http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/melting-ice-could-cause-gravity-shift-1685201.html


The melting of one of the world's largest ice sheets would alter the Earth's field of gravity and even its rotation in space so much that it would cause sea levels along some coasts to rise faster than the global average, scientists said yesterday.


The rise in sea levels would be highest on the west and east coasts of North America where increases of 25 per cent more than the global average would cause catastrophic flooding in cities such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco.

A study into how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could respond to global warming has found its disintegration would change the focus of the planet's gravitational field, so sea levels would rise disproportionately more around North America than in other parts of the world. If the ice sheet covering West Antarctica disappears, the loss of so much mass from the southern hemisphere would effectively make the pull of gravity stronger in the northern hemisphere, affecting the spin of the Earth and causing sea levels to rise higher here than in the south, where the mass of ice is currently located.

Related articles
Google Ocean shows effects of climate change
However, the scientists also estimated that the global average sea level would not rise as much as previously expected due to the ice sheet melting into the oceans.

This is because parts of the ice sheet are more stable than previously thought, and so would probably not slip into the sea even in a warmer world caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, they found.

And yet, there's no convincing my neighbors, and there's no getting them to take the smallest step towards living more sustainably.

Any ice melting over water has already displaced the water and will not change the water level of the oceans or encroach to any unusual degree on any continent if it melts. The air over Antarctica has been cooling and ice is building there over the landmass. There is a possibility with volcanic activity and molten magma closer to the surface of the crust that some areas of land or the water are heating. There is an active volcano within a few hours of my "homeland" and it could melt an entire glacier in a heartbeat if it goes BANG, which it is predicted to do.

As a whole the earth has been cooling for the past seven years. It leveled off in 2000 and began a downward trend in 2002. The divergence from the projected has become steeper than expected.

This article was one of the silliest scare pieces yet to be floated. Don't fall for false science. Sustainability has to do with the rich getting everything at the expense of their fellow man. And if they have their way, a lot fewer of their fellow man -- who they believe not be their fellow man, but rather their livestock.

I support conservation of natural resources and wise use of of nature's benevolence and to use available means to fight pollution, but please read the commencement speech posted earlier to see what the version of sustainability is that is planned for us. If it gets overly hot (and it probably won't) you will have no right to turn on the air conditioner or the energy source needed to run one.

Take heart. Did you read about the snowfall in Saudi Arabia last week? That is actually a fact.

http://www.sciencewritersawards.co.uk/science/past/2004/biography.htm
Syngenta ABSW Science Writers' Awards
HISTORY SHORTLIST WINNERS GALLERY BACK JUDGES

Judges


Steve Connor
Science Editor, The Independent
Steve is Science Editor of The Independent and Independent on Sunday. He has also worked for The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and New Scientist. A past winner of several ABSW Science Writers’ Awards, Steve has also been nominated twice as Specialist Writer of the Year in the UK Press Awards and has won a clutch of other prizes including the annual award of the Medical Journalists’ Association. He has a degree in zoology from the University of Oxford.

If what this author asserts is possible, it has nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming. The polar ice caps (which are not melting at this time but are near levels seen in the 1970s) have melted and reformed before. Greenland was GREEN and agricultural for 300 years around 1000 a.d. During the Middle Ages Warming Period did draconian water level changes occur? If levels rose man had any nothing to do with the phenomenon and had no control over it. The earth does wobble on its axis, it could theoretically stop wobbling which could result in dire consequences or it could , theoretically, begin wobbling even more profoundly and that, too, could produce extreme effects. I believe scientists have detailed what could happen, theoretically, if the earth were struck by a large asteroid. My guess is our best mounted response would not be a match for the forces of nature.
Temperature drives C02, not the other way around. We do not have high overall C02 levels. Every burp of a volcano spews C02 -- which causes green plants to thrive, hence, helping us to sustain.
Zoology is not geology or climate science but it does trump Gore's art degree, on matters scientific.

