From Rutgers University
Global sea level likely to rise as much as 70 feet for future generations
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Even if humankind manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends, future generations will have to deal with sea levels 12 to 22 meters (40 to 70 feet) higher than at present, according to research published in the journal Geology.
The researchers, led by Kenneth G. Miller, professor of earth and planetary sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, reached their conclusion by studying rock and soil cores in Virginia, Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific and New Zealand. They looked at the late Pliocene epoch, 2.7 million to 3.2 million years ago, the last time the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was at its current level, and atmospheric temperatures were 2 degrees C higher than they are now.
“The difference in water volume released is the equivalent of melting the entire Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, as well as some of the marine margin of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet,” said H. Richard Lane, program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the work. “Such a rise of the modern oceans would swamp the world’s coasts and affect as much as 70 percent of the world’s population.”
“You don’t need to sell your beach real estate yet, because melting of these large ice sheets will take from centuries to a few thousand years,” Miller said. “The current trajectory for the 21st century global rise of sea level is 2 to 3 feet (0.8 to1 meter) due to warming of the oceans, partial melting of mountain glaciers, and partial melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”
Miller said, however, that this research highlights the sensitivity of the earth’s great ice sheets to temperature change, suggesting that even a modest rise in temperature results in a large sea-level rise. “The natural state of the earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 20 meters higher than at present,” he said.
Miller was joined in the research by Rutgers colleagues James G. Wright, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences; James V. Browning, assistant research professor of earth and planetary sciences; Yair Rosenthal, professor of marine science in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; Sindia Sosdian, research scientist in marine science and a postdoctoral scholar at Cardiff University in Wales; and Andrew Kulpecz, a Rutgers doctoral student when the work was done, now with Chevron Corp. Other co-authors were Michelle Kominz, professor of geophysics and basin dynamics at Western Michigan University; Tim R. Naish, director of the Antarctic Research Center at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand; Benjamin S. Cramer of Theiss Research in Eugene, Ore.; and W. Richard Peltier, professor of physics and director of the Center for Global Change Science at the University of Toronto.
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So the natural sea level height is 20 meters higher with today’s CO2 levels.
What is the natural sea level height with the CO2 level of 1700 or 1800AD ?
So do we now have to look at what might possibly happen a few thousand years out? Do we assume that homosapiens will still be around?
Surely more immediate threats such as polution, famine, disease, nuclear terrorism shoudl figure far more.
““The difference in water volume released is the equivalent of melting the entire Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, as well as some of the marine margin of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet,” said H. Richard Lane, program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences”
“You don’t need to sell your beach real estate yet, because melting of these large ice sheets will take from centuries to a few thousand years,” Miller said.
Really? A 2c increase for a duration of centuries to a few thousand years can produce the required amount of energy to melt all the ice in Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets?
“9.506×10^20 kg kJ to melt all the ice in Greenland. For those challenged by scientific notion, that is 950,600,000,000,000,000,000 kJ to melt the 2,580,000 cubic kilograms of ice.
Wolfram Alpha reports that that amount of energy, wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%282.85×10%5E18%29+*+%28333.55+kJ%29, is:
3) ~1.9 x estimated energy released by the Chicxulub meteor impact;
4) ~24 x 2003 estimated energy in world’s total fossil fuel reserves;
5) ~37 x 2003 estimated energy in world’s coal reserves.
Ok, that is a huge amount of energy.”
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2012/03/12/how-much-energy-is-required-to-melt-all-the-ice-in-greenland/
And that is just Greenland.
So I wonder (1) where is that energy coming from and (2) how will that energy reach the areas where there is ice? It has to warm the equivalent of 80c above 0c (the latent heat of ice) before the ice will melt. That means that significantly more heat must be available than the amount calculated for Greenland since the heat energy won’t all be concentrated in Greenland.
How much energy is a 2c increase to the entire planet’s atmosphere?
The big Pliocene Lie is that the high CO2 caused the high temps,
when it was the reverse that actually happened.
The hi Pliocene temps were caused by the Panama Seaway being still open,
and the Drake Passage still closed. Warm oceans = high CO2.
Warmistas confuse the effect with the cause.
Me thinks the Rio+20 push is in full press.
But we know how well temp and CO2 correlate:
http://www.real-science.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/image277-1.gif
Where has all the sanity gone? …….. Long time passing …….
“The current trajectory for the 21st century global rise of sea level is 2 to 3 feet (0.8 to1 meter) due to warming of the oceans, partial melting of mountain glaciers, and partial melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”
No it isn’t. The current trajectory is about 300mm. To multiply that 2-3 times requires unproven assumptions.
