I promise to contribute a joke later, but first, more on the ice melting controversy. FL and Claymore are exactly correct about floating ice -- if it melts, there is no change in sea level. Since it has a specific gravity of 0.9, 90% of a chunk of ice is below water. When the ice melts, it contracts, and the 10% that was above water fills in for loss of volume due to melting. Melting glacial ice (i.e. on land) will cause a sea level rise, but there will be an additional rise due to thermal expansion of the water that is already in the ocean. This is a factor that gets little attention in the global flooding scenarios discussed in popular (i.e. non-earth science) literature.