Tag: flooding

bookmark_borderAntarctica and Greenland Ice Melt Faster Than Anticipated

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Antarctica’s Collapse Could Begin Even Sooner Than Anticipated
The article in Scientific American states, “Two expeditions to the Thwaites Ice Shelf have revealed that it could splinter apart in less than a decade, hastening sea-level rise worldwide.

“As Scambos and Wild gazed down from their Twin Otter plane this past January, they spotted several new tears in the shelf—three kilometers long and several hundred meters wide—where it lifts off the seafloor. Ragged cliffs of ice tilted 50 meters up into the air, exposing deep layers that had not seen daylight for thousands of years. “I think it’s losing contact with everything that used to be bracing it,” Scambos says. Not only is the ice shelf separating from its pinning point. As it speeds up, it is also stretching and tearing away from the glacier upstream.

The team was so alarmed that Pettit and Wild decided they will return this December to install a new instrument station: “BOB,” short for Breakup Observer. They hope BOB will survive long enough to record the final throes of the ice shelf as it fractures into shards. It might not take long.”

Greenland Rainfall and Albedo Feedback
The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) released the report State of the Climate in Europe 2021. “Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years — the highest of any continent in the world. As the warming trend continues, exceptional heat, wildfires, floods and other climate change impacts will affect society, economies and ecosystems, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).”

“Temperatures over Europe have warmed significantly over the 1991-2021 period, at an average rate of about +0.5℃ per decade. As a result, Alpine glaciers lost 30 meters in ice thickness from 1997 to 2021. The Greenland ice sheet is melting and contributing to accelerating sea level rise. In summer 2021, Greenland saw a melt event and the first-ever recorded rainfall at its highest point, Summit station.”

Does the rainfall have a significant impact? Yes; however, it is the Albedo Feedback that is of the most concern.

“It turns out that the rain itself wasn’t the most important factor”, says Prof. Jason Box from GEUS and lead author of the paper Greenland Ice Sheet Rainfall, Heat and Albedo Feedback Impacts From the Mid-August 2021 Atmospheric River reporting their results in Geophysical Research Letters.

“There is an irony. It’s not really the rain that did the damage to the snow and ice, it’s the darkening effect of the meltwater and how the heat from the event erased snow that had overlaid darker ice across the lower third of the ice sheet.”

“Unusually warm atmospheric rivers swept along Greenland in the late summer months, bringing potent melt conditions when the melt season was drawing to a close.”

“The researchers found that, between 19 and 20 August 2021, this melt caused the altitude of the ice sheet’s snowline near Kangerlussuaq to retreat in elevation by a whopping 788 metres, the snowline retreated, exposing a wide area of dark bare ice. Under normal circumstances, snow would cover and insulate this ice, but the snow melted suddenly and exposed the ice to heat, causing even more melting.”

“The authors conclude that the heatwave causing the rain event serves as an excellent example of ‘melt-albedo feedback that amplifies the melt impact of the initial melt perturbation'”.

Sea-level Rise: Greenland and the Collapse of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet |
Anthropologic Climate Change

bookmark_borderAntarctic Ice Sheet and Accelerating Ice loss

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A discovery made by researchers at Imperial College London, the University of Waterloo, Canada, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, and Newcastle University, shows a river longer than the Thames beneath Antarctic ice sheet.

The study explains how the Antarctic ice sheet has a river running under it. The headline “longer than the Thames” isn’t the thrust of the problem. Yes, it is adding a small amount to the rise in sea level. More importantly is not it’s length but rather its width that is critical to our survival. A very wide and thin layer of water is separating the ice sheet from the surface… accelerating the expected time for the collapse of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The surface temperature and tenths of a degree crossed over time is fairly irrelevant when compared to the collapse of the ice sheet. Before we reach +2C, the Antarctic ice sheet will collapse. When the ice sheet collapses, life as we know it will change. In many ways it will be similar to a meteor hitting the ocean. Dr. William Colgan said, “A collapse of the colossal east Antarctic ice sheet, would lead to a 52-metre rise in sea levels…” Besides the instant wiping out of all coast lines, there would likely be tsunamis and other impacts including an acceleration in global warming as the surface is turned from reflective ice to heat absorbing dark surfaces.

The study finds:
An unexpected river under the Antarctic ice sheet affects the flow and melting of ice, potentially accelerating ice loss as the climate warms.

The 460km-long river is revealed in a new study, which details how it collects water at the base of the Antarctic ice sheet from an area the size of Germany and France combined. Its discovery shows the base of the ice sheet has more active water flow than previously thought, which could make it more susceptible to changes in climate.

