Future loss of Arctic sea-ice cover could drive a su bstantial decrease in California?s rainfall, aka drought

You seem to live in a constant state of fear. That's dumb.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

It changes it very slightly since the floating ice 0.9167T/m^3 is pure water ice and when floating it displaces its own *weight* in the denser brine (3% ~ 1.025T/m^3). When it melts there is an overall ~2.5% gain in volume for each cubic metre of iceberg that melts into water.

If it was floating in freshwater then it would make no difference to the water level but the sea is roughly 3% brine.

They add 100% of lost mass to the volume of water in the oceans.

There is a small effect of thermal expansion on the huge reservoir of water too. That is a factor in sea level rise now.

Again it is very small compared to the effect of melting land glaciers but could go expanding on for a very long time as the planet warms.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

John Larkin doesn't know enough.

We've been having ice aces and interglacials for the last few million years.

The ice ages tend to last longer than the interglacials, but even during ice ages only the northern bits of the northern hemisphere end up covered in kilometre thick ice.

Ice ages are rare and the most usual state of the planet is with no ice sheets anywhere.

Anthropogenic global warming may get us closer to that than we've been for the last 20 million years, but it's not clear that what's usual for the planet is going to suit us. Humans evolved while the ice ages were in full swing.

We like interglacials better than ice ages, but we may not like the warmer world that anthropogenic global warming promises to deliver.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 8:43:36 AM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com w rote:

:

rote:

arming,

argue

can agree

se days,

ys the

t, and

from thawing

says Church."

.

James Arthur has found the information he wanted to extract from the articl e. It's less than obvious that this was the information that the article wa s intended to convey, but Jame Arthur has a habit of finding the message he wants in the most unexpected places.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

It's probably not sea levels rise that's involved.

talks about the way an ice-free Barents and Kara sea area (north of Finland) bends the jet stream to delver cold air a lot further south than usual.

The paper was published in November 2010, and was based on occasional cold winters in Europe over the previous fifty years. Now that there's less Arctic sea ice, the Barents and Kara seas have been ice-free more frequently recently.

One example of a cold winter with early snow showed up in December 2010, which made the paper more prophetic than most.

It's a pity that you are fixated on rising sea levels as the only problem that anthropogenic global warming might cause.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

ins, melting Arctic sea ice caps can affect areas a long way from the Arcti c region, bringing not only higher sea levels, but also severe drought.

ice only contributes to its melting.

The GRACE satellites see the Antarctic as losing mass.

The East Antarctic section is picking up mass, but not as much as the rest is losing.

The ice sheets have to slide off into the sea before you get rapid sea leve l rise. That's what the Laurentian ice sheet did at the end of the last ice age, and what's probably going to happen to the Greenland and West Antarct ic ice sheets sometime in the next few hundred years. Hansen has talked abo ut it.

What went wrong was that you didn't read your source carefully enough - if it was one of Anthony Watt's denialist rants, you wouldn't have been inten ded to.

They are aimed at gullible suckers.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Or that's what John Larkin likes to think.

Was it ever under glaciers? I ignore those periods when continental drift put it close to the poles ...

Ice ages are rare - we've been having them for the past few million years, but over the broader sweep of history they are unusual.

John Larkin whines that it isn't as warm as it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, some 56 million years ago

That does seem to have been driven by a large burst of greenhouse gas - methane - but it isn't clear where it came from.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

te:

warming,

ld argue

we can agree

hese days,

says the

ant, and

ra from thawing

? says Church."

ng.

e

Yes! And maybe they could make a theme park, even make a movie about it!

That's great--as good as it gets.

Cheers, James Arthur

To my understanding "Arctic" refers to the Northern polar cap, while "Antarctic" refers to the Southern polar cap.

On the Arctic side, outside Greenland, there are only very small glaciers in Svalbards, Novaja Zemija, Iceland, Norway and possibly Baffins land.

Do you insist that the permafrost in Siberia will affect the sea levels ?

Warm tropical ocean water is quite layered, but below 100 m, the temperatures are quite stable. Only at 0 to 100 m, there is a lot of variation in water temperatures.

Thus, any claims about water expansion refers to this surface layer only.

non sequitir.

--
This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

ins, melting Arctic sea ice caps can affect areas a long way from the Arcti c region, bringing not only higher sea levels, but also severe drought.

ice only contributes to its melting.

There's a bunch of ice capped land mass inside the arctic circle, which is everything north of about 66o latitude ( has to do with region where sun ne ver sets of rises at times of the year).

The melting sea ice hastens the melting of the land ice. Most of the glaci ers experience an initial melt at the warm sea interface.

There are glaciers in California, including a new one in Squaw Valley.

I think there is a new one in Truckee too.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

That's a bit of persistent high-altitude snow, not an ice sheet.

Robert Felix hasn't got the message that global warming puts more water vapour in the air, so more of it falls out over high peaks as snow when the average global temperature is higher.

Ice ages do start by persisting snow fields reflecting more sunlight, but you have to cover rather more area than a few mountain peaks to make much of a difference, and that isn't what's happening at Lake Tahoe.

John Larkin doesn't know enough to recognise denialist nonsense when he runs into it (and he runs into it surprisingly often, gullible twit that he is).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The average ocean depth is about 4000 m, the sea water thermal expansion coefficient is about 100-300 ppm/K depending on temperature, pressure and salinity.

If we assume that the ocean water temperature will uniformly increase by 1 K, the sea level would rise by 400-800 m due to thermal expansion.However, this would take centuries, since the surface layer and the layers below the thermocline (about 1 km) doesn't exchange much heat.

At mid-latitudes, the summer/winter variation affects only the first

100-200 meters. In this area, the thermal coefficient is about 200 ppm. Thus, if the surface temperature rises by 1 K, the sea level would rise by 40 mm so about 1/10th of the values compared to the (unrealistic) uniform temperature increase from surface to bottom.

Even for tropic waters, the temperature below 600 m, the temperature is quite stable

The thermocline doesn't exist on polar waters, but the amount of water is small compared to oceans at lower altitudes.

Please correct me if I forgot from my list any significant (more than

100 000 sq km) Arctic glaciers.

There are small glaciers even in the Alps, but that ice would not have any significant impact of ocean levels.

The original question was, how much the glaciers would contribute to sea level rise. The low latitude glaciers (Alps) are quite small and could not significantly contribute to ocean sea level rise. I have no idea, how much water is stored in Himalaya glaciers, but I very much doubt that even that would have any significant effect on ocean levels.

Sorry for asking about the emperor's new clothes :-)

I admit that my attempts for a reality check might be just that.

However, I am much more worried about the IPCC reporting system.

They take convenient scientific reports and compile some reports to administrators without carefully studying the initial assumption used in the original scientific reports.

In Finland, the average rainfall is about 660 mm (somewhat less in areas above the Arctic circle). It is quite interesting that 500 mm is the definition of desert in your country.

Scandinavia and especially Finland is at the borderline between maritime and continental climate. Some years the maritime climate will dominate, during other years the continental climate will dominate. Thus, there is a lot of year to year variation.

In addition, the ice free Baltic sea may cause 1 m of snow on the southern cost in November, while first permanent snow may appear in mid January.