Here's a comment I posted on Watt's Up With That on a post on Antarctic Sea Ice (with a few additional sarcastic comments added in red for context and laughs):
The Current Antarctic “Melting”:
Surface area of the Earth (sq miles)
196,861,796.38
Ocean surface area of the Earth @ ~ 70% (sq miles)
137,803,257.47
Antarctic Ice Melt / Year (cu miles)
24.00 (Colorado will be flooded! Run for your lives!!! Oh you denier you! It's ACCELERATING!)
Ocean rise / yr from Antarctic Ice Melt (ft)
0.000920
Ocean rise / yr from Antarctic Ice Melt (inches)
0.011035
Ocean rise / yr from Antarctic Ice Melt (mm)
0.275872
Number of years to raise ocean level by 1 inch
90.62
Number of years to raise ocean level by 1 foot
1,087.46
Number of years to raise ocean level by 1 meter
3,624.88 (And don't forget to build that meter-high dam along all the current ocean shores so it even makes it that high. Of course, there's no rush... Oh, and even if the melt was 10 times faster -- an order of magnitude for the numerate -- you still have 362 years to build that meter-high dam.)
What It Would Take To Achieve Actual Antarctic Melting?
Average Annual Temperature of the Antarctic (degF)
-58
Freezing Point (degF)
32
Degrees of warming required to move Antarctic Average Annual Temp above Freezing (degF)
90
Likelihood of Antarctic Average Temp rising to allow meaningful Antarctic melting before the Holocene ends (pct)
0 (Zilch. Nada. Zip. Zero. Not even epsilon.)
What are the summertime average high temperatures in Iraq? (degF)
110
Assuming distributed global temperature rise, what would be the summertime average high temperatures in Iraq have to be if the Antarctic shifted into actual average melting? (degF)
200 (UmHmmm...)
Inevitable resultant editorial comment: Who on earth is dumb enough to believe any of this innumerate warming drivel?
And all the usual disclaimers about the Antarctic being a bowl full of ice and so not going anywhere no matter what until plate tectonics do their damage, we don’t know the role of undersea volcanoes in the area, etc., etc.
UPDATE: Another commenter added this for perspective:
….The next time some numbskull starts railing at me about how Pittsburgh and Denver will be coastal cities by August I will spit on their shoe, and say
“Are you drowning yet ?” or “I refute it thus”.”
Do not forget this article in the Geological Society publication http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/site/GSL/lang/en/page7209.html
“…It is also worth noting the geometry and age of the great icecaps. The Greenland, East Antarctica and West Antarctica ice sheets occupy kilometre-deep basins, and the ice cannot possibly slide downhill – it has to flow uphill. In simple numbers the Greenland icecap has existed for three million years and the Antarctic Ice sheets 30 million….”
So what you would have if the glaciers melted are inland seas not the oceans rising to algorest heights. Think of the finger lakes in New York that are artifacts of the last glaciation.
And the article he references ends thusly:
All this suggests that the present climate has limited effect on melting ice and rising sea levels, but since the Alarmists keep up their horror stories it is good to know that even the present times are not all bad. A recent paper is entitled “A doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850 (Thomas et al. 2008). Another reports that “The East Antarctic ice-sheet north of 81.6oS increased in mass by 45 ± 7 billion metric tonnes per year from 1992 to 2003 … enough to slow sea-level rise by 0.12 ±0.002 millimetres per year” Davis et al. 2005. Wingham et al. (2006) wrote: “We show that 72% of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining 27 ± 29 Gt yr-1, a sink of ocean mass sufficient to lower global sea levels by 0.08 mm yr-1.”
Heh. That reduces my ocean rate rise estimate by over 25%.
Not that you were worried by this point.
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