This gives you a sense of the absolutely huge amount of ice we're talking about. For example, if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses we'll see about 10 metres of sea level rise, but mostly in the northern hemisphere. To underline just how much ice this is, this effect will slowly be counteracted as the ground below slowly rebounds (as it no longer has a huge amount of ice crushing it down from above).

I'd love to see a calculation of how much ice would have to melt for us to add another leap second.

Or to back it up, how would timekeeping bodies deal with that?

Would we actually remove a second because there would technically be less "time" (measured in days, meaning axial revolutions of the Earth) per year?

"rapid deglaciation promotes earthquakes ... rebound stress that is available to trigger earthquakes today is of the order of 1 MPa. This stress level is not large enough to rupture intact rocks but is large enough to reactivate pre-existing faults that are close to failure."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound#State_of_...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/gravity-of-glacial-melt

http://m.nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-abo...

From the last article:

"Three things happen. One is that you’re dumping all of this melt water into the ocean. So the mass of the entire ocean would definitely be going up if ice sheets were melting—as they are today. The second thing that happens is that this gravitational attraction that the ice sheet exerts on the surrounding water diminishes. As a consequence, water migrates away from the ice sheet. The third thing is, as the ice sheet melts, the land underneath the ice sheet pops up; it rebounds."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...

https://youtu.be/4Jnu09xQ4lk

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=45811

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbon-pric...

Also, "bigger government" is a vague enough definition that it could easily apply to this initiative. It creates a new category of tax, and a new category of tax credit. It will probably reduce the government's revenue, but the legislature can and most likely will raise revenue in other places to plug the gaps rather than cutting necessary agencies.

What do you think the bigger barrier is?

If we don't bring the right along then they'll either block any action (America) or create a huge fear campaign and repeal the action (Australia).

The truth is that none of us know what the actual dimensions of our solar system were 5,000 years ago, nor do we know the measurements in the next 1,000.

An object is never the same when nature is applied over time.

I don't think anyone is suggesting or has suggested such a policy. Rather, the recommendation is "avoid changing things, especially when the outcomes are probably negative and their magnitude highly unknown".

> who are dependent on government funding

Plenty of scientists who are funded by non-government grants agree that climate change is real.

Plenty of non-climate scientists have looked at the data and agree that climate change is real.

Plenty of non-scientists with training in a scientific discipline -- who have never received and will never receive a penny of grant money in their lives -- have looked at the data and agree that climate change is real.

This particular ad hom is tired and unfounded.

> Why do scientist, who are dependent on government funding, use words like 'suggest', 'surprised', or 'consensus'?

Suggest: because this is one study/measurement, and others should repeat the measurement and/or come to the same conclusions by other methods.

Surprised: Because they're surprised.

Consensus: When 90+% of trained experts agree on something, that's pretty much as close to a consensus as you can get in a large population.

> Where did the water for the ice come from?... How do you calculate an energy output without knowing it's environment?... The truth is that none of us know what the actual dimensions of our solar system were 5,000 years ago nor do we know the measurements in the next 1,000. An object is never the same when nature is applied over time.

We engineer systems and make scientific measurements and predictions with high accuracy every day without knowing the exact origin and trajectory of everything in the universe.