And a bunch of volcanoes could erupt, and a Carrington type solar flare event could happen, and an asteroid could hit the Earth. I worry about these far more than Antarctica.
From Penn State climate modeling via Eurekalert:
An ice sheet model that includes previously underappreciated processes indicates that sea level may rise almost 50 feet by 2500 due to Antarctic ice sheet melting if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, according to researchers from Penn State and University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“In this case the atmospheric warming will soon become the dominant driver of ice loss, but prolonged ocean warming will delay the recovery for thousands of years,” the researchers report in today’s (Mar. 31) issue of Nature.
Antarctica was the primary contributor to sea level rise in the past and may be the primary contributor in the future because much of its ice sits on ground. Floating ice, like that of the Arctic Ocean, is already in the water and if it melts, does not raise sea level. The Antarctic contribution will also probably dominate melt from the smaller Greenland Ice Sheet. While only parts of Antarctica will melt in the worst case scenario, the melting suggested by the model would be sufficient to double the recent estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for future sea-level rise over the next 100 years.
“Recently we looked at the long-standing problem posed by geological evidence that suggests sea level rose dramatically in the past, possibly up to 10 to 20 meters around 3 million years ago in the Pliocene,” said David Pollard, senior scientist in Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State. “Existing models couldn’t simulate enough ice sheet melting to explain that.”
Ocean warming has previously been identified as the main cause of ice retreat occurring today. Warmer water quickly erodes the underside of floating ice sheet portions. Floating ice shelves act as buttresses for the grounded ice inland, whose base is below sea level. Once the shelves are gone, the grounded ice can move faster. However, in previous models, this process did not simulate enough melting to explain the past sea levels, with only West Antarctica collapsing even though similar areas in East Antarctica with huge amounts of ice could collapse in the same manner.
Pollard, working with Robert M. DeConto, professor of geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, looked at two further mechanisms that could account for greater melting. The first mechanism is fracturing and deepening of crevasses on the low-lying floating ice shelves by pooling of surface meltwater and rainfall caused by warming air temperatures. If emissions continue unabated, this process will begin to dominate ocean warming within 100 years. It already caused the disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002.
The second mechanism comes into play once floating ice sheets disintegrate back to the grounding zone, leaving extremely high walls of ice. These walls are so high that simple physics says they cannot structurally support their weight, and then collapse into the sea, eroding the cliff further and further inland as long as the bedrock stays deep enough below sea level. Similar cliffs, with about 328 feet of ice above sea level and 2625 feet below, exist today at a few of the largest outlet glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula, where huge calving events occur regularly.
Both of these mechanisms are known, but neither has been applied to this type of ice-sheet model before. The researchers incorporated the physics and tested the model, driven by high-resolution climate models and past climate data. The updated model reproduced ice-sheet retreat consistent with geologic sea-level data for the warm Pliocene and also for the last interglacial period around 125,000 years ago. Then they applied the model to the future, forcing it with various greenhouse-gas emission scenarios.
“Although the future sea-level contribution in our model is greater than previously thought, it is based on credible mechanisms and is consistent with geologic evidence of past sea-level rise,” said Pollard. “We regard the results as worst-case envelopes of possible future behavior, and the mechanisms should be considered seriously in future work.
###
The National Science Foundation supported this work.
Added – Some thoughts to consider h/t to Chip Knappenberger and Mike Bastasch)
The current rate of sea level rise is 3.3mm/year & unchanged over past 25 years.
New York City has effectively dealt with Sea Level Rise since it was founded, see end of this article: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/28/freaking-out-about-nyc-sea-level-rise-is-easy-to-do-when-you-dont-pay-attention-to-history/
The Dutch could prevent sea level rise in 1000 AD, I’m pretty sure we have better technology now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands
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[snip]
Marcus, you’ve been warned about those kind of comments more than once. Your comments are now being held for moderation. Clean up your act, and you may come off that list.
