Much About Climate Change is Counter Intuitive

We have many disagreements in the world, but surely everyone would agree we should make our planet habitable by humans for as long as possible. One would hope that even those gullible enough to believe there is an afterlife would want life on our planet to continue. I might be too optimistic on that.

The problem is we do not take enough responsibility for our planet's health. We want to belief our own physical comfort is more important than the planet's future. The problem is complicated by physics of the earth that are counter intuitive.

For example, if we hold up a measuring cup it is easy to see the water level on one side is the same as the water level on the other. The same in our bath tube. When measuring ocean levels, however, all kinds of issues enter that do not conform to what we see in the bathtub.

The link goes over several complex issues involved in measuring the level of ocean waters. I only understand a couple. One is the simple problem of establish something fixed to measure the level of water against. If a shelf of heavy ice melts and runs into the sea it is hard to measure how much the sea rises because the land next to it will rise when the weight of the ice is gone. The land in the Manitoba that was covered with a glacier 10,000 years ago is still rising. Rising shoreline makes it appear the water level has not risen.

The link explains there are also magnetic forces acting on water that make it complicated to measure depth. We all know about high and low tides.

Then there is the way melting ice is changing both the shape of the earth and the angle of it rotation.

All of this is why I tend to blow off politicians and preachers who say they doubt global worming and the role of human activity in it. Scientists know stuff they do not.