A Republican state legislative candidate in Virginia is being mocked on Twitter for suggesting an unscientific potential solution to rising sea levels.
“I’m curious, do you think the sea level would lower, if we just took all the boats out of the water? Just a thought, not a statement," said Scott Pio, as he shared an image of the Pacific Ocean swarming with thousands of icons seemingly representing boats. The tweet has since been deleted.
Mr Pio is in a race with Delaware Democrat David Reid in Loudoun County in Virginia. He has worked as an organiser in former president Donald Trump’s International Rapid Response Team, a force tasked with mobilising support for the Republican leader when he golfs in Virginia.
Mr Pio was mocked by several social media users and his Democrat competitors. “This guy’s an actual candidate for the VA House of Delegates. Yes, this is today’s Republican Party for ya,” said Democratic camp’s news curator Blue Virginia.
Mr Pio defended himself: “When you take things out of bath water, the bath water decreases, does it not? Got a lot of hate from your group for asking a question about taking things out of the water. Curious when you stopped believing in pure physics? I guess you don’t believe in science experiments?”
But people soon got down to calculating the math behind taking out all boats from water and weighing its impact on sea levels.
The answer is “about six microns, which is slightly more than the diameter of a strand of spider silk”, said Randall Munroe, an engineer and an award winning comic artist whose work majorly revolves around science, according to Raw Story. “But you don’t have to worry about that six-micron sea level drop.”
Mr Munroe explained that the oceans are currently rising at about 3.3mm per year due to global warming. In such a situation, if one is to remove every ship from the ocean, the water would rise back to its original average level in under a day, or 16 hours to be precise, Mr Munroe said.
According to Nasa, global sea levels are rising as a result of human-caused global warming, with recent rates being unprecedented over the past 2,000 years. The surging sea levels, potentially threatening human life in the form of natural disasters, can be traced back to primarily two factors related to global warming — the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, and the expansion of seawater as it warms.
