People on street do not consider environment important.

[jdobbin]

Canadian island disappearing.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/28122006/3/cana...hel-island.html

The Yukon's Herschel Island is being slowly washed away by rising sea levels caused by global warming, says the territory's historic sites manager.

[shoggoth]

Thermal expansion of water contributes slightly more to rising sea levels in a warming world than ice melt.

[shoggoth]

Doesn't make any sense though. How can a ~20cm rise in sea levels last century possibly cause an island to sink? Is the island like only 10cm above sea level or something? Id have thought the tidal differences were more.

[GostHacked]

Freeze a glass of water. What happens? The level rises. Melt it, and it will go back to normal. All that ice in the ocean if it melts will not raise the water levels, if anything by water freezing logic, we will have a lower sea level.

I think everyone has it backwards. Try that simple experiment. Take a glass of water, mark the level of the water and throw it in the freezer. Did it rise or drop? Once you have recorded those results, take the glass out of the freezer and put it on the counter and let it melt back to water. Recorde the results of that.

Seriously, try this. Or here is another experiment. Take a glass of water (room temperature), fill it half way, and then throw some ice in it, but enough ice to float freely in the glass, like an iceburg. Record the level. Now let that glass sit there on the counter untill the ice melts. Did it rise? Lower? Tell me.

That island, like all land is being eroded away, but not by rising sea levels. It is just the seas as they are. The currents cause the errosion. Moving water causes the errosion. Not a rising sea level. Although a rising sea level would accelerate the problem.

Ok, let's leave Antarctica and other land masses out of this for this sake. The Arctic is really nothing but ice, not much land there at all, if any. A big ice cube in a huge glass of water. If all the ice melts, using the above logic, what will happen to the sea levels? More or less stay the same, but most likely a reduction in the sea levels. When you take into account, ice and snow that is on land and drains into the ocean then you have the possibility of the sea levels rising. And really considering how large the oceans are on our planet, I think debating about the sea levels rising and really affecting the planet as a whole is useless.

Tectonic plates shifting COULD affect the sea level. Volcanoes rising out of the sea creating more land in the ocean, so the water is displaced and the water level rises. The earth regulates itself anyways. The cycle of the year and the flow of the currents balances all that out.

Homo Sapiens may have contributed to global warming, but that would be really in the last 150 years. Before that, the earth was able to regulate everything on it's own. Our modernization and industrialization of the planet I think has contributed to a global warming, or maybe accelerating a regular cycle of the planet. Ice age, warm age, dinosaurs, METEOR, ice age, gets warmer ect ect.

I really think Mother Nature will take care of everything, and that may mean taking care of us in a way we do not want.

[jdobbin]

Doesn't make any sense though. How can a ~20cm rise in sea levels last century possibly cause an island to sink? Is the island like only 10cm above sea level or something? Id have thought the tidal differences were more.

The elevation of Herschel Island, Canada 3 ft / 1 m.

http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/...5-413-2005.html

Herschel Island displays extensive coastal thermokarst. Retrogressive thaw slumps are a common thermokarst landform along the Herschel Island coast that have been increasing in both frequency and extent have in recent years due to increased thawing of massive ground ice and coastal erosion. The volume of sediment and ground ice eroded by retrogressive slump activity and the potential release of climate change related materials like organic carbon, carbon dioxide and methane are largely unknown. The remote setting of Herschel Island, and the Arctic in general, make direct observation of this type of erosion and the analysis of potential climate feedbacks extremely problematic.

http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/...-5-413-2005.pdf