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Floods!


Caid Ivik

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DS_CL, you're totally correct. But...

Increased temperatures mean that liquid water takes up more space. Therefore if the oceans all get hotter, the sea levels rise. Moreover, the melting of the ice caps will stop insolation being reflected, and so the water will heat up more. So actually the melting of the ice caps does indirectly contribute to increased sea levels.

I also heard that there is a seal escapee from Prague zoo trying to get to the sea.

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DS_CL, you are right, but that only applies to the floating Arctic ice.

Remember that the vast majority of polar ice is in fact in the Antarctic ice sheet... which is NOT floating on any water. The melting of the East Antactic ice sheet alone accounts for 60 meters of those 70 I was talking about. The other 10 are a combination of the West Antarctic and Greenland. I never even considered the floating ice over the Arctic... it's too thin anyway.

But like I said, the melting of the Antarctic is an insane extreme scenario. I was just pointing out a "what-if".

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> Because by the laws of physics, water will displace as

> much mass as the volume of water that is displaced by

> the object. In other words, the melting of the polar

> ice caps will have the same effect on the Earth as ice

> in a glass of water. If you notice when you’re pouring

> a glass of ice water, the water level stays the same

> even though the ice melts. This is because the mass of

> the ice displaced equals the volume of water it took

> up. That’s also why the ice floats.

Thats wrong! Why dont you just try it? Just fill a glass of water and do a lot of ice cubes in it and you'll see that it actually WILL rise!

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true it will rise a bit (well for as far as i know) but anyway also keep in mind that a part of the ice is also above the water level so that piece of ice WILL make the water level rise. Also the south pole is on land. only the northpole is floating

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Well I also had that idea with the water and ice is 1/10 bigger

but:

Is there more ice on the planet (poles and other things that will melt) than 1/10 of all the water? is answer is yes... ...then we got a big big problem

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Your right Nema, I forgot to take into account the loss of heat reflection by the poles. But then, hotter climate means more cloud cover. To my understanding, Clouds also act as a heat reflector. I figure, if the temperatures rise, and more of the oceans evaporate to compensate for the increased amount of heat, cloud cover should increase as well.

As for the expansion of water when it is heated, the evaporation of the oceans should counter this effect. I believe that if global warming was going to increase sea levels, we would have already started to see this effect. As far as I know we haven

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Er... note that higher temperatures means more evaporation, but not necessarily more condensation to form clouds. Therefore areas of cloud will become denser (and more rain will fall on Austria and the Czech republic), but they will become smaller in area, since condensation will only happen at a higher altutude.

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Actually, it's like this:

North Pole melting - no problem

Greenland melting - small problem

West Antarctic melting - BIG problem

East Antarctic melting - "Houston, we have a HUGE ******* MAJOR PROBLEM!!!!"

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It's no problem. If we'll have one problem for thousands of years, we will habituate. Just we'll have more floods and rain, at least farmers won't need too much water supplies. If Antarctica is partially melting, it would be good for Australia, because it's such dry land.

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