Global Warming: Want to see if your house will be flooded?

Global Warming: Want to see if your house will be flooded?

by ManfromMiddletown
Fri May 5th, 2006 at 08:09:11 AM EDT

For most people, climate change is an abstract concept.

Reports earlier this year that the Greenland ice cap is losing its ice cap brought a brief frenzy of concern that we had reached a tipping point in which the cataclysmic consequnces of global warming were to be revealed a la Apocolypse to the world. The facts are less dramatic but not much less disturbing. Greendland's ice cap losing much larger amounts of area during the summer melt.

In February 2006 researchers discovered glaciers in Greenland were moving much faster than before, meaning that more of its ice was entering the sea.

In 1996, Greenland was losing about 100 cubic km per year in mass from its ice sheet; by 2005, this had increased to about 220 cubic km.

A complete melt of the ice sheet would cause a global sea level rise of about 7m; but the current picture indicates that while some regions are thinning, others are apparently getting thicker.

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

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While there's still much debate as to how much of the Greenland ice cap will be lost to global warming, one thing is certain. The broad trend in the region over the greater part of the last century is towards warming.

Talking about climate change solely in terms of global warming is misleading though, because there are a multitude of factors contributing to climate changes. Some like greenhouse gases will raise temperatures, others like particulate matter in the atmosphere which leads to global dimming that tend to lower global temperatures (ironically, potentially leading to a masking of the full extent of global warming.)

Remember that by itself the loss of the Greenland ice shelf would raise sea levels by 7M (roughly 21 ft), and while this is the worst case scenario in Greenland, this number does not include potential sea rises resulting from loss of sea ice in the Arctic, which is at risk of melting, leading to a loss of sea ice.

Projections suggest that the Arctic ice cap will be much smaller as sea ice is loss to warming, and as the loss of permafrost could release water into the ocean, and potentially release massive amounts of methane, itself a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere creating an runaway train effect far greater than the impact created by human impacts alone....

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