The question is not whether or not the Earth is warming. It is. Temperature
records are very hard to fake.

The question is not, as some suspect, why it is raising. True, there is a lot
of discussion about that, and the documentary seems to indicate that the
scientific world is hardly in consensus about it. But that's not the real
question either.

The question is, what are we going to do about it. If all the ice in Antartica
melted, the sea level would rise in the 50m range. Helsinki's elevation is at
51m from what I can find, so I recommend we move BatMUD's server out of the
basement and call it a day.

Shinarae Lluminus

Since you asked:
The area of the Antarctic ice shelf is about 14 million square kilometers,
with an average thickness about 2 kilometers. This works out to be a volume of
about 2.8 * 10^16 cubic meters. Since this shelf is on land, the water will
run off into the oceans. This will raise the sea level.

Now before we start working with that figure, note that this is ice volume,
not water volume. Ice, as we all know, floats, because it is less dense than
water. Most figures I've found for the specific gravity of ice put it about
92% the density of water, which means the actual water we have to worry about
is a bit smaller than this.

Now, if the Anarctic ice cap melts, it is safe to assume the Arctic one will
melt as well. Why? Because the Arctic cap is salt water, and the reason we put
salt on roads is that when water has crap dissolved in it (such as ions) the
freezing point drops. In addition, when the Arcic ice cap melts, it, too,
being ice will become less volume. The two ice caps are roughly the same total
size, and this frees up a lot of room for water to fill later.

This means that the water we actually have to worry about is closer to 2.25 *
10^16 cubic meters. The Earth is roughly a sphere, 6 million meters in radius.
The area of a sphere is 4 pi r squared, but of this sphere, only 70% or so is
covered with water. This means the area of the world's oceans is about 3.164 *
10^14 square meters.

So far, this brings the elevation of the oceans up 71 meters. That's pretty
bad. However there are a few other things to take into account:
-- coastlines. The world's 1 million km of total coastline is going to get
flooded. This adds some to the area being flooded, which in turn lowers the
depth of flooding (same volume over more area = less thickness)
-- depressions. Areas that are below sea level, but not touching the ocean,
will eventually get flooded as well, simply due to the barometric pressure
changes.
-- river valleys. These get flooded too.
-- humidity. As temperature goes up, the amount of water that can be safely
held in the air also goes up. This change is most notable at sea level, where
the air density is highest -- and the raising sea level will cause _more_ air
to be down that far.
-- the landmass of Antarctica. There are depressions in its surface where some
of the melted ice would most certainly pool to form lakes. Obviously, that
water wouldn't run off the side into the oceans.
-- the curvature of the Earth. Each 1m of raised sea level takes more water
than the previous one due to that curvature.

I ran some quick and, admittedly, dirty calculations on each of those,
deliberately esitmating _low_ on each case to come up with a pessimistic
result. I found that the total remaining water volume, when spread out over
the total remaining space, would cause an elevation rise of about 54 meters.
Since I was esimating pessimisticly, the real result is probably smaller than
that.

Again, this is assuming every single scrap of ice on Antarctica melts
completely. This would require a very large temparture rise -- more than one
might htink at first, since 0C ice melting into 0C water robs 80 times the
energy from the environment as 0C water becoming 1C water. It may very well
happen, but certainly not quickly.

Shinarae Lluminus