Is this the same story Anthony? ?http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35926694
Alright last I heard the Antarctic ice sheet was either slightly growing or not appreciably diminishing, so barring a Hollywood based event, it’s not happening. Me no worry.
I’m happy just to learn that their newly discovered/invented/imagined/ conjectured/whatever models are based on ‘credible mechanisms.
Rube Goldberg has a patent on all the incredible mechanisms, so it is good that these researchers are using credible mechanisms for their guesswork.
It is also good that they say that these credible mechanisms, when and if they decide to start to occur “continue unabated”.
Why is it that catastrophic scare type weather events always need to continue unabated in order to create the conjectured calamity ??
Why don’t they do what ordinary non-climate scientists do, and base their models on real things that they have actually observed happening ??
Science after all is supposed to be observation and experimentation of phenomena in the real world. Or words to that effect according to OED.
G
Alarmists are now claiming that the Antarctic sea ice growth is because more fresh water is coming off Antarctica, and it’s easier for the cold fresh water to freeze. For some reason they think that isn’t happening in the Arctic or Greenland.
Full on GW alarmism here… Models say CO2 emissions will also cause extreme weather, and flooding.
Sea levels set to ‘rise far more rapidly than expected’
New research factors in collapsing Antarctic ice sheet that could double the sea-level rise to two metres by 2100 if emissions are not cut
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/30/sea-levels-set-to-rise-far-more-rapidly-than-expected
And what is this process that allows ice to build up so that it is far too high to support its own weight structurally. Usually in playing table games where you build up stuff too high for it to support itself, it will collapse the instant it gets to the point beyond which it can’t remain standing. This can happen as quickly as 10^-43 seconds from the time it gets too high to support itself.
So I thought ice sheets grew (thicker) slowly; excuse me that’s very slowly.
So why do they wait long after they are far too tall to support structurally their own weight ??
This might be the first reported evidence of something actually waiting after it gets to the point of being able to happen, and it just doesn’t happen.
Most physical processes happen as fast as they possibly can and always no faster than that. Nobody is going to tell them to wait until somebody at Penn State wants to study their failure, as it happens. There must be some other unknown mechanism or condition that is stopping it from happening, in which case we have made a grievious error in concluding that it can happen, when in fact it cannot happen because of it being prevented from happening by something we don’t know about.
So in fact because of this X-factor, the unknown factor, the event can’t possibly happen yet so it won’t happen yet; but it will when it can.
G
Who do these Penn State students think is going to hire them for a paying job, after they are able to pass the exams, and get out of school ??
Nobody is going to pay money to find out if something hasn’t happened, even when conditions are such that it cannot possibly have not happened.
That could take forever to find out that something that hasn’t happened isn’t going to happen even though it absolutely can’t not happen.
I can see a coming need for more post doc fellowships, to feed all these students who are unable to get a job.
G
“Who do these Penn State students think is going to hire them for a paying job,”
Why that’s easy, they go on the dole, the climatstrologist dole that is. After all isn’t Penn state where the Mann is…
“Who do these Penn State students think is going to hire them for a paying job,”
The government will hire them. Bureaucrats are exactly what they are training to be.
It’s not the sheets that collapse, it’s the cliff face that’s the leading edge of it. It collapses because the ice that used to be there, floating on the sea, melted and calved into icebergs. If you have a sloping hill and the lower part of the hill floats away, what’s left is a cliff.
“New research factors in collapsing Antarctic ice sheet that could double the sea-level rise to two meters by 2100 if emissions are not cut”
=====================
Hum? when did we get to one meter? We are on pace for about five inches.
I’m sufficiently alarmed by the claims of these scientists that as soon as I stop typing this, I’ll be out in the yard digging a hole to install a depth gauge. I live only about 25 feet above current sea level, so may need an aviation hazard light on top. May I please have the authors’ e-mail addresses, so that, provided they keep them current, I can send them the results in 2500?
And if another dinosaur killer asteroid hits Antarctica, there will be gross sea level rise:-)
Well no ! Such an arsteroid would simply blast all that ice into outer space to become our other water moon, so the sea level would go down and not up.
g
Tom they will unload a little known alarmist trick – A double double!
