Mike Lorrey wrote:
< The Greenland ice cap may collapse, and the arctic ice cap will most
likely vanish in a few decades. If the Greenland ice cap collapses, it will
result in sea level rises of 3-9 meters at most.>
This fragment from Mike's post brings something to mind. Amara Graps
recently posted a reference to William Calvin's website at
http://WilliamCalvin.com/ That has a link to his Atlantic Monthly article
"The Great Climate Flip-flop" which says that the climate system has the
potential for sudden (over a decade) temperature drops, which could give
Europe a Siberian climate. The unstable mechanism is the Gulf Stream current
which acts as a conveyor belt carrying warm water to northern Europe and
giving them much warmer weather than they would otherwise have. It has
flipped to other modes in the past and apparently could do so again. Melting
the Greenland ice cap sounds to me like a pretty substantial nudge.
Don Klemencic
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