I worry more about the proliferation of global graphitti than global warming in an ice field.
After watching some of the Global Warming "documercials" with dramatic, alarming pictures of enormous ice walls cracking and caving into the ocean; it's obvious they're selling indelible impressions to casual viewers on an impending catastrophic flood of sea levels leading to total world obliteration. Far from the truth, though, these documercials fail to differentiate that ice calving is the result of expansion not contraction which are chunks of ice that break off glaciers and fall into water creating floating icebergs. The melting and growth of sea ice, in contrast to land ice, does not affect sea level.
Factoid: Academy Award and Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore's 2006 movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" documents this dishonest documercial format of half truths and lies about global warming.
In one scene filmed, a mother polar bear and cub are described as drowning on a broken-off melted Alaskan ice cap floating helplessly out to sea. It was later exposed as a bogus scenario. I realize a polar bear can drown... if, say, it's exhausted and swimming over 50 miles. But basically, these bears can swim 15 miles easily, at a speed of 6 miles an hour, and they use the edge of an ice floe as a platform from which to hunt. An on site photographer reported that those bears afterwards dived off to swim back to shore--talk about an inconvenient truth!
It is uncertain to NASA observations, however, whether the world's two major ice sheets--Greenland and Antarctica--have been growing or diminishing. Together, Greenland and Antarctica contain about 75% of the world's fresh water.
"Global warming could therefore be expected initially to increase both melting and snowfall. Depending on which increase dominates, the early result could be either an overall decay or an overall growth of the ice sheets. This is of particular importance because of the huge size of these ice sheets, with their great potential for changing sea level." [It leaves any computer software models literally out in the cold because it could be either scenario A or B depending on mother nature, not anything due to man's logic to decide the actual global change to expect--only time will tell.]
An interesting corollary is that the Greenland ice sheet is warmer than the Antarctic ice sheet and as a result, global warming could produce serious melting on Greenland while having less effect in the Antarctic. In the Antarctic, temperatures are far enough below freezing that even with some global warming, temperatures could remain sufficiently cold to prevent extensive surface melting. It then leads with an assumption of a null outcome, negative results to support any significant overall global net change.
All this technical talk is exactly what the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency. as a federal bureaucratic organization does not want the voters to understand. As an administrative and enforcement arm of a very liberal, progressive government, it promotes the Washington political agenda. They must raises more taxes on high earner taxpayers including hiding from the stupid middle class an income tax increase too, and so want to enforce a "Cap and Trade" policy to tax "greenhouse emissions", the hydrocarbons emitted from coal-fired power plants and automobiles by restricting oil production and by forcing the public to curb personal utility power usage. Of course, Al Gore and his political cronies have invested heavily in promoting this Cap and Trade program too.
V.P. Al Gore invested tens of millions of dollars in green energy projects not because they work, but the profit potential of 'credits' generated by EPA regulatory controls he can command. So, Al Gore and other wealthy investors establish the marketplace for a Cap & Trade Exchanges to buy and sell "energy credits." You will be limited to how much electricity you use or save through Federal government mandated allocations, you are literally fined with excess usage levies; but, if you use less, you can sell your unused credits in the Cap & Trade Exchange--Hello, Al Gore? By the way, they say that this practice provides an alternative source to create an additional supply, say what?
