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Could Collapsing Antarctic Glaciers Raise Sea Levels Sooner Than Expected? (salon.com)
"We may be headed for an ice apocalypse which could result in the flooding of coastal cities before the end of this century," writes long-time Slashdot reader whoever57. Grist reports on two of the largest and fastest-melting glaciers in Antarctica which "hold human civilization hostage."
There's no doubt this ice will melt as the world warms. The vital question is when... Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world's oceans -- an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet... Each new iceberg that breaks away exposes taller and taller cliffs... In the past few years, scientists have identified marine ice-cliff instability as a feedback loop that could kickstart the disintegration of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet this century -- much more quickly than previously thought. Minute-by-minute, huge skyscraper-sized shards of ice cliffs would crumble into the sea, as tall as the Statue of Liberty and as deep underwater as the height of the Empire State Building. The result: a global catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen... When [land-based ice] falls into the ocean, it adds to the overall volume of liquid in the seas. Thus, sea-level rise.... All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years -- much too quickly for humanity to adapt...
A lot of this newfound concern is driven by the research of two climatologists: Rob DeConto at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and David Pollard at Penn State University. A study they published last year was the first to incorporate the latest understanding of marine ice-cliff instability into a continent-scale model of Antarctica... Instead of a three-foot increase in ocean levels by the end of the century, six feet was more likely, according to DeConto and Pollard's findings. But if carbon emissions continue to track on something resembling a worst-case scenario, the full 11 feet of ice locked in West Antarctica might be freed up, their study showed.
If sea levels rise by six feet, "around 12 million people in the United States would be displaced, and the world's most vulnerable megacities, like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City, could be wiped off the map."
A lot of this newfound concern is driven by the research of two climatologists: Rob DeConto at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and David Pollard at Penn State University. A study they published last year was the first to incorporate the latest understanding of marine ice-cliff instability into a continent-scale model of Antarctica... Instead of a three-foot increase in ocean levels by the end of the century, six feet was more likely, according to DeConto and Pollard's findings. But if carbon emissions continue to track on something resembling a worst-case scenario, the full 11 feet of ice locked in West Antarctica might be freed up, their study showed.
If sea levels rise by six feet, "around 12 million people in the United States would be displaced, and the world's most vulnerable megacities, like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City, could be wiped off the map."
(responding to: how were all of the last predictions?)
Pretty accurate.
Yep. So far the predictions have been matching the measurements pretty well.
This particular article, however, verges on the sensationalist. Do note it's talking about sea level rise by the end of the century, not the next decade or two, and I also notice that, although what the actual scientists quoted talked about was two meters by the end of the century-- and note that this is on the high edge of what other scientists think, the authors of this article immediately jump to "but maybe it will be worse!" and talk about four meters of sea level rise. So, they took the highest estimate from any scientists, and doubled it.
Instead, pay a little more attention to this quote from the article, buried somewhat far from the sensationalist headline:
"Some scientists aren’t fully convinced the alarm is warranted. Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, says the new research by Wise and his colleagues, which identified ice-cliff instabilities in Pine Island Bay 11,000 years ago, is “tantalizing evidence.” But he says that research doesn’t establish how quickly it happened."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The ice isn't floating "in the glass", it's sitting on a land mass above the glass, genius.
Where do you Dunning-Kruger imbeciles keep coming from?
Empirical Data Exposes the Truth
Thirty years of Fail
"Prince Charles famously warned in July 2009 that humanity had only 96 months to save the world from “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” That deadline has passed, and the prince has not issued an update to when the world needs to be saved."
"World leaders meeting at the Vatican issued a statement saying that 2015 was the “last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees [Celsius].”
"When Laurent Fabius met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to talk about world issues he said “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”
"National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center head James Hansen warned in 2009 that Obama only “has four years to save Earth.”
"World leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009 to potentially hash out another climate treaty. That same year, the head of Canada’s Green Party wrote that there was only “hours” left to stop global warming."
"The year 2009 was a bad time for global warming predictions. That year Brown warned there was only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBC reported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”
"Environmentalist write George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”
About 930 million people around the world were undernourished in 2002, according to U.N. data. By 2014, that number shrank to 805 million. Sorry, Monbiot."
"The U.N. was already claiming in the late 1980s that the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.
The San Jose Mercury News reported June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”
That prediction didn’t come true 17 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today."
New York City - 33â above sea level.
Sandy Storm Surge was just under 14'. If it had been 14', it would have destroyed the subway system- basically killing mass transit in New York.
Miami... no- let's talk Florida- averages 6' above sea level.
All of our major ports are built at sea level. Many of our refineries are built at sea level (not cheap to rebuild).
And keep in mind that about 90% of climate models assume we'll find some way to reduce the carbon level by 2100. We don't currently have any way to reduce the carbon level.
I'm not saying it's real. I'm just saying you are being a bit flippant with something that is actually pretty serious.
Sort of like the engineer who warned that the O rings were too cold on the shuttle. He was ignored and overridden too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Florida has an average elevation of 6' above sea level. Google it.
A lot of the rest of the Coastal U.S. is also quite close to sea level.
You can't live in a place that high tide washes across twice a day and that is going to be 20' under water during major storms.
Mumbai doesn't make sense tho. It's much higher above sea level.
But Shanghai would be toast.
