Bye, Bye Alexandria: A 1-Meter Sea Rise is Certain

[AtheistCrusader]

8. The immobility of the ice, and the total amount of heat required to melt it.

A goodly chunk of it will melt, yes. Enough to make a different, certainly.

"From 1996 to 2000, widespread glacial acceleration was found at latitudes below 66 degrees north. This acceleration extended to 70 degrees north by 2005. The researchers estimated the ice mass loss resulting from enhanced glacier flow increased from 63 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 162 cubic kilometers in 2005. Combined with the increase in ice melt and in snow accumulation over that same time period, they determined the total ice loss from the ice sheet increased from 96 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 220 cubic kilometers in 2005. To put this into perspective, a cubic kilometer is one trillion liters (approximately 264 billion gallons of water), about a quarter more than Los Angeles uses in one year."

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2006-023


It contains 2,850,000 cubic kilometers of ice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet

220 cubic kilometers melted in 2005... (Actually, Nasa revised those numbers down to 193 last year)

Going to take a while to melt that.
It's also going to take a long while to march right off the land mass into the water, even with the enhanced glacier flow due to the melting. If you split the ice in half, upwise through the middle, and sent it all directly toward the ocean in all directions at the fastest observed pace so far (which has only been observed in limited places, for limited durations, but I'm going worst case scenario here), we have about 25 years before all of it is deposited in the ocean.

I'm not saying it's not a big deal. It's a ridiculously huge deal. But it's just one of many moving factors. Can the ice flow faster? Maybe. We haven't observed it yet, but yeah, maybe. If the Atlantic currents move to melt it faster, how big is the resulting ice sheet that will form in Europe?

We are juggling priceless eggs in variable gravity. Could be worse than we think. Could be better. Preparing for the worst seems prudent, since a lot of the variables are already in motion, and beyond our control. Cease all CO2 production today, and we still have a lot of problems to contend with.