The discovery was made by researchers at Imperial College London, the University of Waterloo, Canada, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, and Newcastle University, with the details published today in Nature Geoscience.

Co-author Professor Martin Siegert, from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said: “When we first discovered lakes beneath the Antarctic ice a couple of decades ago, we thought they were isolated from each other. Now we are starting to understand there are whole systems down there, interconnected by vast river networks, just as they might be if there weren’t thousands of metres of ice on top of them.

“The region where this study is based holds enough ice to raise the sea level globally by 4.3m. How much of this ice melts, and how quickly, is linked to how slippery the base of the ice is. The newly discovered river system could strongly influence this process.”

Water sources
Water can appear beneath ice sheets in two main ways: from surface meltwater running down through deep crevasses, or by melting at the base, caused by the natural heat of the Earth and friction as the ice moves over land.

However, the ice sheets around the north and south poles have different characteristics. In Greenland, the surface experiences strong melting over the summer months, where immense amounts of water channel down through deep crevasses called moulins.

The situations in the Greenland summer (left) and the new system found in Antarctica
The situations in the Greenland summer (left) and the new system found in Antarctica

In Antarctica, however, the surface doesn’t melt in sufficient quantities to create moulins, as the summers are still too cold. It was thought this meant that there was relatively little water at the base of the Antarctic ice sheets.

The new discovery turns this idea on its head, showing there is sufficient water from basal melt alone to create huge river systems under kilometres-thick ice.

Improving predictions
The discovery was made through a combination of airborne radar surveys that allow researchers to look beneath the ice and modelling of the ice sheet hydrology. The team focussed on a largely inaccessible and understudied area that includes ice from both the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets and reaches the Weddell Sea.

That such a large system could be undiscovered until now is testament to how much we still need to learn about the continent, says lead researcher Dr Christine Dow from the University of Waterloo.

She said: “From satellite measurements we know which regions of Antarctica are losing ice, and how much, but we don’t necessarily know why. This discovery could be a missing link in our models. We could be hugely underestimating how quickly the system will melt by not accounting for the influence of these river systems.

“Only by knowing why ice is being lost can we make models and predictions of how the ice will react in the future under further global heating, and how much this could raise global sea levels.”

For example, the newly discovered river emerges into the sea beneath a floating ice shelf – where a glacier extending out from the land is buoyant enough to begin floating on the ocean water. The freshwater from the river however churns up warmer water towards the bottom of the ice shelf, melting it from below.

Co-author Dr Neil Ross, from the University of Newcastle, said: “Previous studies have looked at the interaction between the edges of ice sheets and ocean water to determine what melting looks like. However, the discovery of a river that reaches hundreds of kilometres inland driving some of these processes shows that we cannot understand the ice melt fully without considering the whole system: ice sheet, ocean, and freshwater.”

A changing Antarctica
The existence of large under-ice rivers also needs to be taken into account when predicting the possible consequences of climate change in the region. For example, if summers warm enough to cause enough surface melt that the water reaches the base of the ice sheet, it could have large effects on the river systems, potentially tipping Antarctica to a Greenland-like state, where ice loss is much faster.

There are also potential feedback loops that would accelerate ice loss. For example, if the ice starts to flow faster as water accumulated at the base, then this will increase friction where the ice runs over dry land, which could increase the amount of basal melting and water produced.

The team are now looking to gather more data about all these mechanisms from surveys to apply their models to other regions and provide a better understanding of how a changing Antarctica could change the planet.

Sea-level Rise: Greenland and the Collapse of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

Anthropologic Climate Change

bookmark_borderThe Missing Risks of Climate Change

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The Journal Nature published the report The missing risks of climate change. The paper found that there are many risks associated with climate change that are not being considered in economic analysis. (The Climate Endgame also found inadequacies in current risk management analysis.)

