[Note: this post (and a few others) was lost in WordPress, and I had no notification of its existence. While a bit dated, it is still valid – note to guest authors with WUWT WordPress privileges – when you submit something, be sure to notify me via email too – Anthony]
Guest post by David Middleton
From Live Science…
Records Melt Away on Greenland Ice Sheet
By Brett Israel, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer posted: 21 January 2011
The disappearing Greenland Ice Sheet set several records during an unusually long melt last year, according to a new study.
Running from April to mid-September, the melt season of 2010 was about a month longer than usual, said study team member Jason Box, a geographer and climatologist at Ohio State University.
[…]
“The disappearing Greenland Ice Sheet”… Where in the heck did the author get the idea that the Greenland Ice Sheet was disappearing?
A recent publication by a team from TU Delft & JPL found that the Greenland ice sheet was melting at half the rate previously thought. They estimate that the Greenland ice sheet is losing ~230 gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year. One Gt of water has a volume of 1 cubic km (km^3). 1 Gt of ice has a larger volume than 1 Gt of water… But, for the purpose of this exercise, we’ll assume 1 Gt of ice has a volume of 1 km^3.
If 1 Gt of ice has a volume of 1 km^3 and the current volume of the Greenland ice sheet is ~5 million km^3 and Greenland continues to melt at a rate of 230 km^3/yr over the next 90 years… The Greenland ice sheet will lose a bit more than 0.4% of its ice volume.~230 gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year equates to about 0.005% of ice mass loss per year. At the current rate, it would take 1,000 years for the Greenland Ice Sheet to lose 5% of its volume.
The Earth’s climate was at least 2°C warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum and the Greenland Ice Sheet did not melt, disappear or destabilize…
The Earth’s climate was at least 2°C warmer and the Arctic was about 5°C warmer than it currently is during the Sangamonian (Eemian) interglacial. and the Greenland Ice Sheet did not melt, disappear or destabilize.
Greenland’s glaciation began during the Miocene, when the Earth’s climate was at least 5°C warmer than it currently is. It advanced rapidly after the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period.
Earth’s climate would have to warm back up to where it was in the mid-Miocene (~15 MYA) in order to destabilize the Greenland ice sheet…
There is no scientific evidence to back up the assertion of a “disappearing Grrenland Ice Sheet. For a detailed explanation as to why the Greenland ice sheet cannot collapse under any AGW scenario, see Ollier & Pain, 2009.
David says
The Earth’s climate was at least 2°C warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum
———-
This claim seems to be based on reading the graph but the graph is missing the last 100 years . Adding in the extra 100 years would add another 1C making the difference just 1C.
There also seems to be some semantic jiggers pokery around the “disappearing Greenland ice sheet”. There are measurements of the ice sheet which are satellite-based cross-checked with field measurements. So David tries to tell us there is “no evidence”. Sorry not buying it.
why the Greenland ice sheet cannot collapse under any AGW scenario, see Ollier & Pain, 2009.
————
I also had a read of this article. While generally informative , it agrees that glaciers are retreating but attempts to fuzz over the whys. It also fuzzes over the processes at glacial margins by emphasizing processes in the ice sheet interior. There is also the odd strawman argument being constructed here.
Basically to much activism/spin and to little objective science.
@KR
“Quite frankly, the general approach of the comments here, arguing that melt isn’t going to be that bad, is in my opinion just wishful thinking.”
++++++++
I presume that was a reply to my calculation that the new sea water accumulated from melting ice sheets will absorb very large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere – equal at least to the current 392 ppm.
I must say I expected, given your command of quite a number of reference documents, that you would have replied with something more substantial than your opinion of my opinion about the positive effects on the Great White North of a substantial increase in temperature. Wishful thinking? Darn right! Stand outdoors in Yellowknife in winter for a few hours and the prospect of a cooling climate in the coming decades is terrifying. The Ice Road Truckers will be running almost all year.
More to the point would have been some argument from you about the current CO2 content of the ice in Greenland and the offset that would be necessary in the calculation to look at the net uptake by the new seawater. I note in your sort-of-reply that you have tried to divert attention from the core of my argument that the CO2 absorption by new seawater will be massive, to the possible effects of melting. The question of how mankind would cope with a large rise in sea level is open to debate. It is worth remembering that for all the tiny islands lost, and new ones created in places like southern Georgia and Florida, there will be a lot of new farmland crated by the removal of the glaciation. Canada is huge (about 10m km^2) and very large portions of it are basically uninhabitable at present, the same as Greenland. The melting of the ice from Antarctica would uncover an entire continent.
