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Due to the move of the blog to Wordpress posts from Jan 2012 onward will have commenting disabled (when I remember to do it)
Cheers - AE

Tuesday, 18 January 2011

We're all going to die. Again.

Oh noes, the oceans are coming to kills us all, their levels rising from melting sea ice in the arctic. Except that this is only possible inside the brains of people like The Telegraph's Roger Howard, who writes here that:
Regional sea ice is retreating fast, threatening to raise global sea levels...
That's only the second and third line of the article, and is a schoolboy error of such epic proportions - and unusually for teh interwebz 'epic' is probably not overstating it - that for me he's shut his own balls in the drawer credibility wise. Roger? Watch this carefully.



See? As the ice shrinks you get water in the glass, and once all the ice is floating (about 25 seconds in) the level remains constant no matter how much melts from that point. The same thing happens with ice floating in the oceans when it melts.

'Kinell.


PS - not the only recent schoolboy error on this subject. A fortnight ago the Devil pointed this out. Polar bears in Antarctica... oh dear, oh dear. They've changed it now so it'll be interesting to see if Roger Howard rewrites his piece. Enough commenters have pointed out his mistake that he's surely aware by now.

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microdave's avatar

microdave · 735 weeks ago

"Regional sea ice is retreating fast" - Oh really?? Try telling that to the people caught up in the Okhotsk Sea: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/01/its-not-...

"Threatening to raise global sea levels..." - apparently NOT: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/17/sea-level-m...

Might be better if he shut his head in the drawer - it would reduce the chances of him spouting any more drivel like this...
1 reply · active less than 1 minute ago
Yeah, I thought about the Rooskies as well. I was going to leave a comment there mentioning it as well as telling him not to be such a bell-end but Disqusting was playing up again.

Edit: actually I've just looked and at least one person has now called him on it.
It was my understanding that frozen ice expands as the water turns to crystals which enlarge and the majority of it sinks beneath the water level, thus increasing the overall water level. But when the ice melts, the crystals deflate back into more compact water density and the water level actually goes down, not stay the same. Either way, stay the same or decrease, it certainly does not expand and increase. So in that regard, melting ice will not affect the sea levels upwards as it is a physical impossibility. That is simply hard-core chemical and physical facts, not to be equated with global-warming theory constructed on a belief. Heaven forbid the belief should be challenged.
1 reply · active less than 1 minute ago
From my hazy recollection of physics studies floating ice displaces as much water as the ice itself weighs and the amount of ice left sticking out is equivalent to the volume it expanded by. I may have that wrong but like you I'm certain of is that melting ice can't possibly increase the water level if it's free floating. A little from thermal expansion, yes, but that's not the melting ice doing it.

Heaven forbid the belief should be challenged.

Indeed. We're all heretics and we shall burn. Unless we drown first ;)

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