Sunday 23 September 2007

Great news for international shipping! (3)

The Times gave the story about the Northwest Passage yet another outing yesterday (not online yet, it seems).

John Sauven of Greenpeace gave a classic quote "The canary in the coal mine is singing very loudly now. At this rate we could see the end of summer ice in our lifetimes"

1. John, you knob, canaries don't sing when the air gets dangerous, they first show 'signs of distress' and then they keel over.

2. I have never seen the Arctic Ice, and I've never met anybody else who has. So I'm hardly going to miss it.

3. It seems fair to see melting ice-caps as evidence of 'global warming', but it's not global warming that anybody really cares about, it's rising sea levels that might muck things up.

4. As Arctic ice floats on water, if it melts it won't make any difference to sea levels.

5. Devil's Kitchen has linked to other studies that show that the amount of ice in the Antarctic is increasing. Now remember, that stuff is on land. If it were all to melt it could indeed get a tad damp in the Netherlands and East Anglia. But they never mention that, do they? I wonder why.

5 comments:

sanbikinoraion said...

Yes, because there is no ice on Greenland at all, is there?

Mark Wadsworth said...

True. But the Greenlanders will be net beneficiaries if their glaciers melt a bit, covered here.

Penny Pincher said...

'They' keep telling us that if the ice caps melt we'll be flooded everywhere with rising sea levels. BUT if I fill a glass to the top with ice cubes floating in my chosen drink - when the cubes have melted the contents don't overflow the glass and it's not because i've been sipping the drink either!!

Mark Wadsworth said...

LT, that is true for ice that is floating (ice is 10% less dense than water - the water swells up when it freezes - so 10% sticks out above the surface).

But, as Sanbik points out, this doesn't apply to glaciers and ice on the mainland Antarctic.

Penny Pincher said...

Oops - just see I missed commenting on the last point!! If it gets so warm as to melt ice on antartic land mass then another continent for Tesco to build a new super store and satellite towns etc. No probs.