I am so glad I am 470′ above sea level. I can watch the rise from here and not be too worried.
Scientific value : V
Number of authors : N
V = N^-2
Thanks Willis!! 😀
I just hope the stupid scaremongering of all those even remotely involved in climate sciences does not discredit science to such a degree that all the other branches are tainted with the discredit when nature proves their forecasts to be utter trash. I suppose they may well be defended from their crass incompetence by the protection of the media which appears to be burying predictions like the hundred months to doomsday runaway temperature prediction surprisingly successfully.
Facile, blinkered, ill conceived and inept are the obvious adjectives that spring to mind if this is even remotely their scope of research into the problem. The balance of temperature involves at least a hundred variables that even as an amateur I can think of so to focus on just one as say it decides everything is utterly daft.
The work reminds me of the early days of chip modelling when we took a simple lumped capacitive load and ignored track resistance, distributed capacitance, track to track capacitance and a whole lot more but al least we knew they were simplifications that made the results questionable in smaller geometries.
I hate reading this type of grant inspired crap. Another instance of comparing apples with pears.
The Pliocene era is not comparable with the Pleistocene (2.65MY ago to 10,000MY ago). Although we call the present the Holocene, it really is no more than another inter-glacial period within the Pleistocene.
Around the end of the Pliocene, something significant happened to restrict the flow of warm water currents and reduce temperatures in the polar regions.
The culprit looks to be the emergence of the Panama Isthmus, which closed the free circulation of waters between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
For those interested in the subject of the difference between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, this is a halfway decent article.
“Posted by News Staff”
WUWT has acquired some News Staff! Good stuff.
Oops, here is the article:
http://www.google.es/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=pliocene%20carbon%20dioxide%20levels&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CDQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aos.princeton.edu%2FWWWPUBLIC%2Fgphlder%2Fpliopar.pdf&ei=OTVoT5CdE8O80QW00tmUCQ&usg=AFQjCNHqZO5nFVRtGy5F9LscmYF-SGuCRA&cad=rja
Given that the sea level has already risen about 80 meters in the last 12,000 or so years, I can’t say I’m particularly concerned by this.
Oh, right … I get it …
We need to blow a bazillion gigabucks NOW in order to prevent the ocean from rising 70 feet a thousand years from now. Let me put this into a different context:
If you don’t give me $100,000 right now, your city will be under 70 feet of water in 1000 years. Yes, I know that sea levels are currently not rising, that is one of the primary indications that what I am saying is true.
Rutgers, please try not to be such morons. Please?
Can’t more productive work be found for these people to do?
Now that is plausible, those are the areas currently losing mass. The question becomes do we have enough fossil fuels to get temperatures that high and to keep CO2 at those levels for that long. Considering that we don’t yet have model independent evidence of net positive feedback to CO2 in this climate regime, something else was probably different in the Pliocene. To even get to these temperatures and this level of melting required significant contribution from black carbon, which much more easily and affordably reduced than CO2.
When will they ever learn?
Ah, right, this’ll be why they were jacking up the Envisat sea level readings the other day, to invent an ‘increase’ which will ‘swallow us anyway’. You can smell the next IPCC report before it’s written.
I’m not bothered. I live about 80m above current sea level, so I think I’ll have plenty of warning if anything happens.
I’d like to know something. Do the observations about sea level by these guys at Rutgers take into account the shifting of the surface over the many eons? Continental drift? Would that have anything to do with how sea levels may be measured or regarded?
Just a simple question from a geological ignoramus. Otherwise, this study sounds a lot like the “if present trends continue” argument. I’m not going to be around to worry about it when it ultimately happens, if it happens at all.
Hm, how about the recent findings of another study claiming that Earth has lost a quarter of its water:
http://sciencenordic.com/earth-has-lost-quarter-its-water
that might have to be taken into consideration when making claims of sea-level rise based on historical levels of CO2 and temperature
I can find no reference to any prominent, unambiguous unconformity in the 700,000 year Vostok ice core record so I infer that there has been no local melting interval in this time caused by an extraordinary event. If the Vostok observations are correct, what is the cause for concern?
It is easy to conclude that young eyes blinkered by dogma see extrordinary climate events quite often, causing them to rush to print.
Christopher Hanley says:
March 20, 2012 at 1:03 am
Can’t more productive work be found for these people to do?
There’ll probably be a market for journeyman pontoon fabricators in 12,000 years or so…
Reminds me of a car registration plate which I saw on a Rolls Royce many years ago in Birmingham UK.
Itread OBO 110X