The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596


fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912.


Have you been in a cave somewhere? You do read, I know that but please catch up.



plate tectonics, the 1960s, anyone?


Things like "may have" would make one tend to think you have some catching up to do and anything you say questionable. Are you trying to be serious here or just playing around

and Dr. Alfred Wegener (and Pangaia).

;)

So, I get it, SLaD!

What are you trying to say? What "may have" are you referring to? The point is natural events occur, sometimes overnight or sometimes at a snail's pace, and man has no say one way or the other -- they happen. The idea of the inundation that the article discussed would have happened more than once over the course of geological time and it would have happened with or without man's presence or interference.Plate tectonics was just an example of another dramatic (though slow) happening as was the mention of an exploding volcano. Stop the insults. There was no lengthy discourse concerning plate theory and whether it may or may not have occurred. I have done no investigation/reading as to whether the science writer's thesis, shall we say, holds water. Many scientific theories that we believe to be true are in actuality, just theories and may be disproved whenever new information arrives on the scene. Thank you, however, for the geology review!

you know the word before "have" that is now mysteriouly gone

Really. You think I edited it out after you read the post and replied? No, I was at work and know nothing about any editing out anything. I usually do have to go back in and delete or add spaces or fix typos or try to make myself better understood. This is certainly not worth arguing over.

at least that is settled, I guess I must have misunderstood you on that point

The issue is human-induced rapid climate change and its effects. The kind of rapid change that is occurring is most certainly is not part of a natural cycle.

More importantly - to all of the Big Energy tools out there:

I believe in imminent ecological disaster due to human-induced climate change and pollution. I believe in "global warming." No amount of lobbying or propaganda is going to change that. Save your money and your time. I have reduced our energy consumption by at least 60% over the last few years, and our level of consumption is dropping day by day. Pretty soon, a great deal of our energy will come from wind and solar power.

My friends are reducing their energy consumption. Think about all of those profits you're missing out on - and think of the independence as opposed to dependence. My friends and I buy, for the most part, locally-grown, organic produce. Uh-oh - less profits for both Big Energy AND Big Agribusiness. Find other mega-consumers ... for, as to us, the gravy train is OVER. Moreover, I will zealously oppose any offshore drilling off of my beloved California coast (and any other drilling, for that matter), as well as any new nuclear power plants. So, get rid of your Hummers!

Sincerely,

because there is no human-induced rapid climate change. Those who were swayed by the AGW hype seem unwilling to look at the geological and climatological data. The geological data of ice ages and interglacial periods shows they last for thousands of years but that their onsets are rather rapid. I am not arguing for either situation, just that we have no control over it. We never caused the fluctuations and we can not hold them back, one way or the other. We do have control over pollution, but we also have the technology to ease much of the burden if we have the will (and funds) to do so.

My "footprint" is smaller by far than average and always has been (I'm cheap!). My CSA provides locally grown organic produce, my car is high mileage, I use my bike or walk whenever possible and I wear a sweater and keep the thermostat at 65. I despise big Pharma and big Farma. (The owners of Big Oil have big stakes in both.) We have much in common. I hope this time I mean it when I say it's time for me to disengage so here's a parting shot from history:

"The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.
Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend.
Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974.
“It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude,” the article continued.
That article also emphasized Bryson’s extreme doomsday predictions. “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest.”
Bryson warned, “It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” However, the world population increased by 2.5 billion since that warning.
Fortune had been emphasizing the cooling trend for 20 years. In 1954, it picked up on the idea of a frozen earth and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.”
The story debunked the notion that “despite all you may have read, heard, or imagined, it’s been growing cooler – not warmer – since the Thirties.”
The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming.
“The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.”
If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.”
There were more warnings. The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. about global cooling worries. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said.
If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age, Mitchell continued.
Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”
A city in a snow globe illustrated that March 1, 1975, article, while the cover showed an ice age obliterating an unfortunate city.
In 1975, cooling went from “one of the most important problems” to a first-place tie for “death and misery.” “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” said Nigel Calder, a former editor of “New Scientist.”
He claimed it was not his disposition to be a “doomsday man.” His analysis came from “the facts [that] have emerged” about past ice ages, according to the July/August International Wildlife Magazine.
The idea of a worldwide deep freeze snowballed.
Naturally, science fiction authors embraced the topic. Writer John Christopher delivered a book on the coming ice age in 1962 called “The World in Winter.”
In Christopher’s novel, England and other “rich countries of the north” broke down under the icy onslaught.
“The machines stopped, the land was dead and the people went south,” he explained.
James Follett took a slightly different tack. His book “Ice” was about “a rogue Antarctic iceberg” that “becomes a major world menace.” Follett in his book conceived “the teeth chattering possibility of how Nature can punish those who foolishly believe they have mastered her.”

This excerpt can be read here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/17/catlin-artic-ice-survey-an-annie-hall-moment/#more-7911t . You must see some similarities in the hype and sadly the ice age hype is more realistic.

Oceans anyone?

Human beings have a very negligible effect on climate. That said, there has been weather modification going on since the 1960s -- actually before that. When you read stories about the great dust bowl years of the (really rotten) 1930s you learn that crude attempts were undertaken even then to produce rainfall. (Of course, you know about the Rain Dance, too.) In the 1960s cloud seeding techniques were routinely used over agricultural areas to reduce the effects of drought. The Chinese bragged and displayed pictures of how they were going to control the weather during the Olympics. Whether these techniques are perfected is unknown to me. Could intensive weather control change the climate? I do not know.

I also do not know what you mean by "Oceans anyone?". The oceans DO regulate the climate. Here's how according to Mr. Novak (and, yes, I do detect his ire -- this is an essay and parts of it were written before the downward turn of temperatures beginning in 2002 and then updated since. http://www.nov55.com/gbwm.html.

"Oceans control the climate, not greenhouse gasses.

Temperature is irrelevant; only precipitation matters, and it has been increasing due to warmer oceans.

Nothing could be better for mankind and the planet than what has been occurring over the past few decades. The warm weather and increase in precipitation is nothing but good for humans and all life forms. The Oceans have stopped rising after increasing for tens of thousands of years, because snow is accumulating on 90% of Antarctica due to increased precipitation everywhere as a result of warmer ocean water. However, there was a major heat loss around the Arctic over the past 18 months, and it is too early to say what that will amount to.

Important Fact: Oceans overwhelm all other influences on climate. Oceans, being 70% of the earth's surface, are the climate regulators influencing air temperature, humidity and precipitation. Yet the IPCC did not account for the effects of oceans, because they had no data or theory to go by, and they couldn't handle that much complexity. The total fraud of the IPCC is demonstrated by this fact.

When an El Nino shows up in the Pacific Ocean as a hot water mass, Central and South America get flooded due to increased evaporation from the ocean. Now, an El Nina is in the Pacific as a cold water mass, and it is creating cold weather and droughts. Scientists don't know what creates El Ninos and El Ninas. So they don't have a clue as to what's controlling the climate. Ice Ages

The air does not heat the oceans; the oceans heat the air; because the oceans have a thousand times as much heat capacity as the atmosphere. And the claimed 0.6°C increase in atmospheric temperature is not much heat to be adding to anything, while satellites show less temperature increase, unless Hansen is screwing around with the numbers as usual. Thermometer Fraud

The first 20% of the CO2 in the air (which nature adds, not humans) does most of what CO2 does. It uses up available radiation in a few meters. In other words, the amount of radiation available determines the result, not the amount of greenhouse gas. Fake Mechanism

Greenhouse gasses cannot trap more heat, because they already trap all they can. Up in the stratosphere and higher, they can trap a slight amount more, but the stratosphere does not influence the lower atmosphere; and the quantities are minuscule beyond relevance. Trapping Heat