Abstract

The risks of climate change are enormous, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions to billions of people. The economic consequences of many of the complex risks associated with climate change cannot, however, currently be quantified. Here we argue that these unquantified, poorly understood and often deeply uncertain risks can and should be included in economic evaluations and decision-making processes. We present an overview of these unquantified risks and an ontology of them founded on the reasons behind their lack of robust evaluation. These consist of risks missing owing to delays in sharing knowledge and expertise across disciplines, spatial and temporal variations of climate impacts, feedbacks and interactions between risks, deep uncertainty in our knowledge, and currently unidentified risks. We highlight collaboration needs within and between the natural and social science communities to address these gaps. We also provide an approach for integrating assessments or speculations of these risks in a way that accounts for interdependencies, avoids double counting and makes assumptions clear. Multiple paths exist for engaging with these missing risks, with both model-based quantification and non-model-based qualitative assessments playing crucial roles. A wide range of climate impacts are understudied or challenging to quantify, and are missing from current evaluations of the climate risks to lives and livelihoods. Strong interdisciplinary collaboration and deeper engagement with uncertainty is needed to properly inform policymakers and the public about climate risks.
Main

There is overwhelming evidence that the risks and impacts from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are very significant, will impact nearly every aspect of human life and the environment, and could ultimately prove to be devastating. An apparent incongruity exists between the pervasiveness of anticipated physical changes and the relatively modest total losses often estimated in economic evaluations1,2. Part of the explanation for this mismatch comes from ‘missing risks’: the risks that are not currently included in economic evaluations because of their uncertainty, because of our limited understanding of them or because existing economic models do not capture them in sufficient detail.

The interplay within and between different physical and social systems plays a crucial role in defining when and where impacts will manifest themselves, and these interactions are often only poorly understood. This leads to large and growing uncertainty estimates and a wide range of incompletely understood and underestimated risks3. For example, the potential for climate change impacts to drive social discontent, dislocation and relocation, and instability and conflict, are all deeply uncertain, but potentially crippling.

Excluding these risks from economic assessments is equivalent to placing a probability of zero on their occurrence. This, clearly, is not the case. Similarly, the common practice of engaging with only the expected levels of impacts and reporting central confidence bounds can undermine the ability of decision-makers to engage with the actual range of risks. The overall consequence is an underestimation of the total risks of climate change. This Perspective aims to identify, classify and suggest ways to engage with some of the most significant risks that are not currently captured by socioeconomic evaluations of climate change, from both a natural perspective and a social perspective. As an example of how this can be achieved, we present a demonstration of how diverse impact estimates or assumptions can be coherently combined.
Background

The complexity of feedback systems has slowed the process of both understanding them and modelling them. Compound, sequential, and concurrent extremes would lead to lower thresholds (for a single driver) for substantial impacts as well as deeper impacts when two drivers align53. The overall lack of representation for this type of secondary effect leads to an underestimation of risk.

Understanding the risk of 2 °C, 3 °C and 4 °C global mean surface temperature anomalies requires not only a reporting of the existing risks that models provide but also the incorporation of new classes of risks as well as the potential for disruptive unknown risks that could dramatically alter the context of future societal systems and anthropogenic climate change risks. It is hoped that recognition of these ‘missing risks’ will improve the overall level of accounting for consequences associated with climate change under credible warming scenarios.

Global Warming

bookmark_borderClimate Change: No Credible Pathway to 1.5C Limit

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The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place.” The report Climate change: No ‘credible pathway’ to 1.5C limit found:

National pledges to reduce harmful emissions offer little hope of avoiding climate disaster, UN climate experts said on Thursday, in an urgent appeal for a radical transformation of the energy sector, before it’s too late.

There’s “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” today, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new report, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Uncomfortable truth
“This report tells us in cold scientific terms what nature has been telling us all year, through deadly floods, storms and raging fires: we have to stop filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and stop doing it fast,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP.

“We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

Despite Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) promises made by governments in favour of reducing their carbon footprint, pledges made since the last climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 will lead to cuts of less than one per cent of projected 2030 greenhouse gas emissions, according to UNEP.
Paltry reductions

This is the equivalent of just 0.5 gigatonnes of CO2, UNEP calculated, adding that only a 45 per cent emissions reduction will limit global warming to 1.5C.

As it stands today, latest data indicates that the world is on track for a temperature rise of between 2.4C and 2.6C by the end of this century.

“In the best-case scenario, full implementation of unconditional NDCs and additional net-zero emissions commitments point to only a 1.8C increase, so there is hope. However, this scenario is not currently credible based on the discrepancy between current emissions, short-term NDC targets and long-term net-zero targets,” UNEP said.
Fossil fuel-free solution

For the situation to improve, a “large-scale, rapid” and fossil fuel-free shake-up is needed of our “electricity supply, industry, transport and buildings sectors, and the food and financial systems” to cut emissions by 45 per cent to limit global warming to 1.5C, and by 30 per cent to keep average temperature rise to 2C, the UN agency explained.

And although the transformation towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions is underway in electricity supply, industry, transportation and buildings, it needs to move “much faster”, the report concludes.

