Of course! Why didn't I think of that? The collapse of the western ice sheets is obviously God's punishment for the intolerant western penguins due to their persecution of the eastern LGBT penguins.

A random idea just occurred to me. What if global warming is genuinely happening, and is legitimately being caused by mankind via carbon emissions (CO2), but is still a good thing anyway? Think about it. If the Earth's total average temperature raises enough to the point where the continent of Antarctica becomes warm enough for permanent human habitation, then a significant portion of our land shortage problem could be solved!

One of the biggest factors behind poverty today is an insufficient amount of usable land for people to live on, and Antarctica is the only continent left where no one has bothered to establish an independent nation, and is almost completely untouched by the effects of long term industrialization and environmental exploitation. If this continent were to become suitable for human habitation, we could move a bunch of people there and start a new nation, or maybe several new nations, and the problems associated with over-population would be significantly alleviated without reducing the population.

Oh, and by "environmental exploitation" I simply mean the act of tapping into and using the resources of the environment. I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with harvesting said resources, because I don't think there is (as long as reasonable and rational regulations are put in place, of course), but I can't think of another term to effectively describe the concept.

Potential problems could be that if the ice caps do melt, then the sea levels would obviously rise and push in the coastlines of all the continents, which would reduce the world's total amount of usable land, even in Antarctica. Plus, the nations at the equator would get hotter, and may potentially become unlivable deserts like the Sahara, which could also reduce the amount of usable land.

But that's all operating under the assumption that the Earth's overall average temperature is actually rising. If the temperature is not rising but rather remaining constant, and if the pole shift hypothesis has both merit and application here – and I'm not sure that it does, but bear with me for just a moment – that could possibly mean that the southern icecap is not actually melting at all, but simply shifting eastwards (western edge melts, eastern edge freezes and expands), meaning that the continent of Antarctica could actually moving out of the uninhabitable "frozen zone" (or rather that the uninhabitable frozen zone is moving off of Antarctica). If this is the case, then we wouldn't have to worry about the icecaps melting and raising the sea levels, because the southern icecap would still be exactly the same size as it is now, but would simply be located to the east of Antarctica instead of directly on top of it. No idea what will happen with the northern icecap, though. Maybe it will move westward into Northern Canada?

Anyway, the point is that previously inaccessible land would become available for human colonization, with no native or indigenous population to worry about. Sure, some nations may currently lay claim to certain areas of Antarctica, but that can be resolved with treaties. If the global environment changed enough to where Antarctica became suitable for human habitation, the implications would be profound.

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Who owns Antarctica?
http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antar...

Clearly the east must be LGBTQ friendly, and the west is a bunch of religious bigots.

Yeah, this is definitely one issue where I try to remain bipartisan as well. Some people think global warming is caused by CO2 emissions. Other people think it's caused by the sun. Then there are some people who think it isn't even happening at all. Personally, I try to disconnect from all of the platforms and look at all the data from an objective point of view, without allowing dogma to cloud my judgement.

From the article:
"But while eastern areas of Antarctica are growing rapidly, scientists are warning that the continent’s western ice sheet has begun to collapse."
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So the eastern sheets are growing, but the western sheets are melting? Hmmmm, I wonder... are they doing so at the same rate? If not, which one is changing more rapidly, and how is that affecting the total ice volume? Even if the eastern sheets are growing, if the western sheets are melting at rate which exceeds the growth of the eastern sheets, the total volume of ice as a whole still could be going down. But if both sets of sheets are changing at the same rate, and the total volume of ice is remaining constant, that opens up a different discussion — what's causing the temperature of the South Pole to shift eastwards? Does the pole shift hypothesis have some level of application here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_shift_...