater percolates down and lubricates the flow at the ice/rock boundary. This was not taken into account in the IPCC report. The consequences for acceleration of melting are not understood, but having regard to the recent increases in measured melting rate, they do not look good. I would admit that I'm not a climate scientist, just a "general" environmental scientist, but I suspect from watching most news items and publications on these things that we are quietly passing some minor "tipping points" without even seeing them.
The scene in "An Inconvenient Truth" of the melted glacier water going into "holes in the ice sheet is my outstanding image of the film. It is obviously an opportunity for something very bad to happen very fast.