It's quite close to sea level now and has 10' tidal variance as it is.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The Earth's ocean surface is about 360 million square kilometres. Multiply that by 11 metres, and you have about 4 trillion cubic metres of water, or 4 trillion metric tonnes = 4 quadrillion kilograms. It takes about 64 megajoules to get 1 kg of mass up to the Earth's escape velocity. So, you'd need 256 sextillion joules of energy, just to get that much water off the planet. That's more than twice the amount of energy the USA consumes in a year. And that doesn't consider the efficiencies involved in the technology you use to move the water, or the effects on climate that would result from doing it. Possible? Perhaps. Practical? No way. Better to find a way to stay where we are, or find water that is on Mars already.
I made a mistake. 360 million square kilometres is 360 trillion square metres. Multiply that by 11 metres, and you have about 4 quadrillion cubic metres, not 4 trillion. So you would need 256 septillion joules of energy, not 256 sextillion. That's more that two thousand times the energy used by the USA in a year. And again, that doesn't take (in)efficiencies into account, or the effect on the Earth's climate that kind of terra-un-forming would have. So, either we make our stand on Earth, or wait for Superman to show up and help us move to Mars.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Antarctica's average precipitation is 166 mm per year. Its surface area is 14 million square km. Therefore it receives an average of:
(0.166 meters)*(14 million km^2)*(1000 m/km)^2 = 2.324 trillion cubic meters of precipitation each year
Since water weighs one ton per cubic meter, that.s 2.324 trillion tons of water falling onto Antarctica every year. Unlike most of the other continents, this precipitation does not flow to the sea as water. it mostly ends up locked up as snow or ice (there are a handful of "rivers" - mostly small streams of glacial meltwater running to the sea). If you assume the ice on the continent has reached equilibrium (amount it gains equals amount it loses each year), that means it has to lose 2.324 trillion tons of ice each year, mostly as icebergs. If it loses more than that, sea levels go up. If it loses less than that, sea levels go down.
That massive iceberg (4x the size of Manhattan) that broke off earlier this year was estimated at 1 trillion tons. While that's a huge amount to lose all at once, it's less than half the amount Antarctica needs to lose every year to maintain equilibrium. The press likes to hype up outlier events like that because it appears to confirm the belief that Antarctica's ice is melting. But outliers are just that - outliers, and not necessarily representative of what's actually happening. The last scientific net gain/loss study I saw actually concluded that Antarctica is gaining ice. Not losing it. Enough to lower sea levels by 0.23 mm per year.
A while back, I made a list of various predictions saying that climate change was irreversible, or soon would be irreversible.
Of the seven links you give, five are "404 not found" or "Error 553 Website is offline". That's an amazing record, five of seven links dead. But these were mostly to sites like "examiner.com", which was (it's dead now) a site where people could upload blog posts that, if they got enough readers, would give them pocket change.
Two of your links still worked.
The first was to a NPR story in 2009 quoting a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences saying that if we stop emitting carbon dioxide immediately, the effects due to the carbon dioxide we have emitted will last for "more than a thousand years," basically due to the lag time it takes for carbon dioxide to be desorbed by the ocean. There's no real prediction here- basically, it's an article about the system hysteresis. So, no, this is not a failed prediction.
The second was a link to an article about an editorial by James Lovelock. In a 2006 article in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Professor James Lovelock said billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as it is known would be unlikely to survive." I have little respect for Lovelock, but nevertheless, the end of the century is still 83 years away, so this is not an example of a prediction that has failed.
Of the links that were 404 not found, I could dig up one on archive.org, an article on "commondreams.org" about a report from "Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading environmental think-tank," headlined that "Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible'." That's not actually a prediction. All the way at the end of the article are two things that might be predictions:
The first: "Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies have argued that as many as one million plant and animal species could be rendered extinct due to the effects of global warming by 2050."
That's a prediction for over thirty years from now, so, no, that is not a prediction that has failed.
The second: "A recent report by the world's largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of disasters like floods, frosts, and famines caused by global warming could reach $150 billion annually."
An actual prediction! It's hard to say whether any given damage is "caused by" global warming. However, if you consider hurricanes "caused by" global warming, or droughts, or wildfires, that easily adds up to well over 150 billion. So at best I'd call this a prediction that needs some data analysis to say whether it's accurate or not. For what it's worth, here's Forbes-- not exactly a left-wing cheerleader-- saying the same thing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...
So, final summary: NO, this is not a list of predictions that have been turned out to be false.
The actual predictions-- by which I mean, the ones from actual climate scientists-- have mostly been pretty accurate. If you're looking at the sensationalist predictions-- sea level rises of many meters, cities innudated by floods, etc.-- they are for the most part predictions for after the year 2100, not for now.
But the real science predictions aren't sensational enough for the tabloids, and journalists tend to downplay the "in a hundred years" part of predictions in popular articles.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So why not push the so-called "climate experts" to completely opensource their models and explain what they are doing?
The models are open source; they are heavily annotated and explained.
...So wouldn't it be a good idea to have as many eyes overlooking these models?
Yes, that's the way science works. And the models have been downloaded and are being run by hundreds of universities around the world. We do have thousands of eyes looking over the models.
It doesn't take a degree in climatology to find errors in code or mathematics.
And so the fact that people aren't finding those purported errors in code or mathematics, despite thousands of people looking for them, should tell you something
http://www.geoffreylandis.com