On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 16:07:56 -0400, Rob McEwen said:
On 7/26/2018 3:49 PM, valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
Compound interest is a bitch.
it took ~40 years or so to get to that 1mm increase (to be extra clear, this is a reported increase over how much oceans are rising now compared to ~40 years ago.
In other words, it's acceleration, second derivative, not velocity first derivative. Which means that the number added each time period is bigger each time period. The growth per year now is bigger than the growth per year 40 years ago.
But NOT so much when the rate of increase is THIS tiny. Yes, if the rate of the increase holds steady, then this could start causing a lot of problems EVENTUALLY. But this still only adds up to an ADDITIONAL 4 inches (total!) per century (over what would have happened).
Let's run the math. 1mm/additional per year. So 1 the first year, 2 aditional the second, ... and the century year then adds 100mm or 4 inches *by itself*. But we need to add years 1 to 99's contributions too... sum(1..100) = 101 * 50 or 5050mm. Divide by 25.4 and you get 198 inches cumulative. Be glad the actual rate of acceleration is less than 1mm/year.