keith_w wrote: > graywolf wrote: >> Well, I do not feel all that sorry for you. If sea level was to rise a >> half-meter half or Flordia would be gone, if it rose a meter there would >> just be a few little islands where millions of people now live. And they >> would only be a small percentage of the people effected through out the >> world. A lot of Holland, I understand, is actually below sea level. >> >> On the other hand, here is some homework for you. How many gallons of >> water would have to be added to the worlds oceans to raise sea level 1/2 >> meter? Next question, how many gallons of water are in the worlds ice >> caps. > > You mean above sea leel?
No all of it, after all ice is bulkier than water. > >> Now last question, if the worlds mean temperature went up 10 >> degrees, how long would it take to entirely melt the ice caps. > > TEN degrees? F? Almost unthinkable. I mean, it would never do that short > of a genuine Armageddon. World flips poles, stuff like that! > Rises we have to worry about, if we want to do that, are more in the > order of 1/2 to 3/4 degree! That does enough all by itself. Even 1 > degree is unbelievable... I know of no mechanism that would cause that. > I picked that 10 degrees because that has been suggested as the maximum that would leave the world generally habitable. Yes, short of the sun suddenly going hotter it is almost impossible to conceive. And a degree would cause a change so slow that none of us would be alive to see the results. >> One of the things that we forget is just how big a place the world is. >> We think in terms of our town, our city. I have crisscrossed the US by >> car, train, bus, and a lot of it on foot. Even with that experience it >> is so big I have a hard time imagining it. The US is a only a small >> portion of the land in the world. The oceans are 3 times as big as all >> the land combined. Think of that. > > That's just surface area! Of course it is. So some home work for you, Keith what would the reduction of land area be in this case? My whole point was that people believe or disbelieve things without doing any sort of check on even the possibility of it. Most of these disaster scenarios require some kind of miraculous condition that there is no know way of ever happening. "The sky is falling" is so much human nature that there are thousand year old folk tales about it. Sudden global disasters are so rare that there is only evidence of it happening twice since the world was born. Both times it wiped out most of the life on earth. So, yes, it could happen a third time. If it does we will have no control over it, unless we have already left the solar system. However these occurances seem to happen in time frames of hundreds of millions of years and since the last was only 65 million years ago, I doubt we need worry about it right now. Ice ages seem to be on something like a 20 thousand year cycle and probably have more to do with variations in the sun's output than any local effect. Of course all that evidence is bullshit because the world did not exist until I was born, and will cease to exist at my death. <GRIN> > >> Oh yes, and quit watching disaster movies. > > keith > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
