What makes you think that? Jim is obviously too high to be directly affected by any likely sea level rise, but there will be other things going on which may finally attract his attention.
That's the river frontage in Nijmegen, which gets submerged any time the Rhine get high. Our house is 64 metres - 210 feet - above sea level.
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Since what would kill Michael - if he lived long enough at the same address - would be the flood surge from a hurricane, rather than the steady rise of the sea level, this is an implausible prediction. Hurricanes will spread north as global temperatures rise, but it will be long time before they menace Nijmegen, long after Florida has been scrubbed off the face of the Earth. The low lying twit should be thinking about what happened to the low-lying areas of Burma last week.
And - just for the record - I'm all in favour of cutting carbon diode emissions back to the point where we won't lose the the ice caps and Florida.
Since what I wrote was "the ice caps will slide off Greenland and Antarctica" one would have thought that even someoe as intellectually challenged as Michael Terrell should have realised that I wasn't talking about about floating, but rather about ice that is piled miles high on top of solid bedrock.
There one beginning construction, permits approved, in Yuma County, AZ.
...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: "skypeanalog" | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
"JT" is WAY ahead of you, but the leftist weenies will insist on a depression... enjoy!
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: "skypeanalog" | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
This would be true if you could just wait for the average sea level to rise enough to submerge your house. Unfortunately for you. Florida is exposed to hurricanes, which only grown in areas where the sea surface is hotter than 26.5 Cecius.
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As global warming progresses, the tropical sea surfaces will be above
26.5 C more freuquently and over larger areas, so there will be more hurricanes, and more powerful hurricanes. The storm surge associated with such a hurricane is going to wash you and your house out to sea long before the average sea level has risen enough to threaten even the lowest point in your garden. Check out the latest reports from Burma to get some idea of how this will go.
England and the Netherlands are a long way too far north to have to worry about hurricanes for now and for the next hundred years or so.
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I obviously did, since I went to the trouble of specifying that I was talking about the ice caps on Greenland and Antartica, which don't float.
Probably less - the ice caps could melt where they are over that kind of time-scale. The more worrying possibility is that the ice caps could become mechanically unstable, and slide off the underlying rock into the sea as floating icebergs, where they would raise the sea levels without having to melt first. Of course, icebergs do tend to drift towards the equator, and they do seem to melt long before they get there.
Predicting when that might happen isn't easy - you'd have to know a lot more about the temperature distribution within the ice caps than we do at the moment - and the IPCC has ignored this particular risk simply because none of the existing models are good enough to generate reliable predictions.
I personally think the damage will get here long before the water does.
For example: If 5 or 10 years from now the global climate models prove to be even remotely accurate, then people will panic. I don't think it will make any difference if the models say 10 feet in 20 years, and we only get 3 feet. The trend will be clear, and our economic (and other) systems will collapse. (And in all liklihood, the models will get even better by then..)
The only meaningful variable is time. What is the duration start-to- finish, and is that enough time for a soft landing? I doubt it. This is Mother Nature's "big fix" coming in to remedy the world's over- population. -mpm
The calculator appears to me to only melt ice with a stated percentage of the amount of heat added to that stored in the atmosphere by raising the atmosphere's temperature by a stated amount. I consider this faulty logic. One way to explain that: Suppose the atmosphere's temperature took a sudden big jump to a level sufficient to melt the icecaps and then quickly levels off. The icecaps will melt over the following decades/centuries/whatever with the amount of heat stored in the atmosphere being constant - the melting will be done from solar absorption exceeding the planet's radiation into space until the surface gets warm enough to have radiation to space equal solar absorption.
That calculator said a 66 degree C rise in the atmosphere's temperature will only raise sea level by .1 meter. I would think that a 66 degree C warming would totally melt the icecaps, which would raise sea level a heck of a lot more than .1 meter.
All of the oil long futures contracts expire sometime in the hands of people obligated to buy. Those that can't take delivery and make use of it (such as refining it and selling refined products) have to sell it off, or else they are out the money they spent satisfying their contractual obligations.
Buying a quantity of oil and reselling it (especially without taking delivery first) has zero net effect on the supply.
The main supply issue that I see is owners of supply waiting for the price to get higher - which it will, since oil is a limited resource that is being consumed. Prices will rise until they force consumers to switch to alternatives, or simply cut back, or until the price gives a profit motive to develop new alternatives.
No. Read the explanation carefully. It's not very well written and could use a re-write. I'll try my luck. Disclaimer: I are not a fizixist.
If you raise the temperature of the entire planet 1C, then only a small percentage of the heat used will be available to melt the ice. The rest is absorbed by the ocean and land. The proportion of the energy available to melt the ice pack is roughly the ratio of ice area (Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland) to the total earth surface area. It's the surface area, not the mass because atmospheric heating only acts on the surface of the ice, water, and land.
The author uses a figure of 3.45% which seems odd. "The Greenland, East and West Antarctic Ice Shields total 3.45% of Earth's surface with a combined surface area of about 1.524 x 10E7 km2." Wikipedia has the earth's surface area at 5.1 x 10E8 km2. Doing the math, I get 2.9% of the surface area is ice. It's probably more like
5-10% because I think the author apparently forgot about Alaska, northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Google found a few references that claimed 10% ice coverage in winter. Also, subtract out any floating ice because its weight has already raised the sea level by the volume of the displaced water.