It found that electricity supply transformation had made most progress in some countries, amid dramatically reduced renewable electricity prices.

“It is a tall, and some would say impossible order, to reform the global economy and almost halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but we must try,” said Ms. Andersen. “Every fraction of a degree matters: to vulnerable communities, to species and ecosystems, and to every one of us.”
Food system reform

Rapid and lasting emissions cuts are needed in food production industries too, as this accounts for about a third of greenhouse gases, UNEP continued.

It noted that action in four areas – protection of natural ecosystems, dietary changes, improvements in farm food production and decarbonization of food supply chains – would reduce food system emissions by 2050 to around a third of current levels.

Global Warming

bookmark_borderClimate Change: Flesh Eating Bacteria

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The side effects of climate change are far reaching. Lee County, Florida is where hurricane Ian made landfall. Storm surges and subsequent flooding led to a spike in the potentially deadly infections caused by Vibrio vulnificus. The flesh eating species of bacteria is found in warm, brackish water.

One species, Vibrio vulnificus, can cause life-threatening wound infections. Many people with Vibrio vulnificus infection require intensive care or limb amputations, and about 1 in 5 people with this infection die, sometimes within a day or two of becoming ill.

Some Vibrio vulnificus infections lead to necrotizing fasciitis, a severe infection in which the flesh around an open wound dies. Some media reports call this kind of infection “flesh-eating bacteria,” said the CDC.

At least 29 cases and four deaths have been confirmed in Lee County this year as a result of such infections.

“The Florida Department of Health in Lee County is observing an abnormal increase in cases of Vibrio vulnificus infections as a result of exposure to the flood waters and standing waters following Hurricane Ian,” a spokesperson at the county health department said in a statement to CBS News on Monday, which noted that community members should “always be aware of the potential risks associated when exposing open wounds, cuts, or scratches on the skin to warm, brackish, or salt water.”

“Sewage spills, like those caused from Hurricane Ian, may increase bacteria levels,” the statement continued. “As the post storm situation evolves, individuals should take precautions against and infection and illness caused by Vibrio vulnificus.”

More articles on Climate Change and Health, Extreme Weather Events and Global Warming.

bookmark_borderClimate Change: Increasingly Costly for Americans to Insure Their Homes

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The report by PolicyGenius Home insurance prices are rising even faster than inflation explains how climate change is making homeowners’ insurance more difficult and costly to obtain:

Severe natural disasters
Climate change has increased both the length and severity of the hurricane and wildfire seasons in the U.S., causing many insurance companies to increase rates or stop offering coverage in high-risk areas altogether. When there’s fewer companies doing business in a particular area, the ones left are forced to establish stricter underwriting rules and increase rates on new and existing customers.

Record catastrophe losses
There were 97 natural disasters resulting in $92 billion in insured losses in 2021, according to the Insurance Information Institute (III). This is up from 92 events totaling $74 billion in losses in 2020. As a result, insurers have had to increase rates to account for higher reconstruction costs in affected areas, and to make up for the record losses.

Without decisive action to mitigate climate change, frequent droughts will threaten jobs and agricultural yields in Oklahoma and Texas; extreme heat will devastate an already high proportion of vulnerable residents in Mississippi and Kentucky; and the number of homes with flood risk will increase significantly in Louisiana and Delaware, according to our 2021 Policygenius Best & Worst States for Climate Change Index.

Last October, FEMA revamped its program to more accurately assess flood risk, causing insurance premiums for some coastal properties to rise to $4,000 or $5,000 annually, up from just $700 or $800, Porter from First Street Foundation said.

These hikes may be prohibitively expensive for lower-income families or retirees, especially those who may be living in a property inherited from family, Wright said.

“These family houses have been around forever, and they may not have a mortgage, so flood insurance may not be required,” he said. “But they should have it anyway.”

More articles on Flood Insurance, Extreme Weather Events and Global Warming.

bookmark_border10% of Canadian Homes Uninsurable Due to Extreme Weather and the Climate Crisis

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The Guardian reports The uninsurables: how storms and rising seas are making coastlines unliveable.

“In Canada, the number of uninsurable homes has reached 10%, according to industry figures. The Magdalen archipelago is losing half a metre each year to erosion, roads have fallen into the sea and the sand dunes that once offered protection from squalls are disappearing faster than they can be saved, but it is not just there. Most of Canada’s major cities are built on the frontlines of a changing climate – along rivers and coastlines or on flood plains.”