My point is that arguments about land loss only are partial, frequently alarmist, biased and therefore, unscientific. Rising global temperatures will liberate millions of sq km of farmland in Siberia, Greenland and Canada. Rising seas will maintain a CO2 level approximately where it is right now. Mankind will easily adapt to a warmer and less hostile world
Taken in proper context, the natural fluctuations in climate are readily accommodated by both the natural world and the human world. There are two true threats to ‘life as we know it’: catastrophic cooling on the one hand, and on the other, self-immolation through the application of literally insane policies to bankrupt the entire world economy, slaughtered on the altar of ‘Man has the Power to Control the Climate’.
King Canute (990-1035) was not demonstrating his arrogance when in the 11th century, he set his throne on the sand and commanded the tide not to wet his feet and robes. He was making a public demonstration that even a powerful king is unable to control the forces of nature, no matter how praised and flattered, no matter how accepted he was as the ultimate commander of his accumulated, earthly realms. It is interesting that an ancient Viking had more comprehension of the nature of our relationship with the planet than many of the Lettered and Anointed in this day.
@Daveo says:
First, thanks for engaging in a real debate.
I work some of the time in Mongolia which suspect has a trillion tons of coal (all taken out of the atmosphere by natural proceses when the world was much more comfortably warm). I think there is enough, but not all of it is recoverable. The coal reserves of many countries are highly manipulated so read the numbers with care.
>Impressive use of large numbers! Let me try.
I won’t repeat everything, readers can look upwards for the links.
>2010 global coal comsumption, 7.237 billion tons. (Hard and Brown coal)
Let’s factor that for 20% ash and agree on the carbon content of 85% of what is left. That gives about 5 bn tons of Carbon, agreed?
>Without including the increase in coal use ( as we keep hearing china is putting online 1 coal plant per week) thats 723.7 billion tons in 100 years.
Willem Nel tried to look at how much coal could be recovered and used. He says Peak Coal will be in about 2070, China included. By then China plans to be on Thorium-Fluoride. Peak Uranium is 2035, so little is there of it.
>According to your figures, thats almost 45% more than will be absorbed by the melt water or 702,000,000,000 tons of CO2 still going into the atmosphere.
If the coal can be recovered and burned, this is a real possibility.
>As brown coal produces more CO2, this figure would be higher.
Brown coal is definitely lower in CO2 emissions per MJ than hard coal. Please look at the MASHCON figures to see the C:H2 ratio for young and old coals. Moisture, Ash, Sulphur, Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Brown coals are much higher in H2 because they are less ‘processed’ (by age) biomass.
>Have we got enough coal? You betcha!
In theory we should have. As South Africa and China are proving, it is cheaper to turn it into liquid fuels and plastic than burn for electricity. There will be a lot of competition for it.
>The reserves to production (R/P) ratio provides an indicator of how long proved coal reserves will last at the current rate of extraction. BP calculated this to be 118 years for coal at the end of 2010.
That is wildly in error butI won’t go into that now.
>So to wrap up it IF the Greenland ice sheet melted (your thoughts not mine), it would only absorb 70 years of coal use at 2010 consumption rates.
Thanks for your version of the calculations. What this does is put more of the facts (or our opinion of them) on the table. You have probably never seen the new seawater-CO2 argument before. All this alarming talk about sea level rise from melting and nothing about the implications for the atmosphere.
Taking your figures as accurate, factored for ash and carbon content (reduce by 30%) and adding at least as much melting from the the Arctic islands, Alaska, Antarctica and who knows, the Himalayas, the absorption of CO2 by the expanded ocean will be huge. I wonder if the topic would dare be broached at RC. Who’s a denier now, Gavin?
If we managed to maintain the current coal combustion rate for another 2-300 years and melting accelerated to the fanciful rates imagined by KR, it still means no change in ocean pH and no change in the atmospheric ppm of CO2. This is a very different scenario from that presented by the main stream media and the sound-alikes of Hansen. How on earth they get funded is beyond me.
All this is said without getting into any of the arguments in favour of a better, warmer world with higher CO2. If we managed to get the CO2 level up, it would warm at least a bit, but then there is all that winter cooling of the Arctic Ocean without an insulating cover of ice…
It’s a calamity.