See Apophis 2036.
I think the assumption must be made that at some point in time (I think for sure in this century) fusion power will replace fossil fuel power. To make predictions about climate change, global warming, rising sea levels etc. out to the year 2500 without assuming that CO2 content in the atmosphere will peak within the next 50 to 100 years is silly.
No scientist should even dare make a projection into 2500. Sheer nonsense.
Here we go again. These “scholars” will be retired by the time their 2500 “projection” can be ascertained.
What makes you think they are scientists, they are greedy people living off they tax payer dime and will say anything to keep that reward.
@R2Dtoo, These “scholars” will be retired,… Retired?… They’ll have been fertilizer a thousand times over by then . And that is being kind.
Well I’m still waiting for somebody to demonstrate controlled continuous nuclear fusion taking place, without using gravitational confinement. But I am not holding up on any plans while waiting for that to happen.
G
“still waiting for” “controlled continuous nuclear fusion”
Probably don’t have to as bigger surprises are some to come in much smaller packages…..
Well I have at least one possible ‘ entity ‘ that can use the text contraction of BFL, but I’m sure that’s wrong, so why don’t you surprise us and mention some (even just one) of these much smaller packages.
In my experience, bigger surprises in much smaller packages, is a sure fire recipe for much greater hazard.
87 octane ordinary oxygen free gasoline is as big a surprise in a small package, that I ever want to be around.
But I’ve had it up to …. here …. with hypotheticals, and so called ” research ” projects that purport to study hypothetical non events that haven’t happened yet, and may never happen.
Yes I understand the concept of sending five ships out to sea carrying valuable cargoes, so you can be fairly sure that one of them will make it through.
But what is your plan B for dealing with the market glut, if all five of your ships make it through ??
G
There’s that crazy assumption again that CO2 causes global warming. Gotta watch that. Crazy sneaks up on a person. Look at Bernie Sanders.
Very good point.
those climate scientists love their models, but they will be long gone before those models are proven to be right or wrong. keep the grants coming in the meantime though. and a Nobel prize wouldn’t be bad either. Has Al Gore sailed to the North Pole yet, as promised?
Pity the poor drowning polar bears.
in our model is greater than previously thought
How can they say that with a straight face?
“How can they say that with a straight face?”
Cash the check first?
What planet are these people on?
Antarctic air temperatures are falling
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Southern ocean temperatures are falling
BTW – what happens a mile under the ice is not climate.
It is geology.
It is not relevant to the only important climate question, that of, when will glacial inception start?
Climate is what happens on the surface.
FIFY: Climate is what happens
on the surfacein the models.Don’t you know that ice cannot structurally support itself when it builds up to over a mile high, so it simply does not build up to such great heights as to be able to have things happen a mile below it.
G
It seems this global warming alarm is just a scare tactic and distraction for the more important issues on our earth.
It’s also telling that they looked back 3 million years ago for a 20m-30m example… when the Big Melt between 18500 and 8000 years ago that followed the last glaciation saw a 120m sea level rise which has tapered off to a miniscule 0-3mm a year.
They didn’t want to point out that sea levels have never remained constant in the last 3 million years or that the rise has slowed to a snail’s crawl from the recent past.
They’re trying to set up another “unprecedented sea level rise” lie.
belousov March 30, 2016 at 12:28 pm
Antarctic air temperatures are falling
Antarctic sea ice is increasing
Southern ocean temperatures are falling
It is not relevant to the only important climate question, that of, when will glacial inception start?
____
You missed this one, the ice sheet on land is growing as well, net transfer of water from ocean to land.
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses – Oct. 31, 2015
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses
What is amazing is that these models fail to take the most crucial thing into account. It is absurd to assume CO2 levels will remain high much beyond 2100. By then we’ll have switched to some nicer form of nuclear (thorium, fusion…something) and CO2 will be removed almost as rapidly as it was released.
