Some British Scientists have come up with a truly bizarre ‘end of the world’ scenario tied to global warming which really just calls into question their level of education and whether they even deserve the title ‘scientists’:

British scientists are warning of another possible side effect of climate change: a surge of dangerous volcanic eruptions.

Researchers say the melting of polar ice sheets from global warming and the resulting stress placed on the earth’s crust from rising sea levels will increase eruptions in the years to come.

What blockheads! First off, the amount of water on this planet is not going to change one ounce because of melting ice. Ice is water – so the crust is going to be supporting the same amount of water whether it is in ice form or liquid. In fact, the higher the temperature we could lose water into space or see more water in the air, but you won’t see more water. It will just move from one form to the other.

Two, the amount of water melting into the oceans is a fraction of the total volume of water now in the oceans. While there is a lot of ice at the poles, it pales in comparison to the water in the oceans (recall the earth’s sruface is 71% covered by water).

Third, the worlds current volcanoes apply much more mass onto the crust every day than can be added by melting ice. The planet has vast mid-ocean ridges and volcanic island chains which are depositing rock upon the crust every hour of every day – building oceans, continents and raising mountains. Any fool knows a volume of rock (laced with metals) is going to outweigh the same volume of water. Water is much less dense, especially in its ice form since water actually becomes less dense when it freezes – which is why ice cubes float and don’t sink.

These ‘scientists’ have apparently not even accounted for these simple facts in their Chicken Little theory, and that relfects on the generally poor quality of the science backing the man-made global warming hysteria right now.

Addendum: I should have added a fourth item – the thickness of the crust itself compared to the amount of water sitting on it. The Earth’s crust runs from 10 km thick in the oceans to a fairly average 30-45 km on the continents, with some places running up to 60-70 km of solid rock (reference this USGS crustal map). In contrast the oceans run, on average, 3-5 km deep (see here). It is pretty absurd to think an increase in sea level of even 0.08 km (250 ft) would create such imbalances in a system holding up km of rock and stone they would increase volcanic activity – which is mantle material coming up through the crust AND . Recall that the total mass of water is not changing, some is just slowly melting off the thick land masses in some cases and some is already ‘in the water” where the ice floats on the oceans already (North Pole primarily). The whole concept seems to be a bit of a stretch.