We are doomed I tells ya.
What troubles me is how isostatic rebound is used to tweak numbers.
For example, if you assume the land is rising an inch a year, then for the volume of the ice to remain the same the top surface of the ice must rise an inch a year. If the top surface does not rise an inch a year, you then assume an inch of ice has “melted.” In a darkened room, playing with numbers on a computer screen, an inch of ice adds up to a large amount of water, when it is calculated over hundreds of square miles. However you have to notice the entire excersize is built upon a premice: That the land is rising an inch a year. What if it isn’t?
I can’t help but notice that the graph for sea levels contains “a “Correction” of 0.3 mm/year added May, 5th 2011, due to a “Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA)” – 1993 to Present.” I assume that is based upon the premice the sea’s floor is sinking??? What if it isn’t?
Sometimes I think these fellows ought stop tweaking numbers on computer screens in darkened rooms, and instead spend some time on a beach. Talk to the old-timers who have lived there for their entire lives, and can recount what their grandfathers told them.
One thing you learn is that entire neighborhoods have been built on spits of land that weren’t even there before the ’38 hurricane, or the huge Nor’easter of the early 1960’s. If you are determined to be an Alarmist, what you should worry about is what a single hurricane can do to the east coast of the USA, if it builds up a head of steam and charges up the coast with its core intact, (unlike the storm last summer, which dawdled slowly northward and lost its core.)
LazyTeenager says:
April 6, 2012 at 12:16 am
I also had a read of this article. While generally informative , it agrees that glaciers are retreating but attempts to fuzz over the whys.
Some glaciers are retreating and others are advancing — the “whys” for each of those states are pretty well established.
Sea level has been up and down a few in the past 6K years or so , but the trend is down. Archeological digs 50 miles inland of the Gulf of Mexico, show where the shore was in the past 2-3K years when the MSL was 2 meters higher. Expecting a meter or two of rise is no big deal, except for those who chose the wrong place to live. Nothing unusual is happening.
http://i42.tinypic.com/xndjrq.jpg
Missed the word ‘meters’ at “Sea level has been up and down a few”___.
I wrote and submitted this post about a year ago. I noticed that error shortly after submitting it. I noted the errata in my first comment to this post.
Kobashi’s GISP2 reconstruction cover 960-1950 AD.
A combination of Kobashi’s GISP2 reconstruction and regional instrumental data shows the modern warming in Greenland to be nearly identical to the Medieval Warm Period.
The glacial junk science journalist referred to the “disappearing Greenland ice sheet.” There’s no evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is disappearing. Had article referred to the dynamically variable Greenland ice sheet, I wouldn’t have taken much issue with it, apart from the relevancy of records set relative to record length.
Even if the ice melts, should we assume that ocean levels will rise uniformly?
Apparently not. It appears that a combination of wind and currents has created a higher sea level in some areas. For example, the Chesapeake bay http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=3680
Now this would tempt me, if I were a warmer, to go make my sea level rise alarmists stories based on the indisputable fact that sea levels have risen.
Of course, as an alarmist I would not think it necessary to announce that this is a purely local event nor what the causes are.
I would just create some banner headlines, claim that millions will drown (because they can’t walk uphill or move inland), include a photo-shopped image of sky scrapers emerging from the sea, maybe a polar bear swimming and so on and let people think that (a) this is global and (b) it is AGW.
Wait!!! If all of the ice melts, then the oceans will have more mass, more depth[sea level rise]. More depth more pressure. More pressure more land rise [kind of like squeezing a pimple]. I was going to say more mountain building, but the squeezing a pimple now has me worried….
/sarc
David Larsen says:
April 5, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Cwoop, Sie habten lande gefunden; finde lande, found land, new found land. There were sites there excavated in the 1960′s that showed viking habitation in old National Geographics. Southern europe must think finde is vines for grapes but the vikings finded lande, found land.
My understanding was that the land was marked with grape vines on the map. Probably just my memory.
KR said on April 5, 2012 at 7:55 pm
David Middleton – …. Short term trend estimates are not statistically significant, and are in fact cherry-picking – in the presence of noise I could take an insignificantly short period and extract almost any rate I liked; but that would be meaningless.
