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Correct, but in the case of Greenland, the ice is not in the sea already, so whatever ice melts, it goes to the ocean. Additionally, the adbedo feedback occurs, where as soon as the lower surface of the ice shows up, absorbs more solar energy and melts even faster.

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Unfortunately (or fortunately, as I see it!) the Greenland icecap has, by it's sheer weight, depressed the land surface to form a shallow basin. If the ice there should all melt, the result would be a massive inland sea. Only a small proportion of the meltwater would reach the surrounding ocean

Many websites that discuss the consequences of the possible total melting of the icecap mention the depressed land surface, but none of the authors seem to have realised that most of the meltwater will be retained in that same depression.

"If all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted......" - yes, and if all the tea in China were dumped in the ocean it would make a LOT of iced tea! However, neither is likely to happen in our lifetimes, or in the future for millions of years. Such melting certainly didn't happen in the past few million years, even when global temperatures and CO2 levels were much higher than now or in the forseeable future.

Villaman's post is relevant too. Until recently many "climatologists" had assumed in their calculations of sea-level rise due to ice-melt, that melting of the Arctic and Antarctic floating ice-sheets would contribute to this. Of course, it won't. Floating ice displaces its own weight of water, so when the ice melts, it takes up the volume of that weight of water, and no level-change results. Almost any physics student could have told them that.

It makes one wonder just how many other errors in assumption are buried in reports and analyses of climate change and its consequences.

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In war, nothing ever goes according to plan except occasionally, and then by accident - Winston Churchill

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