A Global Warming Mystery
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Sometime during the late 1950s or the early 1960s, my father mentioned
to me that, if the average temperature of the planet rose by as little as
5ºF, then the polar ice would melt and the sea level would rise by
300 feet. At the time, I was skeptical. I still am. It
seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that 300 feet of increased
sea level is an overestimate. If it was a small body of water, then
it wouldn't take much water to raise its level by 300 feet. The oceans
of the entire planet are not a small body of water. They present a
very large surface area. It's difficult to believe that there's enough
extra water stored anywhere on the entire planet to raise the level of the
oceans by 300 feet. I mentioned my father's comments in an article on page 2 of the April 1999 issue. In that article, I suggested another possible consequence of melting polar ice, one that seemed to me to be more plausible. I suggested that the addition to the oceans of such a large quantity of fresh water might reduce the salinity of the oceans enough that most of the sea creatures would die. Phytoplankton
produces much of the oxygen that we breathe. If the phytoplankton
dies, then we might die of suffocation. That might make rising sea
level irrelevant. Some time later, I heard somebody suggest that, if the Antarctic ice melted asymmetrically, then the centrifugal force of that mass of ice, caused by the spin of the planet, would become unbalanced. Since that force
is largely parallel to the surface, near the poles, the unbalanced force
might cause the crust of the entire planet to slide sideways on the underlying mantle. He proposed the idea as an explanation for pole shift. I don't know how valid the idea really is. Maybe the unbalanced force would only slide the Antarctic continent sideways, not the crust of the entire planet, creating some big mountains in front, and exposing some of the mantle, behind. That exposed area of the mantle might be something like the Siberian Traps. Whatever the case, the results would be cataclysmic, maybe even causing an extinction event. Here's another possibility. If all of the polar ice melted, that
would result in a large redistribution of mass on the surface of the planet.
Sea level would be higher, so the effective diameter of the planet would
increase. Heavy places, where the ice used to be, wouldn't be as heavy
any more. Such redistributions of mass might change the rate of spin
of the planet, and shift the axis of spin. Such ideas are interesting but I don't know how plausible they are.
I don't know what the results of such events might be but various people have
given some thought to such Earth changes. For some relevant, albeit somewhat tedious reading on that subject, see Worlds in Collision, by Immanuel Velikovsky.
It's available in The Sovereign's Library. Getting back to the sea level thing, a while back I watched a NOVA
documentary called Decoding the Weather Machine. The narrator commented that, if the Greenland ice sheet melted, then the level of the
oceans would rise by 23 feet and that, if the Antarctic ice melted, then
the sea level would rise by 200 feet. The total of those two numbers
is close to my father's prediction. The narrator didn't even mention
the Arctic ice cap, which is in addition to what's on Greenland. There's
the extra 77 feet. Even my father's value for the rise in temperature that would cause such changes is similar to what I've heard on other reports. It suggests that my father was right, but that isn't what puzzles me. My father made his comments back in the late 1950s or the early 1960s. So far as I'm aware, except possibly for a few scientists hidden away in universities,
people weren't thinking much about changing sea level back then. So,
why was my father, so long ago, thinking about such things? Where did
he come across the ideas? Where did he get his information? It's
a mystery to me.
Stray Thoughts
Sam Aurelius Milam III
• Whenever people get the government to solve a problem for them, the only long-term result is to make the government stronger.
• The Founding Fathers were politicians. Think about it.
• Watch for anomalies in the stories that the government tells. The existence of anomalies suggests the existence of lies. Sometimes, the
anomalies hint at the truth.
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