Global Warming (Again) (Should I have opted for gills?)

I wanted to see where things might possibly go if worst came to worst. I mean how deep would the water get?

I think we can all agree that the “Water World” scenario is total trash for a number of reasons. But probably the most important one is that there simply is not enough water in, on or around the earth to raise the sea level any significant fraction of the height of Mt. Everest.

But how high could it get? Well certainly high enough to be a painful experience for the species, but it certainly would not 'cover most of the land” or anything like that. As near as I can calculate it, if all the ice in the world were to melt, and if the ocean area were not allowed to get any larger, the sea level rise would be about 260 feet. It would not actually be any where near that much rise but only because the area of the ocean would grow considerably with every few feet of rise in the sea level.

That means that any place now more than a couple hundred of feet above sea level would be fine and even most of California would not become new waterfront property, But it also means that most of all major coastal cities would be completely inundated.

But how likely is that scenario, ie. All the ice in the world melting? Well certainly not very! Apparently about 10,400,000 square miles of the earth's land surface is covered by ice. Of that, approximately half is Antarctica. However, Antarctica ice contains over 99% of the ice on the land surface. So if you don't melt the Antarctic Ice Sheet the most rise you could get out of melting every other glacier and and snow pack in the world would be about 2 foot of ocean rise. While the economic impact of that would be serious in many places the fact is that except in severe storm situation most areas would not even notice the difference.

How much temperature change would be required to melt Antarctica? A lot! The current temperatures in the interior of the continent average -50C but in the summer get as high as -30C. Melting the antarctic Ice sheet in it's entirety would require a temperature increase of at least 30C. That kind of temperature rise would be killing people off in the rest of the world long before the rising water could reach them.

Global warming, man made or otherwise, may cause a lot of problems but high water is not likely to be a significant one.

Sources: http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/weather/climate.shtml

http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/weather/snow-ice.shtml

http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/qwater1.html