Volcanoes put 2.3% as much CO2 into the air as humans every year (gov source). If CO2 could accumulate, the volcanic amount in 43 years would equal the human amount for one year. Volcanoes have been doing it for 5 billion years, and humans for only 150 years. The supposed total amount of human accumulation (240 GT) is put into the atmosphere by volcanoes every 1,200 years. See Delicate Balance Fraud

Where does the volcanic CO2 go, if the human amount accumulates? If it is acidifying the oceans, why didn't volcanoes acidify the oceans many times over? See Acid in the Ocean Fraud

Nature puts 26 times as much CO2 in the air through decay and respiration as humans do through energy sources.

All biological life is based on carbon. The carbon all cycles through carbon dioxide. The small amount of carbon dioxide originating from petroleum is a slight correction of the disappearance of carbon in sea shells and limestone. There was five times as much CO2 in the air during dinosaur years. Now, plants are getting one third as much CO2 as they need. You don't think scientists are that dumb? Read the rest of my web site and find out.

Fossil fuels are needlessly squandered by closing down coal plants and switching to natural gas to reduce CO2 emissions. Society should immediately build about 200 new coal plants and learn to use nuclear in a responsible manner.

The fraud of carbon dioxide agitators is visible in the shutting down of coal plants. Very little reduction in CO2 results, while dependence upon foreign energy increases. Why not shut down the airlines? People need heat and electricity more than they need to fly. It's not about protecting the environment; it's a war against the lower classes.

Replacing coal with imported natural gas: Methane is 23 times as strong of a so-called greenhouse gas as CO2. If 5% is boiled off to cool cryogenic containers during shipping, that's 0.05 x 23 = 115% plus the original 100% = 215% x 66% as much CO2 in a power plant = 142% as much of a supposed greenhouse effect from shipped natural gas as from using coal to generate electricity. And the ship would burn about 20-50% as much energy as the methane being shipped. That's more kids and pets dying from shipped natural gas than burning coal would produce. But the whole greenhouse argument is fraud, and it doesn't make diddly what source of energy is used." [This explains why the "Commencement Address of another post is somewhat misleading in its presentation of a solution for coming energy needs.]

"Not the least absurdity is opposition to the warmer temperatures and increased rainfall which are infinitely better than the cold that is beginning to descend upon the planet.

Most people don't realize that this subject is not about science. The propagandists were doing the same thing before carbon dioxide came along. They were using ozone and other environmental concerns as a pretext for lowering the population of the globe to one tenth. Carbon dioxide brought their cause out of obscurity. So they don't care what the science is; and in fact, they refuse to allow scientific evidence to interfere with their agenda—and this includes a large number of scientists...

...The media saying the opposite is nothing but a mockery of all science involved. Frauds in science will do some fake number juggling and proclaim doom everywhere. It is a total contempt for the evidence and scientific truth."

More at: http://www.nov55.com/gbwm.html -- and lots more @http://wattsupwiththat.com/ both will give you to much more information and send you to many other sites, even Real Climate which defends Kyoto. Today at wattsup is an article further explaining the cap and trade fraud scheme that you and I will pay for and get nothing in return.

I can't speak for Mr. Novak, but when he uses terms like 'propagandists' and carbon 'agitators' he is not calling YOU names, but rather the Al Gores of the world. Mr. Gore is Big Oil -- check that out. It also should be a red flag for a ruse, wrapped in a ruse, covered by another ruse. Maybe, like the steel, textile, and auto industries BO is planning it's own demise. Peel the onion skin. It may resurrect itself as a sheep, but suspect it's a wolf in disguise.

Again, this has nothing to do with pollution due to dangerous release of noxious substances. That is man made and can and should be remedied. That is where the money should be spent.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/
**Check the above site for a picture from the official Naval archives and you will see the USS Skate which surfaced in open water at the North Pole on March 17, 1959. That could not happen today --due to ice.

thanks