Monday, July 04, 2011

Arctic meltdown to flood London

I discussed a suitable understanding of ‘global warming’ yesterday, settling on ‘catastrophic man-made global warming’. By extraordinary chance one of the cheaper (in fact free) tabloids this morning was talking about how global warming could cause a meltdown of the Arctic, flooding London. That’s what I call catastrophic! I live close to the Thames, and hardly relish the thought of having to leave the basement for the upper floors, and travelling to Tesco’s by boat, within my lifetime or my children’s.

But let’s move on to reasons for believing in this catastrophe. Clearly the catastrophic flooding will be caused by higher temperatures. But how high do the temperatures have to get, and how will this be caused? What is the Fermi explanation?

7 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html is a reasonable starting point, though it has been criticised for under-playing the risks of SLR from ice melt (see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/).

Bill Wallace said...

I don't think that the temperature has to rise anymore. At the current temperature the Greenland ice sheet is melting at an alarming rate, all glaciers are in retreat, the Arctic ocean will be ice-free in a few years, etc.

Richard said...

I think I now understand the reference to the London plumbing crisis in your tagline.

Edward Ockham said...

@Richard - see also this post.

Richard said...

My grandfather used to say, "We need both our plumbers and our philosophers, else neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water."

At some point I'll try to get serious and actually grapple with the issues at hand.

Edward Ockham said...

>>My grandfather used to say, "We need both our plumbers and our philosophers, else neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water."

Stick with this blog, mate, and you will learn about all sorts of fascinating questions, possibly including the question of why white vans are white.

Bullseye said...

Thanks for the blog post.

plumbers london