KR, You mean like in the report you pointed to @- KR says: April 5, 2012 at 4:21 pm As to ice melt rates, see http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf that you use to justify your position and wherein the summary of that report it says:
Surging greenhouse gas emissions:
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were 40% higher than those in 1990.
Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-induced warming:
Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.19°C per decade, … Even over the past ten years, ….
Acceleration of melting of ice-sheets, glaciers and ice-caps:
… Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990.
“than those in 1990”? “Over the past 25 years”? “the past 10 years”? “accelerated since 1990”?
Dare I quote you from 7:55pm- Short term trend estimates are not statistically significant, and are in fact cherry-picking – in the presence of noise I could take an insignificantly short period and extract almost any rate I liked; but that would be meaningless.
Question: So everything you’ve said is meaningless?
glenncz says:
April 5, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Kim2ooo – in a book I read about the recovery of Glacier Girl. One of the pictures showed a tractor that was left on the ice in 1990. The picture was taken in 1992, and the tractor was in a 15-20 ft hole. About 15 ft of new glacier has formed over the tractor in two years. I guess it’s melting from the bottom. About 200 ft of ice had accumulated on Glacier Girl since it crashed in about 1944.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks! 🙂
One Lady Glaciologist tried to explain, “It is wind drifts”.
I said, ” It didn’t matter how it got there….it’s accumulated 200 plus feet of ice since 1942 and recovery of Glacier Girl in 1999 – How do you explain that…if ice is rapidly melting? Remember, this recovery was at the 1998 height of AGW heat index.
No one answered!! 🙂
redc1c4 says:
April 5, 2012 at 8:52 pm
regarding the recovery of “Glacier Girl” as proof that the ice is melting:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Reread the posts 🙂
Dr. Lurtz says:
April 6, 2012 at 5:53 am
ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww ha ha ha ha
Hey LazyTeenager, could you please mature a little and learn proper use of your to‘s and too‘s ?
I find reading your comments a bit difficult. You seem to be too (notice the extra o) lazy and perhaps need to (notice the sans o) return to school too.
Regarding “Glacier Girl” – the flight of B-17’s and P-38’s was buried ~260-270 feet under the snow and ice, and had moved ~three miles with the glaciers. They reached the planes by literally melting a hole down to the site with a 4-foot wide hot-tip and pumps, then excavated with hoses of hot water. It was quite a project.
http://www.damninteresting.com/exhuming-the-glacier-girl/
Greenland glaciers accumulate snow and ice as precipitation, move to the sea via plastic deformation of the ice, and melt off/calve, as a continuing process. Total mass balance is determined by the relative rates of accumulation and melt. Observed increased melt rates certainly don’t indicate that it’s stopped snowing on Greenland – just that there’s a difference between accumulation and loss.
Speaking of sea level and accelerating rise… something is rotten in Denmark. I mean in the sea level graph.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2012_rel1/sl_ns_global.png
The years 2008-2011 look exactly on the 3.1 mm/years level increase, but if one take the last years one by one one and compares with the historical data one gets to a different picture.
Well the last year is clear, it shows no increase at all to 2012.
If I go and compute the increase registered 2011, it was 3.1 mm per year -0.3 isostacy = 2.8. I remove it for compatibility with previous measurements.
The total increase for 18 years is 2.8×18=50.4 mm
If I go back to the level from 2010 from their own data:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2010/10/going-down.html
It was 3.1 mm per year in 17 years – a total of 52.7 mm
Going back another year we got in 2009:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2009/04/subida-descer.html
2009: trend 3.2 mm/year. see the very flat 2006-2009. total 16 years = 51.2 mm
and back another year, in 2008 we had:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2008/12/descida-dos-nveis-do-mar.html
2008: trend 3.3 mm/year. total 1993-2008 15 years = 49.5 mm
So now we have 1 mm more then measured in 2008. Why do I see on their chart an increase in this timeframe from 36 to 50 mm – as of 10-15 mm?
Can somebody explain this?
If I go year by year and count we had +1.7 in 2009 +1.2 in 2010 -1.7 in 2011 and 0 2012 to now wich is compatible with what envisat is showing.
BTW does anybody have saved their values for 2007, 2006 or older? Would be nice to point those to me, would like to recalculate those values too.
