"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Spike Jones wrote:
>
> > Even the most wild-eyed greenhouse theorist would
> > estimate the sea rise would take a few thousand years.
>
> Hmmm, Spike, this needs to be written up in more detail.
I read Gribbin's Hothouse Earth when it was hot off the presses
11 years ago. I looked up his estimates and they are about 1 cm
per decade. Gribbin discusses this number, then goes off on
how many billions of pounds {Brits, is two billion pounds the same
as a megaton?}would need to be spent to save this historic
city or that, using seawalls, etc.
Then he goes on to point out that things are not so clear cut,
for if temperatures rise, Antarctica gets more precipitation
and the ice gets thicker inland, thinner on the edges, so the
sea level might actually fall. See Hothouse Earth, p. 175.
I estimate that for every cm rise in seas, you lose a meter
of land, and of course get back that much with each cm
drop. So if the initial warming does drop the seas, I can
imagine spewing CO2 intentionally to recover more of that
valuable coastal real estate that we lost at the end of the
last ice age, thus my term "environmental repair" and "global
rewarming." spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:41 MDT