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What would happen if all ice on Earth melted?

Global mean sea level has been rising and is projected to rise further in the future, as indicated by state-of-the-art global climate models. This is 100% consensus.


What some in this thread are failing to understand is that sea-level changes are NOT spatially uniform—that is, one region may experience a very different sea- level change from other regions. We aren't talking in general-- ocean currents, and a vast array of climate variables can cause tremendous variation in coastal sea-levels that can provide the potency to flood an entire region over a short period of time.

So, it is the local relative sea-level changes (in both long-term mean and extreme event statistics) that the local communities directly experience and thus care more about than the global mean. Unfortunately, we are still trying to develop climate models that can account for in-situ sea level rise & potential for risk for a given region due to the multitude of factors (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.) that can impact it, and how difficult it is to determine when these impacts can take hold.
 
dalamon said:
Right-- because since environmental refugees are only in the order of thousands these days, therefore there is no way that this number will increase over time.


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LogGrad98 said:
The point is it refutes your attempt to claim there is an ever increasing rate of change. It is in fact happening slower than predicted. Maybe it will happen slowly enough that we can adapt and only will deal with refugees in small numbers like the examples you cited.
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dalamon said:
Ever increasing rate of change? Can you find that point made by myself in this thread? Quit putting words into my mouth.

Climate change is a reality, and it is being amplified by human activity. There are many things we can do to slow down this change in climate-- in fact, we need to do so, to ATTEMPT to prevent one environmental disaster after another.


Unfortunately you fail to understand that climate studies done in the 70s lack the sophistication of current ones. You also fail to understand that our estimates regarding the rise of sea levels are based on the most accurate current models, and many of the values commonly accepted are conservative estimations.


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So what was that first sarcastic comment meant to convey if not that we can expect the rate of change to increase?

And the models from the 70s are not the only models failing. If you would just take 6 hours of your time and read more than the dogma you have been you would see this. Models as recent as 10-15 years ago are off as much as 100% overestimation. And none of the models work very well at all for predicting anything in the short term (say under a decade at a time, let alone a 1 or 2 year stretch). So the most current models won't give us anything verifiable for another decade at least.

But plenty of people are screaming for potentially crippling policy changes which would without a doubt disproportionately affect poorer countries in order to possibly try to mitigate something that might, if we ever get the models right, some day disproportionately affect poorer countries. So do known and immediate harm to help try to stop something that might one day do harm maybe.
 
LogGrad98 said:
So what was that first sarcastic comment meant to convey if not that we can expect the rate of change to increase?
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I'm hoping you have a basic understanding of mathematics. Even if the rate of change stays constant, it still means that we will get an increasing amount of environmental refugees, and that we need to do what we can to bring this slope away from the constant value, and try to reverse it as much as possible.

And the models from the 70s are not the only models failing. If you would just take 6 hours of your time and read more than the dogma you have been you would see this. Models as recent as 10-15 years ago are off as much as 100% overestimation. And none of the models work very well at all for predicting anything in the short term (say under a decade at a time, let alone a 1 or 2 year stretch). So the most current models won't give us anything verifiable for another decade at least.
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And if you take 6 hours of time, and search "sea level rise climate change" in the database of probably the best journal for all science in general in the world, you'll quickly realize that these models don't make outlandish predictions, and their estimates often err on the side of conservativity-- and essentially all represent a desire to mobilize a change in habit that will minimize human-caused climate change.

Here is that search-bar for you in case you're too lazy to do so yourself. Hit up a library with a subscription to Nature if you don't have one yourself. https://www.nature.com/search?journal=nclimate&q=sea level rise climate change&shunter=1427963387575


But plenty of people are screaming for potentially crippling policy changes which would without a doubt disproportionately affect poorer countries in order to possibly try to mitigate something that might, if we ever get the models right, some day disproportionately affect poorer countries. So do known and immediate harm to help try to stop something that might one day do harm maybe.
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Sorry, what are these climate change mitigation policies that heavily impact poorer nations disproportionately?

Many of the calls for mobilization disproportionately affect developed nations, as these are the nations that are disproportionately butt-****ing our world's climate.
 
The scientific world is calling for policy changes, many of which would cripple their own scientific funding, because they are 100% realizing how ****ed we are, and how pointless difficulty in securing funding will be once the world drowns in one humanitarian/financial crisis after another. So do some harm, and affect our irresponsible way of life in efforts to try and mitigate the climate change that we are without a doubt causing, and mitigate the numbers of environmental refugees from inevitably rising.
 
franklin said:
You mean the country that dumps more plastics into the ocean per capita? We need the oceans to rise just to negate the environmental crisis Denmark is creating. We're on the verge bros.
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That total is drop in the ocean compared how much USA dumps. And they make great beer;)
 
I just want to add that climate models provide robust results. Some variables have higher confidence than others, but for many continental scale models, there is much consensus across the climate community and many of the results are reproducible from past and present climate archives. When people say the models aren't reliable, what they usually mean is that models don't provide the results they are looking for.

The climate community estimates sea level will rise as much as half a meter by the year 2100, whether this makes a big impact over then next 100 years is debatable but over the next several centuries, if there aren't any reductions in the amount of greenhouse gases we contribute to the atmosphere, there will be an additional 6-7 meters of water added to oceans by the Greenland ice sheet and another 6-7 meters added by the Western Antarctic Ice sheet. But the real concern is abrupt climate events. We know in the past there have been major climate shifts that occurred quickly. In the 1970's we saw sea surface temperatures shift in the eastern pacific and in the 1980's we saw salinity reduction in the upper 1000-m of the Labrador Sea, even more drastically, scientists believe the Younger Dryas event shut down the North Atlantic jet stream in a period just less than a decade. In all three of these events, a sort of tipping point occurred where years and years of building changes in oceanographic conditions eventually led to a tipping point causing abrupt climatological changes.
 
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