Do you believe in global warmin etc.. (spam post)

[Asset]

Oh my gawd - Big Brother is watching us.

[Michael Palaeologus]

Global warming = rising sea levels because of melting ice caps - or does it?

The ice caps mostly cover the sea, in solid form they have greater volume than in liquid. Thus the icecaps displace a signficantly greater volume of water than they create when they melt.Thus melting ice caps will cause the sea levels to stay the same - least, they may cause the sea levels to fall as themassive displacement effect the ice caps reduces.

We have for some time been in an inter-glatial period - ie we are actually still in an ice age, we are just experiencing a short warm intermission of a few hundreds of thousands of years. The plunge back into the ice age is inevitable.

Ghia will be free of us pesky humans and a bunch of other unfit creatures and will continue spinning in her own sweet way.

[Asset]

I'm down with the Gaia tip too man.

[Townleygreen]

Michael P, you are wrong - most of the ice at the poles is on land. If (when?) the ice of Greenland and Antarctica melt, sea levels will rise by around 65 METERS. I'm afraid the whole of ED will be under the sea in that case. I guess parts of Crystal Palace might just be above water. Makes you wonder why you bothered having children...

[Michael Palaeologus]

Its not mostly on land - a large proportion of the ice is on the sea - the land mass of the poles is quites small (and would have been a lot smaller if the Germans and Russians had been allowd to get away with it).

[Brendan]

The land mass of antartica is massive! 280,000 km?.

[mockney piers]

So when we had a supercontinent with no polar land masses at all, I take it the seas were alot higher? Mind you the alps were at the bottom of the sea back then so i guess any sort of comparison's a bit daft.

But as the ruler of byzantium points out, gaia (or whatever) has witnessed alot of changes of the millionennia, our pesky fag breath will be but a temporary blight.

[Brendan]

Pah, global warming. Sissy stuff. Continental drift now there?s something earth changing.

[Fear 'n boozin]

Now I'm a little confussed. When we had a super continent, there would be no gland under the artic/antartica, but would there not have been ice caps on the earths poles? Reducing sea levels? Though maybe not at today's level. Does that make sense? I can't tell.

[Brendan]

Yeah. You see when we had a super continent all the polar icecaps were displacing water and therefore sea levels were higher and there was a beach in Penge.

[Fear 'n boozin]

My head can't cope with this, it's far to much for a pre midday conversation! However - I think I'm getting all muddled between Mike's comment that global warming is the ice melting and others comments on rising sea levels. I'm no expert bu, a quick glance at this website suggests that most of the polar ice caps (in antarctica at least) have always been coupled with land, so I'm not sure Piers' comment would be right.

Secondly - the melting of the ice isn't global warming, but a result of it. This will raise sea levels, wont it (more water in the sea), but isn't the worse effect the affect this will have on the planets weather? You know, destroying the gulf stream etc?

If I'm talking twaddle, feel free to ignore, but if you know and feel like, please explain!

[Michael Palaeologus]

I recycle and do all that other good stuff - its the right thing to do. We have a duty of care.

I believe in global warming but am agnostic on the range of likely impacts that tend to get trumpeted.

I think that alot of the "unusual" weather that we see is quite normal in a long term historical context i.e. tens of thousands of years. So the fact that its the hottest/wettest/whateverest weather in recorded history is but a nanosecond in climatic and geological time.

[mockney piers]

Depends what you mean by always FnB. If you mean always as in the last million years, then you're quite right.

If you mean always as in the last 200 million years then absolutely not.

have a look at the animation and see how it wanders south

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea

Unless of course you are a conservative christian (see our new transport secretary) then of course continental drift is merely a divine joke put there to give scientists something to do, and (two) kangaroos got to australia after the flood on floating mats of vegetation that they could nibble on during the journey.

[Mark]

Heavens above, so he's put a member of the Catholic conservative movement Opus Dei is in charge of transport. Lord help us transport users.

[Fear 'n boozin]

Of course I believe. Tsk. Anyway, that animation's a little lacking in detail, this map, by Geology.dotty.com, seems to sugest that the continent spent a lot of time down that way. Am a tad upset my last site had a Pennsylvanian and Mississippian continental age, find that a bit much.

btw - did you (or anyone) listen to in our time this morning? It was on mass distiction during the Pangaea period (global warming seemed to be a factor). You can listen to it on the beeb website.

[Fear 'n boozin]

Hell - we have a 12yr old as out foreign minister!

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/images/miliband_david.jpg

[ChavWivaLawDegree]

Just to depress you all even more, did you know the Gulf Stream stopped a few times last month, that was why the weather was so bad, and it's been slowing down over the last couple of decades, so we are facing a possible ice age too!

Couldn't find anything more up to date, but check this

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8398

[Brendan]

Bloody hell! So global warming is going to make it colder! :-S

[Fear 'n boozin]

Some further information on the early geology of the world.

Pre Gulf Stream I'm fairly sure most of northern Europe was iced up, along with North America. The great lakes are what's left after glacial retreat [though I may have to google check this]. No idea how much of Europe was frozen though.

[mockney piers]

Southern edge was heading toward the south coast, hence so much of london, herts etc being clay, it's where the glaciers dumped all that nasty gunk.

What's now the channel was all land and recent sonar surveys have spotted signs loads of settlements down there. Would have been good fishing in the super river fed by the tributaries of the rhine, oder, somme, meuse and the seine!!!

[Fear 'n boozin]

I know, they've been digging around my parents/I.o.W, the whole area up round the north sea was land too (fishermen occasionaly fish out artifacts. So you could walk to France, Germany, Denmark, Holland etc (well, I think that might be it). I also think the river that carved out the channel, and became the North Sea was the Rhine.

[Fear 'n boozin]

oh - you said that - I didn't get past the fishing!