While past CO2 fluctuations took thousands of years, the reason for that long uptake has little to do with CO2 exchange…and more to do with ocean temperature changes. At today’s estimated energy imbalance, it will take 500 years for the ocean temperatures to go up even by 1C. And while yes, CO2 did vary with temperature in the past (largely due to that), even if the world was several degrees warmer…the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is now higher than could be supported, so the system will only ever remove ever-increasing amounts of CO2 (as levels climb)
From Penn State – no need to read further!
Sadly true. I am a 1971 graduate of PSU (engineering), and it was a great school then, but things have really changed in the last 30 years or so. Back in the 80’s it made national headlines when it became the first university (to admit to) giving minority students cash rewards for getting good grades. Kinda like first graders get a dollar for all ‘A’s, except it was $500 for each ‘A’. So while other kids were ponying up big bucks to pay their tuition for a chance at a quality education, these favored students had to be bribed to go to class, study, and otherwise open their books. Hey, anything to get those diversity numbers up. Since that time it has been political correctness full speed ahead.
Their climatology woes began with Dean Eric Barron, who after leaving PSU several years ago to do some resume polishing, returned about a year ago as its President. As dean, Barron had lured Michael Mann away from Virginia, and still considers him to be the keystone of its rapidly disintegrating (from my perspective) climate science program. Mann is Barron’s guy, make no doubt. The PSU “investigation” into the caliber of Mann’s work is a worldwide joke. It’s just sad.
Ed,
Shocking. And in 1971 a dollar could buy probably 8 – 9 times more than it can buy now.
Well when I went to school (back in the Plasticine Era), there was no such thing as a multiple choice exam, where they gave you five proposed answers to the question; each of which was supposed to be equally plausible to somebody with ordinary skill in the subject, so a WAG by somebody with absolutely no knowledge of the subject could get 20%. They actually expected the student to be able to deduce the answer him(er)self with no prompting.
Our exams were always (supposed to) result in a normal distribution of scores with 50% being the most probable, and the full passing grade, demonstrating the required level of understanding of the subject. Today it seems like a passing grade is north of 80%, so all the passing students are crowded into the top 20% space.
In fact our teachers were required to ” scale ” the class scores to produce that 50% most probably result, and do that for each subject, since not everyone in the class was doing the same list of subjects.
There was one exam I took where the teacher could not get the class average score down below 70%; I think it was a math exam using any fair ” scaling ” recipe.
For example if the class average came out to 70%, you could simply subtract 20 points from everybody to get down to 50. That would still leave everybody in the class in that subject in the same relative position to all of their competitors. You could also multiply everybody by 5/7 to get a 50% average, but that would move everybody closer together in points, than the raw scores, and that was always a problem, since pecking order was the name of the game.
In the case of the exam I referred to, we did not have a class of really good mathematicians; the number wasn’t that big. I scored 98 out of 100 points on that test and that screwed up the class average royally. When the teacher did the post mortem review of the exam, and described model answers, I realized that the part where he docked me two points, I actually was correct and he was wrong. So I explained that he had made a mistake, and I should have scored 100. After a brief haggle he finally admitted that I was correct. But then he told me; “I’m not going to give you those two points because you didn’t explain it on the test, the way you just did. ” And he didn’t change my score. He also left the class average at 70%, and in essence said to the “educators” screw you and your 50% required class average. (and screw me for haggling over those two points) No I was only # 6 in the class for that year.
Today of course everybody has to be equal, and in common core math, the correct answer doesn’t matter, and what is important is that the student ” follow the correct procedure .”
Hey ! Earth to Educators, If you follow the correct procedure, you ALWAYS get the correct answer. That’s how “correct procedure” is defined.
But when these California Academical Educators replace Algebra with Statistics; then the students will be expected to get the correct common core answer about 50% of the time, just to make it all fair.
G
PS In a combat situation, if your opponent is better than you are, he will get you, before you get him. Fair people get to be dead people (most of the time).
