Posted on 01/27/2011 8:39:10 AM PST by Names Ash Housewares
Thanks for sharing! I’ll have to work on it some more. Just trying to picture it in me head, I still can’t convince myself that a block of ice sitting on a land mass of relatively insignificant size (compared to the Earth’s surface) can possibly contain enough water to raise the oceans around the world by such a large amount. Something with that claim strikes me as being fishy, so I was trying to use some math to figure-out what was happening.
No.
You’re assuming an “average” depth of the Greenland ice cap.
It is a very wide bowl: about the same distance as from New York City to Chicago, from Miami to just north of the St Lawrence River. Big?
Yes. But it is NOT an “average depth times an average area. The entire rim is zero depth - the mountains that go around Grrnland - to a distance of some 50-100 miles - protrude through the ice and are visible even from space. So the ice depth at the edges is “zero”. The ice area is NOT the area of Greenland, but only that area in the middle of the island.
The maximum depth at the center is just that: it is the deepest, but the area-weighted average depth is NOT the average of the maximum + the minimum. That is, you can’t get the average by adding the max + the min then dividing by 2. Further, they have only drilled some 5x holes in the Greenland icecap all the way to bedrock, so they don’t know the real contour of the under ice surface. These are simply guesses, by people who have their budgets to earn bu being pessimistic. (By over-estimating ice mass.)
In the 60 years since WWII airplanes landed on the Greenland icecap, those aircraft have been promptly buried by over 275 feet if NEW ice and snow, The aircraft cannot “sink” into the ice - their wings and fuselage would keep them them “floating” if the the airplane was to try to “sink” down. So, in the center of Greenland, almost 300 feet of new ice have been added .... at the same time that the catastrophic global warmers are trying to tell us the icecap is melting.
And, for the last 52 years since 1958, the summer (hottest) temperatures at 80 degrees north latitude - as actually measured by the Denmark Meteorology Institute - have seen a decrease in summer temperatures. And, since summer at 80 degrees north latitude is the ONLY time of year when temperatures are ABOVE freezing, melting cannot have taken place.
Despite what Hansen at GISS wants you to believe.
See also my reply above.
Now, consider ALSO that a very large portion of the Greenland ice cap is in a “bowl” whose bottom is already “under sea level” at some -1200 meters.
If that ice melted completely - estimated at requiring some 1300 years of continuous temperature increase from today’s winter time average temperature of -25 degrees Celsius! - only 10% of that volume of ice in the “bowl” would contribute to sea level rise.
Therefore, to calculate sea level “rise” you can ONLY include the mass of Greenland’s ice cap that is above sea level AND above rock level!
“Despite what Hansen at GISS wants you to believe.”
I don’t believe it. I was just trying to replicate someone else’s computation. I came within 20%, which, given my loose assumptions means I probably got pretty close to how they did it.
So, we’re not all gonna die? Hansen must be very disappointed.
I hope he is, and it’s fatal.
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