“Over the past 15 years, insurance claims from severe weather events in Canada – windstorms, flooding, wildfire and drought – have more than quadrupled. Seven of the country’s costliest disasters occurred in the last decade. Insurers now expect to disburse C$2bn (£1.3bn) in disaster-related payouts annually, with costs only expected to rise.”

“A federally run fund, meant to help communities build disaster-resilient infrastructure, is quickly running out of money years before it expires at the end of the decade. It has already received far more requests than it can pay for, and despite the federal government repeatedly topping it up, more than half of the money has been spent.”

“Without any sort of concerted effort or gameplan, that figure will only grow. We’re continuing to build in harm’s way, largely on water, because that’s where people love to be. And the modelling shows that these storm events are just going to become more frequent and more intense in the years ahead,” says Craig Stewart, vice-president of the IBC’s climate change and federal issues portfolio. “The risk is growing. And so far, our efforts at risk reduction have been terrible.”

“The private market, on its own, cannot handle the level of risk that’s escalating in the system without some sort of formal government backstop or direct participation.”

In the US, Florida has blocked insurers from withdrawing from the market for at least two months after Hurricane Ian. Officials in the US have also warned residents about the dangers of rebuilding in areas likely to suffer weather-related disasters.

In November 2021, a powerful “atmospheric river”, a plume of water-laden air, led to widespread flooding in the province of British Columbia. Highways and bridges were washed away and thousands of homes – built on an old lake bed that was a known flood plain – were submerged in turbid waters. The damage cost insurers nearly C$675m – with billions more in uninsured costs having to be borne by residents and government.

The floods also hit the town of Lytton, British Columbia, which a few months earlier had been the site of scorching temperatures before it was all but destroyed by a wildfire. In the aftermath, the uncertainty of how to rebuild – or whether to rebuild – has become a flashpoint.

“There was conflict between people who wanted to rebuild Lytton better, and those who were traumatised by the fire and they wanted to put their lives back together as quickly as possible without any change,” says Porter. “They didn’t want to be told what to do. They didn’t want outsiders coming in and telling them you must change your life in such a way.”

Governments are bracing for the mounting costs from extreme weather to upend life in cities. A recent report warned that floods and droughts could cost the global economy US$5.6tn by 2050.

More articles on Flood Insurance, Extreme Weather Events and Global Warming.

bookmark_borderHurricane Ian: Florida Becoming Uninhabitable

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October 2, 2022

How long would it take to go 100% green?
“It depends on cooperation. If we all cooperated, we could change over within 6 months. However, we don’t expect the climate deniers will cooperate. In the meantime, many countries plan to reduce fossil fuels by 2030. Some countries, such as China, are building nuclear plants. The UK will transition from natural gas to green hydrogen with most of the regulations in place by 2030.”

“The key to how fast the US transitions is in the cost to ourselves (since we don’t seem to care about the rest of the world.) This can already be seen in Florida and Louisiana where almost all of the homeowners/hazard insurance companies have pulled out. FEMA is a good place to focus our forecasts. FEMA’s flood insurance is the only government subsidized insurance available to everybody. When the government stops subsidizing extreme weather events, you will see an instant turnover to 100% green. The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is growing exponentially; therefore, we expect FEMA will be bankrupted in short order. At that time, much of US real estate will become worthless and the cost of burning fossil fuels will be deemed too costly. The people impacted by financial and life losses will litigate the fossil fuel industry out-of-business,” said climate scientist Daniel Brouse.

The Costs of Climate Change
Hurricane Ian will be one of the most costly disasters on record, both in terms of money and lives. Over 2 million people lost power. Roads and bridges were destroyed. Some inhabited islands literally got washed away. The hurricane was so powerful that it is difficult to calculate the number of deaths as the bodies can not be found.

The Insurance Journal reports:
Wind and storm-surge losses from Hurricane Ian could reach as $47 billion in Florida alone, a figure made larger by inflation and rising interest rates, the property analytics firm CoreLogic said in a new analysis.

“This is the costliest Florida storm since Hurricane Andrew made landfall in 1992 and a record number of homes and properties were lost due to Hurricane Ian’s intense and destructive characteristics,” said Tom Larsen, associate vice president for hazard and risk management at CoreLogic.

“Hurricane Ian will forever change the real estate industry and city infrastructure,” Larsen said in a news release. “Insurers will go into bankruptcy, homeowners will be forced into delinquency and insurance will become less accessible in regions like Florida.”