Hello there Lamb Chops;
No one wishes your half wit dreck to be true more than I. Hell we all wish you were correct. Scientists gain nothing personally when they get their point across my friend. If someone is running a business and profiting nicely I say more power to you get it while you can. If however they are dumping their waste in your yard ( even a negligible diminutive amount) you would cry foul and you would want them to pay for what they are doing to your “property”. Everything has a price my friend. If we pay through the nose for cleanup costs for a mess that we arguably leave behind energy companies better do the same. Oh I forgot, the TELEVISION cable “news” programs are making all kinds of mad money at being the bad guy.
I just love that publication “Lie Science.”
@Larry Plume
Thanks for providing real numbers. Nothing sings like the truth.
@Crispin in Johannesburg.
To be honest, no I hadn’t given it too much thought. Ice is melting; CO2 levels are continuing to rise. So it’s not having much of an impact on maintaining current levels, I can’t see how it would maintain/reduce levels in the future.
Let’s factor that for 20% ash and agree on the carbon content of 85% of what is left. That gives about 5 bn tons of Carbon, agreed?
Agree, but your original statement was
That is equal to the total emissions from burning 410,000,000,000 tons of carbon or roughly 500 billion tons of good quality dry coal.
I’m assumeing thats already calculated in?
As I referenced, we are currently consuming 7.23 bn tons of coal per year (6.3 billion tons of “good quality dry coal”), 45% more than your calculation required to maintain current CO2 levels.
If we managed to maintain the current coal combustion rate for another 2-300 years and melting accelerated to the fanciful rates imagined by KR, it still means no change in ocean pH and no change in the atmospheric ppm of CO2.
Well, no. As described, the melt water from a complete melting of Greenland, and as you also said a similar amount of melt from other glaciers and ice sheets, would absorb 50-70% of the coal emissions over the time period you described. As coal use accounts for aprox 45% of the total of all emissions. That means it would only absorb 20-30% of the total CO2 emissions. Where are the other 70-80% going to go?
Personally, I would be more concerned with the sea level rise from that much melt water (aprox 14m or 50ft), than the CO2 that it would absorb.
@Daveo says:
>To be honest, no I hadn’t given it too much thought. Ice is melting; CO2 levels are continuing to rise. So it’s not having much of an impact on maintaining current levels, I can’t see how it would maintain/reduce levels in the future.
With these speculative matters like who’s wild and virtually groundless speculation about sea level rise is better than who else’s, realism is not a strong requirement. Let’s tighten this up a little:
>>Let’s factor that for 20% ash and agree on the carbon content of 85% of what is left. That gives about 5 bn tons of Carbon, agreed?
>Agree, but your original statement was
>>That is equal to the total emissions from burning 410,000,000,000 tons of carbon or roughly 500 billion tons of good quality dry coal.
Well, you said ‘coal’ and coal has a lot of water in it and a lot of ash, then quite a lot of carbon with residual H2, O2 and N depending on the age. The H2:C ratio drops with time and the moisture may drop equally, sometimes first. 500 GT of dry coal means about 600 GT of coal as mined, which means I am correcting the 7.23 figure for brown and high ash coal.
>I’m assuming that’s already calculated in?
It is now – just keep in mind the difference between coal and Carbon mass. For a lignite the carbon content of raw coal may be as low as 40% ‘as mined’.
>As I referenced, we are currently consuming 7.23 bn tons [7.23 x 10^9] of coal per year (6.3 billion tons of “good quality dry coal”), 45% more than your calculation required to maintain current CO2 levels.
I wanted to be sure that if we move from a demonstrative calculation to a forecast based on melting and coal burning (from the demonstration in principle to a calculated impact) that melting of other ice fields was considered. If you want to use ‘actual global use’ then we could also usefully apply ‘actual melt of ice’ as the absorber, not the demonstration unit of Greenland. It would never melt by itself. There is a lot of ice in the Arctic Archipelago and Antarctica would be simultaneously affected. So we could go for 5m km^3 of melt or a melted Greenland and the accompanying effects which would be much larger.
Suppose Coal burned = 10 gigatons (1 x 10^10). Moisture = 15% average, Ash = 20% average. Actual ‘coal = 6.8 gT. Carbon content of that coal = 85%, yields 5.78 or roughly 60% of initial mass. This is 1.5 times the carbon content of lignite, for example. Back of the envelope says coal ‘as mined’ is 60% carbon, by this logic.
As coal gets depleted (probably 2 or 3 centuries from now) the carbon content will be going down and the ash content up. South Africa is currently building a power station that burns coal with 40% ash. The reported mass mined is the total, not the Carbon, of course.
