Freedumb! Watch A Law Professor Tell A Physicist That Greenland Melt Won't Raise Sea Level
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Meanwhile, Mitrovica has told the American Institute of Physics bulletin that Rotunda’s testimony “completely misrepresents” his work — and added that when it came to political pressure, he was talking about the pressures brought to bear from “climate change skeptics who respond to rigorous scientific work with dismissiveness, insults, and hostility.”
Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat on the committee who also happens to be Congress’s only physicist and was involved in the discovery of the top quark, decided to question Rotunda about these Greenland claims later in the hearing. “I was fascinated by what seemed to be apparent support of an argument that the Greenland ice sheet would melt, and thereby lower the sea level,” said Foster, “and I was wondering if you can expound on how exactly the physics of this works.”
Rotunda began by getting some of the points about gravity right, but then veering off: “When the ice sheet melts, all the gravity that was then part of the island of New Greenland [sic] disappears into the ocean, it just goes away. And that ice has been pushing Greenland down, and now Greenland will be moving up, because the water is all over the place.” Here, Rotunda seems to be confusing the immediate gravitational effect of losing ice from Greenland on the oceans with another slower phenomenon, sometimes called postglacial rebound, which also occurs as you lift the weight of ice off a landmass. Scientists like Mitrovica take both of these into account when predicting future sea level rise due to ice loss from the world’s ice sheets.
Foster was also pretty confused. “There will obviously be a local effect, where the land will pop up…” he began. “He said 2,000 kilometers away, up to 2000 kilometers away,” said Rotunda. “But overall, the effect, just from general principles, has to be to significantly raise water levels worldwide, unless there’s new physics I’m not aware of, I think that’s sort of fundamental,” Foster countered. “Read his article, that’s what he says,” Rotunda responded. (In the actual article, it’s clear that Harvard’s Mitrovica believes that overall, melting Greenland causes global seas to rise, despite any local gravitational and rebound effects. The article also makes clear that these are two different effects.)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/09/19/watch-this-law-professor-try-to-convince-a-physicist-that-greenlands-melt-wont-raise-seas/?utm_term=.060166212077
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