The Ice Caps Are Melting! Scare Tactic of the Global Warming Hoax?

We've all been subject to the cries of Global Warming alarmists warning us of impending disasters if we don't do something NOW! You read their comments in the paper and hear them on your daily newscasts, "The ice caps are melting! The ice caps are melting!" Hearing plea after plea, I can't help but be reminded of one of my favorite childhood stories. In the classic fable, The Sky is Falling, Chicken Little has a hysterical belief that the sky is indeed falling and disaster is imminent. In a panic, he runs from character to character in the book crying, "The Sky Is Falling!" I have to laugh.

Public awareness is one thing, but creating unprecedented public panic is another. Claims were made from the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the President has just four years to save the planet! (Or what? It will explode?!?) In an interview with The Associated Press, The new science adviser to The President, John Holdren, said that the current state of global warming is so dire he compared it to "being in a car with bad breaks driving toward a cliff in the fog." Why the desire to mislead the public when there is no current scientific evidence proving that human activity is the cause for the climate change? I suppose the theory is that if they can instill a fear of an impending apocalypse amongst people it will be much easier in getting their support in global warming regulation and buying in to such bamboozlement as Obama's cap-and-trade system. Of course, that's purely my opinion.

With the recent publicity regarding the e-mails that were hacked from the computer system at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom, one would have to wonder if all the hype about global warming is nothing more than a political scam. The e-mails mention the completion of a "trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years" and state deliberate manipulation to "hide the decline." There was also an e-mail suggesting the suppression of this information in the request of deleting corresponding e-mails. So, is it all just a big lie?

Global warming in itself is not a scam. The climate is changing in many places all around the world. What these scientists and a large group of politicians want us to believe is that humans caused these changes and if we caused it, then hopefully through radical measures we can stop it. They want us to believe that the warming the earth has been experiencing is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide; however, there is no scientific evidence to support this claim.

One of the biggest scare tactics is that the warming temperatures are causing ice caps, also termed icebergs, to rapidly melt and if we don't do something to reverse this trend, our sea's will rise to catastrophic levels. A major area of concern is the ice in the Arctic Ocean. James O'Brien, an emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies oceans and climate changes doesn't think this is a concern. He says, "When the Arctic Ocean ice melts it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it's displacing water." He goes on to say that, "When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down."

Stop for a minute and think back to grade school science. What he is talking about is the Archimedes Principle. The Archimedes Principle states that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid (not the weight of the body immersed.) The principle applies to both floating and submerged bodies and to all fluids. What is the body submerged in this situation? It's ice. What is ice? Ice is frozen water. An unusual property of water is that it expands when it freezes. So the solid form (ice) takes up more space than an equal amount of the liquid form (water.) So, in theory, when ice melts it will take up less space than it did displacing the water. Hence, melting ice caps will not raise our sea levels. Another interesting fact to contribute is that ice caps are not 100% frozen water. They actually contain billions of tiny air bubbles and therefore are not solid ice. So their mass is not only made up of expanding water but air as well. If air was trapped in ice, where would the air go if the ice melted? To the bottom of the sea? No, it would be released back in to the air.

You can simply test the Archimedes Principle and get a better understanding of it on your own. Take a large clear glass, bowl or container and fill it about 1/2 of the way with water. Then add ice cubes until the glass is about 3/4 full. Take a piece of clear tape and tape on the outside of the container covering the line of the water(if the ice level is higher than the level of the water, you want to make sure you apply the tape to the outside of the container at the water level.) Now take a black permanent marker and draw a line on the tape exactly where the water line is. Do not move the glass. Leave it sit until the ice melts. You will notice that once the ice melts the water level in the glass will be below the original level where you drew the line, proving that ice takes up less space when it is in it's liquid form, water.

So there is no need to panic regarding the melting of the ice caps. There would be some concern for potentially dangerous sea levels if the massive continental ice sheets (the only remaining are in Greenland and Antarctic) were to break loose and fall in to the ocean and melt. Research, that hasn't been manipulated, and historical data are showing that scenario is not likely. The climate data throughout history shows a natural process of the earth cooling and warming. It actually shows that this warming period that we are being spooked with actually ended over 10 years ago, yet global warming alarmists aren't telling us that. The last two years global temperatures have actually dropped by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. This data causes scientists (independent from political influence) to believe that the earth is just going through a normal cycle of warming and cooling. Recent statistics show that the earth just entered a cooling period. Given this information citizens and politicians as well need to give serious consideration to exerting any radical measures. Doing so could actually cause irreversible damage to our planet.

© Anglfire693, 2009