More articles on Flood Insurance, Rising Sea Levels and Global Warming.

bookmark_borderRising Sea Levels: 100’s of 1,000’s of Buildings in Danger of Submerging by 2050

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Real estate across millions of acres in the United States are projected to be submerged under seawater by 2050 as reported in Sinking Tax Base Land and Property at Risk from Rising Seas.

ZME science summarizes the findings as follows:
The research group Climate Central, a nonprofit that analyzes and reports on climate science, looked at sea level rise that has been projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tidal boundary lines, and records of more than 50 million properties in coastal areas. When they put everything together, they found that about 650,000 individual properties are most at risk of being flooded within the next three decades.

The state of Louisiana has the largest percentage of homes and other buildings at risk, with over 25,000 properties across over one million hectares expected to fall below tide level boundaries by 2050. This means that 8.7% of the state’s total land area could be filled with seawater. However, Louisiana is far from being the only one on the list.

Florida, Texas, and North Carolina are the next three states that are more at risk, accounting for 87% of the land area expected to be lost to the sea. New York, New Jersey, and Maryland were also identified by the researchers as states that are likely to have thousands of properties, from homes to office buildings, flooded in the coming years.

Don Bain, one of the authors of the study, told The Washington Post that the analysis should be a wake-up call for communities that have to adapt to sea level rise as a direct consequence of the climate crisis. “People really haven’t internalized that yet — that ‘Hey, I’m going to have something taken away from me by the sea.’” Bain said.

Scientists have repeatedly warned that the carbon built up in the atmosphere after generations of burning fossil fuels would lead to an increasing level rise. Earlier this year, NOAA found that sea levels could rise along US coastlines by about a foot between now and 2050, which is as much change in three decades as over the past century.

NOAA says, “For businesses along the coast, knowing what to expect and how to plan for the future is critical,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo. “These updated projections will help businesses, and the communities they support, understand risks and make smart investments in the years ahead.”

“This new data on sea rise is the latest reconfirmation that our climate crisis ⁠— as the President has said ⁠— is blinking ‘code red,’” said Gina McCarthy, National Climate Advisor. “We must redouble our efforts to cut the greenhouse gases that cause climate change while, at the same time, help our coastal communities become more resilient in the face of rising seas.”

The Human Induced Climate Change Experiment

bookmark_borderMelting of Greenland Ice Cap is Inevitable

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“Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable'”

In 1995, I was convinced climate change was happening at an exponential rate; however, Sidd said we need more data over a longer time period. (The consensus at the time was it was linear, and we had thousands of years to solve the problem.)

It took until 2004 for Sidd to collect enough data. Indeed, we proved it… using sea level rise and Greenland’s ice sheets.

A new study has been published showing that even if we stopped greenhouse gas emissions today, Greenland’s ice sheet would continue to melt raising the sea level by at least 27 centimeters.

The Guardian reported:
“It is a very conservative rock-bottom minimum,” said Prof Jason Box from the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (Geus), who led the research. “Realistically, we will see this figure more than double within this century.”

“The minimum of 27cm is the sea-level rise deficit that we have accrued to date and it’s going to get paid out, no matter what we do going forward,” said Dr William Colgan, also at Geus. “Whether it’s coming in 100 years or 150 years, it’s coming. And the sea-level rise we are committed to is growing at present, because of the climate trajectory we’re on.”

Colgan said: “If [2012] becomes a normal year, then the committed loss grows to 78cm, which is staggering, and the fact that we’re already flickering into that range [of ice loss] is shocking. But the difference between 78cm and 27cm highlights the [difference] that can be made through implementing the Paris agreement. There is still a lot of room to minimise the damage.”
“There is growing support in the scientific literature for multi-metre levels of rise within the next 100 to 200 years,” said Colgan. A collapse of the colossal east Antarctic ice sheet, which would lead to a 52-metre rise in sea levels if it all melted, could be averted if rapid climate action is taken.

Prof Gail Whiteman, at the University of Exeter, who was not part of the study team, said: “The results of this new study are hard to ignore for all business leaders and politicians concerned about the future of humanity. It is bad news for the nearly 600 million people that live in coastal zones worldwide. As sea levels rise, they will be increasingly vulnerable, and it threatens approximately $1tn of global wealth.” She said political leaders must rapidly scale up funding for climate adaptation and damage.

Read the report from the journal Nature Climate Change: Greenland ice sheet climate disequilibrium and committed sea-level rise

Boycott fossil fuels. Save the planet. Save our souls. (SOS)

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Rising Sea Levels

The Human Induced Climate Change Experiment