Live from a white spot in a purple nation on a blue planet...

Like, OMG, the world is going to flood out.  We'll all be living on ships, just like Kevin Costner in "Waterworld."  Regional coasts will flood.  People will become refugees as the water swallows vast swaths of land.  Whole cities will wash away.  Turn on the news and watch New York, Boston, LA, and San Diego get swallowed by the rising seas caused by melting polar ice.

This will be worse than the ozone hole, which gave half the world's population skin cancer during the 1990's.  This will be worse than global cooling, which decimated the population by destroying our ability to live in northern latitudes.  Or have we all been fed a lie?

Ron Lindsay of the University of Washington/Seattle Polar Science Center told the National Geographic, “Nobody knows for sure” he added that while much of the first-year ice does melt in the summer, “not all of it does.”  The Independent quotes Lindsay as saying, “There’s a good chance that it will all melt away at the North Pole, it’s certainly feasible, but it’s not guaranteed.”  So here we have a situation of two publications cherry picking quotes to prove their respective cases.

I learned at age seven that water expands when it freezes, so it contracts when it melts.  That's why an ice cube melting in your coke doesn't cause the cup to over-flow...the volume displacement shrinks. It's all part of the miracle of hydrogen bonding.  It's also why ice floats, and why getting ice on a lake doesn't kill all the fish in the lake by crushing them under a sinking shelf of ice.

That's assuming that all the ice will melt, and, as you can see, there's no consensus on the subject.  Someone should tell Al Gore that the apocalypse has been canceled, but I'm sure he already knows.