The average temperature of the most sensitive areas (Greenland and Antarctica) that are covered with ice always remain below 0C and will therefore never melt. For example, if you drag an ice block into a freezer, and lower the temperature by 10C from -20C to -10C, how much ice will melt? The answer is none. Until the temperature gets to 0C, none of the ice will melt. Therefore, in the rather large areas where the air temperature never goes above freezing, even drastic variations in temperature will not produce any melting. Only those areas that are near 0C or near liquid water are susceptible to melting.
Nope. Not when perhaps 95% of that temperature rise goes into heating up the water and land, while only perhaps 5% goes into melting the ice. That's also ignoring what gets reflected back into space.
To be perfectly honest (this time only), I'm also having a difficult time believing the numbers. However, I can't seem to find anything wrong with the explanation. I kinda wish the Javascript calculations were visible, so I can see what's going on behind the web page, but the main problems seem to be with the basic assumptions, not the calculations.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
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The calculator still assumes a specific amount of heat (a specific energy quantity), while such an amount of heat gained into availability for some task (such as icecap melting) as a result of an environment temperature rise is unlimited unless the temperature rise has an expiration date. This truth remains even when only a fraction of the heat gain actually goes into melting ice.
A) The Greenland and Antarctic icecaps have critical areas already limited by barely lacking net melting in the recent-past. Most of the ice is on top of low elevation ice that can be melted away by a modest temperature rise.
B) Keep in mind that the "Milankovitch Cycles" cited for big natural periodic variations in global temperature (at surface and in surface-level atmosphere) have most-common citation to solar radiation impinging upon a latitude close to the Arctic Circle (65 degrees north). The annual solar radiation changes there quite little over these cycles but global temperature accordingly changes big - and this is evidence of a positive feedback mechanism with a significant part localized to such latitude zone. The positive feedback being somewhat localized there is evidenced by recent-decades warming of the globe having an impressive concentration there. Past forecast models of global warming taking this mechanism into account successfully predicted this positive feedback mechanism both regionally and globally. Greenland's icecap appears to me to be in harm's way as a result!
Quantity of ice melted is from a specific quantity of energy. A fraction of heating gain from an environmental temperature rise is in power as opposed to energy terms if being either of these, and energy gain to any target (at temperature below "new ambient") from a temperature rise is infinite unless the temperature rise has an expiration date or the target's temperature fully reaches the new ambient temperature.
The last above item can be ruled out completely for ice in Earth's icecaps if global warming progresses to the extent that this "calculator" finds necessary to achieve a .1 meter sea level rise.
This is actually reduced by global warming - we have a positive feedback mechanism, as in a major reason why the Milankovitch Cycles achieve big global temperature changes from minor changes in sunlight upon the latitude zone that is "ground zero" for such effects.
The problem I saw is that, as I saw the explanation, is that the amount of ice melting is from a reasonably-explained fraction of an unreasonably-assumed amount of gain of heat stored into the atmosphere by a global temperature rise. If the temperature rise lacks an expiration date, then the calculations should be independent of specific quantities of energy or energy change which are transient effects. However, the explanation by "junkscience" here has terms of specific quantities of energy with lack of any translating to power terms. If the proposed effects are dependent on an expiration date of a temperature rise (as opposed to the temperature rise being permanent), then the expiration date of the temperature rise needs to be specified and the calculation methodology stated for justification needs to have such an "expiration date" being a factor.
The calculator assumes transient specific amount of heat transfer to ice being a specific fraction of the gain in heat energy stored in the atmosphere. This is analogous to a resistor in an electronic circuit whose AC power supply voltage is increased supposedly having: heating gain only in energy terms by a fraction of the amount of stored energy gained by the rectifier filter capacitor as a result of the voltage increase.
Meanwhile, your referenced calculator continues to say that sea level would rise only .1 meter if global temperature rises by 66 degrees C - which would easily totally melt both the Greenland and Antarctica icecaps.
Here's my rough-cut contribution on the economics:
In my area electricity costs $0.14/kWhr, of which 1/3rd is cost-of-generation (of the power).
The rest of the cost is distribution, maintenance, debt, administration, and state-regulated profit.
Don Lancaster says a typical USA location gets sun equivalent to 5 full-strength hours a day.
A 1w solar cell then yields 5w-hr per day, or
1,826 W-hr annually.
My power company would produce that much power for about $0.08, and sell it to me for $0.26.
Last I checked bare solar cells cost $6/watt, with inverter/charge controllers and (possibly) storage adding a great deal to a system cost.
Most sensible economically and ecologically is to send excess power to the grid during the day, and draw grid power at night. This avoids the cost and trouble of local storage.
Figure then, as a very rough guess, a system cost of 1.5x solar cell cost, or about $9/watt.
The rest and refinement of the calculation--including cost of capital, differing break-even points for consumer vs. the power company, etc.-- is left to the reader.
Jerome J. Schmitt starts off talking about the power coming in from the sun, but rapidly switches to talking about the energy stored in the atmosphere and the energy required to melt the ice caps.
If it were a serious calculation, he'd work out how much extra solar power was being retained by the greenhouse effect, and how long it would take for this power to heat the atmosphere by a given number of degrees or to melt a given volume of the polar ice caps. In fact he just talks about the energy stored in the atmosphere at some arbitrary moment, and goes on from there to a fallacious conclusion.
The whole thing is straightforward fallacious anti-warmingist propaganda, dressed up to look like elementary physics. It depends for its rhetorical force on a sleigh of hand that ignores pretty much all the interesting and complicated issues about heat transfer that the IPCC does address.
No I meant money payback. Do you have any current figures that support your 2-5X claim. There are quite a few sites that say the financial payback is on the order of 8 years.
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