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Comment by rainbowmverse | Hacker News Reader

These simple calculations and the data needed for them would be a great thing for you to provide to support your claims.

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I have provided this information in detail in the past and those who have challenged me to do so haven't even bothered to check it or respond. The information is freely available in all sort of resources. The bits you need are the surface area of the earth and the surface area of the oceans, the volume of land based ice required to melt to fill the appropriate surface area to whatever level you require (in my case 1 metre), the amount of energy required to do the phase change of 1 kg of solid H2O to liquid H2O (which is approx equivalent raising 1 Kg of liquid H2O from 0 degrees Celsius to 84-85 degrees Celsius) and viola you have your results. This give an approximation to the energy required and even if you were 20% out in any of your figures, the amount is of such a magnitude that those errors are fundamentally insignificant for the planetary effects that such an amount of energy would do.

That amount of energy on the lower bounds would have caused all life to become extinct before we would see the oceans rise by any significant amount.

Many years ago, I gave these calculations to a senior climate scientist and he noted at the time that the results were interesting and he would get back to me after he had analysed those figures. That was what 15 or more years ago and I have never heard anything back since those discussions.

I have provided such figures in detail to various climate scientists asking for their analysis and basically no response. Not even to the extent of saying that the calculations were flawed.

So when ever any fool climate scientist or their supporters promulgate any scenario that says we should expect any significant ocean level rises inside of 100 years (significant being anything above 0.5 metre - especially those who promulgate 1 to 10 metres) due to human activity then the onus is on them to demonstrate where the energy processes are occurring. They have not done so to date and based on their dogma, I suspect that they cannot.

The problem with all of this politically correct dogma is that they (the climate scientists en bulk) are not doing any science.

I have said it in the past - there are no stupid questions. It seems to be today that funding is the driver to follow the crowd and to not do actual science.

We need to know what is happening in our climate. This is irrespective of any ideological standpoint you may hold. If you challenge the anthropogenic climate change (ACC) dogma then you are anathema. Even if you believe in climate change, if you do not follow the party line then you are an infidel that needs to be destroyed. Jihad not only occurs in extreme Islam but is alive and well in Climate Science as well.

This whole matter is simple enough for a fifth grader to solve, let alone an adult who should be able to do this in 20 minutes (including looking up the information).

Scepticism has its place and we need a few more sceptics when it comes to the lack of rigour that is being used by those who promulgate such scenarios. If you want to follow a fool where he leads without at least a cursory look at the base of what they are saying then you are free to do so. When someone says that you need to look at what they are saying, you don't need to listen, you can just follow blindly.

end rant.

Now that your rant has ended, have you ever considered the possibility that there are other reasons you're an anathema and nobody takes you seriously, other than a well organized worldwide conspiracy against you? That would be the scientific thing to do.

First it was 5 minutes. Now it's 20 minutes. Why do you keep missing your own deadlines and changing the goalposts more often than you post any citations to scientific evidence or convincing mathematical proofs like you claim to have and everyone keeps asking you for? You keep throwing out numbers and mentioning "studies done" but never name your sources or link to any of them. Why not? You've been admittedly ranting for a lot longer than you said it would take to actually do the math, and you obviously have enough time on your hands, so get started.

You keep saying how quick and easy it would be for an adult to prove it, yet you never do that yourself. Am I correct to conclude that you're not actually an adult?

Now I get it why there was a comment on another thread about a cross thread commenting war with you. This is funny.

But let's say, that 20 minutes if you look up the information yourself and you are slow about it, 5 minutes if given the starting point. Of course if you cannot use a calculation device other than pencil/pen and paper (or blackboard and chalk) then it might take you longer.

I have the calculations sitting in spreadsheet on my machine and I have emails to various people with those calculations, but as you are unable to spend 5 minutes doing, I can't expect you to spend 5 minutes reading.

To make things real simple for those who can't use a search engine, try the following

earth surface area: 510072000 sq km

ocean surface area: 361132000 sq km

latent heat of melting (ice to water): 334 kJ/kg

From these you can calculate the amount (volume) of land based ice required for whatever ocean level rise you need and the amount of energy required to melt said ice.

Note that since only a portion of energy will enter ice, the total energy that would be needed to get the required energy transfer in the ice would be approximately 20 times required energy. This is based on studies done that indicate that it is about 5% of energy absorbed by the planetary system that transfers into the ice portion of the planet.

  from sympy.physics.units import *
  import sympy
  pi = float(sympy.pi)

  earth_surface_area = 510072000 * kilometer**2

  ocean_surface_area = 361132000 * kilometer**2

  latent_heat_of_melting = 334 *(kilo*joule)/kilogram

  volume_for_1_meter_rise = (1*meter) * ocean_surface_area

  # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_(data_page)
  density_of_water_at_0_deg_celsius = 0.9998395 * gram / centimeter**3

  mass_of_ice = density_of_water_at_0_deg_celsius * volume_for_1_meter_rise

  energy_for_melting = latent_heat_of_melting*mass_of_ice

  convert_to(energy_for_melting, joule) # 1.20598728796876e+23*joule

Is that a lot? Compare to the amount of energy received from the sun.

  # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Total_solar_irradiance_(TSI)_and_spectral_solar_irradiance_(SSI)_upon_Earth
  solar_irradiance = 1.361 * (kilo*watt)/(meter**2)

  # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
  earth_radius = 6371 * kilometer

  earth_cross_section = pi * earth_radius**2

  total_solar_irradiance = solar_irradiance * earth_cross_section

  time_for_melting = energy_for_melting / total_solar_irradiance
  
  convert_to(time_for_melting, years) # 0.0220203816289806*tropical_year

What is your fudge factor for how much of that energy gets dumped into melting ice? 1000? 10000? Even then you get quite a few centimeters on the scale of decades or centuries.

Surface area? Don't you need volume to compute the thermal expansion of the ocean? And you also need the volume of land ice to compute how much might melt... if you want to convince people, you need to do more than just provide four statistics and walk away, you need to show how you use those to compute the level of expansion. Which you haven't done, and I'm 99% sure you can't with just those four numbers.

Surface area by height (1 to 10 metres) is volume. Of course, if one doesn't know that specific idea then one might be stuck. The volume of land ice can be assumed to be sufficient by the scenarios given. As far as ice expansion is concerned, not really relevant for a first approximation for the energy required as it is relatively small.

I find that when you're talking about technical things on the internet, it's best to assume the other person knows common knowledge and only doesn't know the idea you're trying to express. It's almost impossible that the GP didn't know V=A*h so pointing it out is more of an insult than anything useful.

I mean you need to know the volume of all the water in the ocean. Because as the temperature rises the water expands, which leads to rising sea levels, in addition to the land ice melting.

To compute the total energy requirements, you don't really need to know the ocean volume, if you are willing to linearly approximate the thermal expansion. If you have less water, the same amount of energy will heat it up to a proportionally higher temperature and correspondingly expand it more, resulting in approximately the same sea level rise.

Obviously this breaks down if you want a more accurate figure, but in that case you also have to account for water shrinking with increasing temperature between 0 °C and 4 °C and so on.

In any case, melting a bunch of ice is a much more energy-efficient way of increasing the volume of liquid water than heating already molten water. The energy required for melting ice is roughly the same as that for heating the water to 80 °C, and 80 °C is not twice as voluminous as 0 °C water.

Pray tell me: where in your calculations are you calculating the one variable that matters the most: "Mean Sea Level".

Shripadk, mean sea level is actually irrelevant as far as these calculation are concerned. Really irrelevant. The climate scientists throw around their 1 to 10 metre or more scenarios and so all we need concern ourselves with is the gross minimum volume of ice required to melt.

Since the planet is an oblate sphere with a non-uniform land distribution and we have a large moon orbiting the planet, any prediction of what we would expect to see as an ocean level rise will depend critically on where on the planet you are stationed as well as the effects of tides.

In addition, any rises of the magnitudes predicted will require more ice to be melted not less as there will be inundation effects that will, in effect, increase the amount of surface area attributed to the oceans.

Hence, all calculations are a minimum not a maximum. If you want to seriously model tidal and inundation effects, then the amount of energy will greater and hence more unexplained by these very climate scientists.

If they cannot give an explanation of the energy requirements for a minimum then they will most certainly be unable to explain for any situation requiring tidal and inundation effects to be accounted for.

So mean ocean level is irrelevant.

How is mean sea level irrelevant? Global warming directly affects the mean sea level. You don't need to go around measuring surface area/volume of ocean,ice and land and what not! All you need is to calculate the mean sea level and compare it with historical data.

And your theory on tidal effects of the moon falls flat because mean sea level takes all those factors into consideration! How? The name itself suggests that it's a "mean" over all variations in the sea levels due to tidal or inundation effects. Unless the gravitational pull of the moon dramatically increased or the moon got closer to the Earth your theory makes some sense. But the effects are pretty uniform. So mean sea level is the only meaningful statistic here. It's real and measurable. Everything else is bogus claims by climate change deniers!

Again, we keep asking you for proof and citations and links to your sources, and you keep calling people liars and deflecting from answering the questions. Until you post links to sources that actually prove what you say, instead of reciting anecdotes about how some mean old scientist ignored you 15 years ago, there's no reason for anyone to take you seriously, and there's a lot of evidence explaining why you're treated like an anathema.

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