So I get a figure of 7.23 x 0.6 = 4.33 GT of Carbon/yr. Reasonable? That is = to 15.9 GT of CO2 (4.33 x 44 / 12 = 15.9)
If the ice mass, total melt, was 5m km^3 the absorption to bring it to present 0.03% CO2 is:
5 x 10^15 tons of new seawater x 0.0003 = 1.5 x 10^12 tons of CO2
Reasonable? Per 5 million cubic kilometres, that is. That is 1,500 GT of absorbing capacity.
Being realistic, there is a bit of CO2 in the ice which needs to be calculated for. I hoped KR would pick up on that kinda obvious omission and start discussing the implications of new sea water. I suspect the implications scared him off.
Remember as well that the CO2 level in the ocean is not similar to CO2 a bottle of soda, as is often used as an analogy. There are huge amounts of CO2 sequestered permanently in the ocean on a continuous basis. That is where cement comes from, ultimately.
So if we talk real numbers, we have to know CO2 sequestration in the sea, roughly ½ of all new emissions as I recall. No matter, we are not getting paid for this….
Take new seawater as virgin uptake. Take it as given that the level will rise temporarily to perhaps, maybe, double the present concentration in the atmosphere, max, unless oil and natural gas turn out to be abiotic. That will be factored by the overstated release of CO2 from warming oceans but corrected for real absorption. The oceans have an enormous buffering capacity including mechanisms that have not even started to kick in yet for an absolute lack of CO2 in the air.
Global coal reserves are said to be about 900 GTons http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-08/global-energy-use-advances-at-fastest-pace-since-1973-on-coal-bp-says.html Note that the figure for Germany was upped from 6.7 to 40.7 GT in 2011. They had earlier ‘disappeared’ almost all of their coal!! What’s up with that? Lesson: Never trust reported coal reserve estimates, even from fastidious Germans.
>>If we managed to maintain the current coal combustion rate for another 2-300 years and melting accelerated to the fanciful rates imagined by KR, it still means no change in ocean pH and no change in the atmospheric ppm of CO2.
The whole point of my story was to engage KR who shows up here to piss on anything that is against catastrophic global warning, proclaim the sky to be falling and then run off, probably back to RC. He can do that cluck-and-run because there is open debate here whereas at the RC Church of AGW (CAGW) such heretical words would never be allowed. KR ran off with a throwaway-comment about my comment about the benefits of warming in the frozen North and stunningly uttered not a single cluck about new seawater and its implications for climate eschatology.
>Well, no. As described, the melt water from a complete melting of Greenland, and as you also said a similar amount of melt from other glaciers and ice sheets, would absorb 50-70% of the coal emissions over the time period you described. As coal use accounts for aprox 45% of the total of all emissions. That means it would only absorb 20-30% of the total CO2 emissions. Where are the other 70-80% going to go?
Sticking with my numbers above, 15.9 x 10^9 Tons of CO2 per year and 5m km^3 of new seawater (5 x 10^15 Tons), calculating about 1.5 x 10^12 Tons absorbing capacity just to bring it to the present sea level. That means the current rate of CO2 emissions emitted for 945 years (1500/15.9) would be absorbed by that 5m km^3 just to keep the ocean level and the pH where it is now. As presently understood, the coal reserves of the planet are nowhere near enough to reach this level (only 118 years as you said), or restated, to even maintain the current pH of the ocean or the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
>Personally, I would be more concerned with the sea level rise from that much melt water (aprox 14m or 50ft), than the CO2 that it would absorb.
I can understand that view. Sea level rise is a non-issue as far as I am concerned. Rapid cooling is a serious threat. We can easily adapt to rising seas as can the whole of nature adapt, just like it did all the other times we and it adapted. Unfreezing 10m sq km of northern Canada, Greenland and Russia does not portend disaster. And I did not factor above the massive uptake of CO2 by tree cover expansion if it ever got warm enough to let them grow again where they used to. I have written on that previously.
It would be nice to see a decent calculation of the CO2 absorption of the expanding oceans plotted against the melt rate.
When the Earth cools and freezes, CO2 is released into the atmosphere by the creation of ice. Were this not so, people would use ice as a CO2 record. Instead they have to use little pockets of air trapped in it. If CO2 had a strong warming power, it would offset the freezing, but it doesn’t. Interesting, neh?