25 Years of Satellite Data Shows Global Warming Is Accelerating Sea Level Rise (usnews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are speeding up the already fast pace of sea level rise, new satellite research shows. At the current rate, the world's oceans on average will be at least 2 feet (61 centimeters) higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Sea level rise is caused by warming of the ocean and melting from glaciers and ice sheets. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists' computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the United Nations, which releases regular climate change reports. Of the 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from melting ice. But the process is accelerating, and more than three-quarters of that acceleration since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the study shows.

Comments

Science snowflakes

[PopeRatzo]

You libs, with your data and your science. It's a religion, I tell you! You believe all that stuff just because it's been peer-reviewed. It shows just how gullible you really are.

If there really was global warming, don't you think it would have been predicted in the Bible? I'm pretty sure God would have mentioned it.

Sick of the alarmism

[fatwilbur]

Going by NASA's own data, sea level has grown a massive 29 centimeters in the last 150 years, and at a pretty steady clip. Let's assume this is accelerating, although the last 150 years have seen quite a massive amount of forest loss/burning and fossil fuel use. What exactly is the coming disaster here? I know people claiming NYC will be underwater and labelling those who disagree as deniers.

None of the climate change data points to anything close to unmanageable disaster. People can easily engineer solutions to deal with such slow change.

I'm finally playing through Mass Effect 3

[rsilvergun]

and the silliest thing about the plot is that nobody believes your character when he says the big baddies (reapers) are coming even though he's got a _mountain_ of evidence. Well, at least I _thought_ it was silly until I took a good look at America's response to Global Warming...

Re: Sure, however...

[c6gunner]

Then you're an idiot. I'm not talking about individuals. This is government debt, and the government itself defines the meaning of those bits arbitrarily.

Never met an economics textook you couldn't eat, eh?

We're all gonna DIE!!!

[Chas]

Okay. If we accept the "The Sky Is Falling" scenario.

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

Quite simply, implementing enough renewable energy+storage for the planet is logistically impossible.
And, even if we DID, we're supposedly beyond The Point Of No Return already.
So...what then? Do we simply harangue ourselves with "How Screwed We Are" every couple weeks while shit goes to Hell in handbasket?
What's the point?

Honestly, carbon capture is probably our best bet.
The main problem is that it's extremely power intensive.
And the only way to implement it sanely is with the backing of nuclear power on a level we currently just do not see at the moment.

People scream about waste. Yet almost every other form of power dumps their waste into the atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner.
People scream about nuclear being expensive power. Yet Obama was looking to make ALL power prohibitively expensive with no actual environmental plan to justify it. Just "Because Global Warming, GIVE US MONEYS!".

Yeah, I accept that nuclear can be an expensive power option due to the regulation environment and the decommissioning pipeline.
But, if building the infrastructure for power-based gigaton-scale carbon capture and worldwide ocean desalination results in our power bills going double, treble, or quadruple of our current level, it's WORTH IT.

Toss on financial incentives for individuals and corporations to cut their energy (and thus, carbon) footprint (as if higher power bills wouldn't achieve this already).

Will it be the largest geoengineering project humanity's ever undertaken?
Nope. Because the project to fuck the planet up to it's current state has been running apace for a couple hundred thousand years now.

But, in lieu of other, nasty options, it's probably our best bet.