Too Late To Stop the Flooding

[Crowheart]

^ LOL

We have impact on the environment, and could be doing better.

Never understood why we need some Doomsday scenario to occur before we recognize that and make some changes.

[EyeKhan]

Oh no! The utter horror, we must stop this. All Michigan should be allowed to have is a failed car industry.

More people work in agriculture in MI than the auto industry. I assume you're making a joke, though Brit humour's a little off... Anyway, the irony of global warming are the regions that will likely benefit.

[EyeKhan]

^ LOL

We have impact on the environment, and could be doing better.

Never understood why we need some Doomsday scenario to occur before we recognize that and make some changes.

Simple. The Powers are fed by the status quo. Shaking the status quo up runs the risk of shaking up the Powers, kicking some out of the club and letting others in. Why in the world would they risk something like that for anything less than a doomsday scenario?

[Crowheart]

Simple. The Powers are fed by the status quo. Shaking the status quo up runs the risk of shaking up the Powers, kicking some out of the club and letting others in. Why in the world would they risk something like that for anything less than a doomsday scenario?

Buuuuut the doomsday scenario shakes up the status quo much more than making a change here and there.

I'm going with the old standard... no one gives a rat's ass until it personally affects them.

[Dreadnaught]

I understand that. You're still not making any sense.

It makes perfect sense. If the actual water level increase depends on the amount and topography of land beneath all that ice, and the amount/topography is a bit of a question mark then the range of potential change is quite large.

[EyeKhan]

Buuuuut the doomsday scenario shakes up the status quo much more than making a change here and there.

True, but how often does the sky fall? Not often. And this particular sky isn't going to fall for a generation or two, buy current estimate. So why would I risk my power for something that might not happen in forty years?

I'm going with the old standard... no one gives a rat's ass until it personally affects them.

That's true for a lot of people. But there's also an awful lot of people who go out of their way to work for some common good or other when it doesn't affect them at all. To take an obvious example, take doctors without borders. These guys could work their whole lives doing medicine in whatever western country they live but instead they go to the world's shit holes, risk their lives sometimes, to help people in situations that would otherwise never affect them. That's pretty amazing, IMO.

[EyeKhan]

It makes perfect sense. If the actual water level increase depends on the amount and topography of land beneath all that ice, and the amount/topography is a bit of a question mark then the range of potential change is quite large.

Dread, they know how much ice is in antarctica and the same with Greenland. Here:

The Greenland Ice Sheet (Kalaallisut: Sermersuaq) is a vast body of ice covering 1,710,000 square kilometers (660,235 sq mi), roughly 80% of the surface of Greenland. It is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice sheet is almost 2,400 kilometers (1,500 mi) long in a north-south direction, and its greatest width is 1,100 kilometers (680 mi) at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern margin. The mean altitude of the ice is 2135 meters.[1] The thickness is generally more than 2 km (1.24 mi) (see picture) and over 3 km (1.86 mi) at its thickest point.

(Wikipedia)

And

Antarctica, topography and bathymetry (topographic map). Antarctic is the fifth largest continent of the world at 14 million square kilometres and is covered by a permanent continental ice sheet. The ice is distributed in two major ice sheets, the East Antarctic and the West Antarctic, and in addition there are shelf ice, extending over the sea water. Antarctic inland ice ranges in thickness up to 5000 m, with an average thickness of about 2400 m, making Antarctica by far the highest of the continents.

http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/anta...opographic-map

and

This one is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and describes how they know the ice thickness.

Summary

A Digital Elevation Model (DEM), ice thickness grid, and bedrock elevation grid of Greenland acquired as part of the PARCA program are available in ASCII text format at a 5 km grid spacing in a polar stereographic projection. DEM data are a combination of ERS-1 and Geosat satellite radar altimetry data, Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) data, and photogrammetric digital height data. Ice thickness data are based on approximately 700,000 data points collected in the 1990s from a University of Kansas airborne ice penetrating radar (IPR). Nearly 30,000 data points were collected in the 1970s from a Technical University of Denmark (TUD) airborne echo sounder. Bamber subtracted the ice thickness grid from the DEM to produce a grid of bedrock elevation values. Applications include studies of gravitational driving stress and ice volume (mass balance) of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Each of the three grids is approximately 1.5 MB. Data are available via FTP. Data access is unrestricted, but we recommend that users register with us. Registered users automatically receive e-mail notification of product updates and changes to processing.

http://nsidc.org/data/docs/daac/nsid...ckness.gd.html

Another about antarctica:

The Antarctic Ice Sheet
The Antarctic Ice Sheet is a thick, ancient sheet of ice with a maximum depth of nearly 3 miles (15,000 feet). It is the iceberg 'factory' of the Southern Ocean. This icesheet contains over 5 million cubic miles (30 million cubic km) of ice. The weight of the Antarctic ice is so great that in many areas it actually pushes the land below sea-level. Without its ice cover Antarctica would eventually rise up another 1500 feet (450 m) above sea-level. The Ice Sheet is very gradually moving, in this case towards the sea in a radial pattern.

http://www.antarcticconnection.com/a...snow-ice.shtml

[Dreadnaught]

Come on, I would expect you to recognize that those are very rough numbers based on very rough surveys that literally can't see through the ice.

There's an element of uncertainty here, and there's nothing salacious or evil about addressing it.

[EyeKhan]

There is not enough uncertainty to support your argument.

[Loki]

Come on, I would expect you to recognize that those are very rough numbers based on very rough surveys that literally can't see through the ice.

There's an element of uncertainty here, and there's nothing salacious or evil about addressing it.

I note that no one responded to the fact that all these predictions are being made outside the range of the available data. To say that there's a lot of uncertainty here is a massive understatement.