It is relatively simple to compensate for such modest sea level rise with appropriate adaptation measures.
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Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, presented the following graphs at a September 21, 2021 seminar that demonstrate that sea level rise at six of the world's largest cities is nothing unusual, merely slow and steady, as one would expect during a gradually warming period:
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In "Biden Killing America's Energy Security With Sea Level Hysteria," a June 22, 2021 America Out Loud article by the late Dr. Jay Lehr and myself, we explained that melting sea ice does not cause the ocean levels to rise:
When water starts to freeze, it expands, becoming 10% less dense and floats upon the water that made it up. When the ice melts back into the water, it shrinks by the same 10 percent. So, when sea ice melts, the 10 percent floating above the water combines with the 90 percent under the water, occupying the same original water volume.
We are often told that small islands such as in the Maldives are at risk of being submerged due to global warming. Stockholm University sea level expert, the late Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner estimated (2017) that sea level will rise only about five cm (about two inches) in the next 100 years. Amazingly, the uncertainty on this estimate is plus or minus 15 cm, because of the large uncertainty in future climate. Regardless, even the highest of Mörner's forecasts poses no danger to most of the low-lying areas of the world. For example, Mörner created the following graph for the Maldives which shows that sea levels were higher than today five times in the past 5,000 years:
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Many people are concerned that, if sufficient land glaciers melt, sea level rise will become a problem. Dr. Lehr and I explained that this too is incorrect. Here are some excerpts from "Biden Killing America's Energy Security With Sea Level Hysteria":
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The Antarctic contains about 90 percent of the world's ice mass. About 44 percent of that Antarctic ice is in the ice shelves (floating) and coastal ice (not floating), mainly in the western regions of the Pacific Ocean. More than 50 percent of the Antarctic sheet is land-based and can be several miles thick. Historical data confirms that there are few days per year when the temperature is above freezing, and then only a few hours per day and only along the coast. Consequentially, no continental Antarctic ice water ever reaches the oceans.
"During bright and sunny days, a small amount of the continental and shoreline ice surface is destroyed by infrared rays from the sun. But this ice does not melt into the water; rather, it sublimates directly into water vapor. Sublimation means that the ice goes directly from the solid to the gaseous phase (water vapor) without ever going through the liquid phase. When the sublimated water vapor reaches the cold Antarctic air, the vast majority of it quickly turns to snow and falls back on the glacier. The winds may blow only a tiny amount over the Antarctic Ocean. Nearly zero goes into the oceans as water.
Coastal Antarctic ice, dramatized with films, photos, and articles in newspapers and TV, shows large ice chunks tumbling into the ocean. These dramatic falling cliffs are not caused by warm air. Instead, the melting is occurring at the water level by the warmed Pacific Ocean. Here the water splashes and melts and gouges caverns in the ice, forming large ice shelves or overhangs. This process continues until the overhang's weight is big enough to cause the overhung ice to break and tumble off. That is when we get the stunning pictures. So yes, some of this ice will melt into the oceans and cause some levels to rise, but the volume is unmeasurably small.
Still, 90% of the coastal ice is submerged in the freezing ocean depths (up to 2,000 meters), so practically only a tiny percent of the shelf or coastal ice actually melts.
NASA published a study on October 30, 2015, saying that Antarctica is accumulating ice at a rate of about 112 billion tons per year. It has already replaced all the ice that melted in the previous several decades. See "Biden Killing America's Energy Security With Sea Level Hysteria for further discussion on this topic.
We Need MORE, not less carbon dioxide!
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