"Recent drafts of the climate report used a conservative analysis that does not project a rise most people would equate with catastrophe, scientists involved in writing it say. Other experts say this may send too comforting a message.

Dr. Hulme insists that it is best not to gloss over uncertainties.

In fact, he and other experts say that uncertainty is one reason to act — as a hedge against the prospect that problems could be much worse than projected.

His goal, Dr. Hulme said, is to raise public appreciation of the unprecedented scale and nature of the challenge. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/science/01climate.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1167786430-ZdFVVgRs8rWzDk7D30eL4w

In article it's conceded that if tropical oceans were to rise a degree or two this wouldn't add much in terms of more hurricances, but main factor is more people living in places where hurriances occur.

Now, this sort of like Dan Rather false but accurate- they admit the obvious, because it's just impossible to appear vaguely sane without doing so. And the factor of a low hurricane season in 2006 is of course one factor in this- if the 2006 hurriance season had been equal to 2005 they probably couldn't even admit this- because this whole thing is about politics rather than science. And this article is more about cutting their political losses rather than looking at the matter seriously. But this suppose to be a moderate view- well it is a moderate political view- when one considers Gore's extreme view of all of Greenland ice PLUS all the Antarctic ice melting.

It's obvious that Greenland ice will not all melt in a hundred years- despite the fact that there NO evidence of this occuring. There is simply too much ice to melt within such a timeframe- even if you put all this ice in the tropics it wouldn't melt in such a short time frame.
Let's say a mile of snow fell on New York City, how long would it take for this snow to melt? The answer is decades. Ice is going to last longer than snow and Greenland ice is a couple of miles thick, in addition there is thousands of square miles of it- therefore it would significantly affect the climate in which it was placed. BUT OF COURSE the average temperature in the Tropics is much warmer then the arctic region, though in the short time in the summer in which the days are longer temperature can approach temperatures found in the tropics.

Now let's enter the strange world of Gore, let's say in this world the Greenland ice melts in less than 100 years [for whatever reason]. What should we be worried about if we lived in this twisted reality of a world? I would say the main worry in the huge waves created by all this ice melting in such short period of time. Now, I didn't see Gore's movie- did he mention this potential huge problem? I doubt he did, because this would require some thought.

Greenland loses about 50 cubic miles of ice per year [and gains about same about amount from precipitation]. 50 cubic miles of ice per year is nothing- major river flow this much volume.
Now, we have never seen this much ice melt [the melting of entire ice of Greenland], though this scale of ice melting though has occurred [within the last 10,000 years, and there were HUGE flooding that occurred associated with this]. The melting of the amount of ice in Greenland within 100 years probably has never occurred [because of the reason I gave above]. But the point I'm making is if this volume of ice melts rapidly [in less than say 1000 years] it's NOT going to be smooth constant flow of ice flopping in the ocean. If there is 50 Cubic miles of ice flowing from Greenland per year and if instead it becomes 500 cubic miles on average per year- this is going to have some very violent events associated with it.

Ok, so I guess I'll do the math. Now the melting of Greenland ice is suppose raise sea level by 20' [or .00378 miles]. There is 139.5 million square miles of ocean according to:
http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/ocean.html
I'll assume that is somewhat accurate, so 139,500,000 times .00378 miles equals 528,409 cubic miles. So at average of 500 cubic miles per year it takes more than 1000 years [not including added the precipitation].
For less than 100 year it would require Greenland to shed more than 5000 cu miles of ice on average per year. This would so violent that merely the sound it produces would be hear around the world.