If the (fill in the blank) continues/increases/diminishes then the (fill in the blank) will (fill in the blank). Ah yes! If the canine had not stopped to….well, shall we say clear his digestive tract of waste…he would have apprehended the lagomorph. If unfulfilled longings were domesticated equines then mendicants could ride. If we don’t die of hyperthermia or hypothermia we might all drown if we all live another 400 years.
> An ice sheet model that includes previously underappreciated processes indicates that sea level may rise almost 50 feet by 2500 due to Antarctic ice sheet melting if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, according to researchers from Penn State and University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Model? Check.
New data in the settled science? Check.
“May” included in the conclusions? Check.
Insanely long time frame? Check.
Steady state conditions extrapolated? Check.
That’s it boys. I meets all the criteria for publication. Run with it.
Does the year 2500 qualify as a “looming” threat?
Cuz I only worry about stuff that is looming.
I’d it doesn’t loom, I cannot gloom.
Kinda poetic. I like it.
Just 50 feet? Piece of Cake. (H/T “Wag the Dog”)
My computer
gamemodel says that it is possible that CO2 could cause the sea to rise 150 feet by next Thursday. Its possible. It also says that the ancient god Cthulhu will return and destroy us all if we don’t stop using CO2.Of course we all believe anything a computer model says, right?
Numerologists should not receive funding from taxpayers (via NSF).
I spent a couple of hours refreshing my memory and doing some additional research on this paper after spotted an article in WaPo this morning raising the alarm.
The model is junk, and the paper’s conclusions absurd.
First, the Paleocene isn’t relevant. The isthmus of Panama had not yet closed, so ocean circulation and therefore climate would have been completely different. The ice ages had not yet started.
Second, there is a general consensus (including IPCC TAR) that the last interglacial, the Eemian, was generally about 2C warmer than present (e.g. ocean foraminifera paleoproxies) in tropical and temperate zones, and that Greenland was up to about 8C warmer (Neem core) for a few thousand years around 125,000 years ago. Neem also suggests Greenland would have contributed 2-3 meters SLR at the Eemian highstand, which was about 6.6-7 meters above present sea level. (Kopp et. al. in Nature 462: 863-867 2009). That means Antarctica (mainly WAIS) would have contributed 4-5 meters. BUT the Eemian highstand above present Sea Level took about 3000 years to reach, and about 4000 to recede back to present sea level. NOT 15 meters in 5 hundred years! (50 feet by 2500) The PR claim that the new model was validated by recreating the Eemian SLR has to be an outright fabrication. Academic misconduct by Pollard if the PR is correctly reported.
This new model is off by more than an order of magnitude. Should never have passed peer review based on minimal knowledge of Eemian highstand. Contradicted by a previous well accepted Nature paper. Just more warmunist fantasizing.
The model is junk, and the paper’s conclusions absurd. or in other words normal for climate ‘science’
ristvan,
Additionally, it strikes me that the paper by DeConto and Pollard has a lot of unstated assumptions. For example, it seems that they assume that predicted surface meltwater will not find its way to the ocean through subterranean passages, as typically happens with melting glaciers. Further, that the water will fill surface tension-fractures to a sufficient depth to provide effective hydrofracturing. Additionally, they are assuming that the lateral forces will be sufficient to cause increased calving, (and not be contained by ground friction) instead of the re-frozen water squeezing out at the surface, or at least filling voids above the re-frozen water. So, instead of being based on “physical principles,” it would seem that there is a significant amount of speculation going into the models. GIGO! It is an interesting paper, but I think that it should be examined skeptically, looking for all those unstated assumptions and evaluating their probability and reasonableness.
“Recently we looked at the long-standing problem posed by geological evidence that suggests sea level rose dramatically in the past, possibly up to 10 to 20 meters around 3 million years ago in the Pliocene,”
Oh for goodness sake what books are these students reading? It would appear that the sea has risen 120 meters starting only 20,000 years ago. Much much more that 20 meters and not 3 million years ago. It took me 2 minutes to find this:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/gornitz_09/
“Global sea level has fluctuated widely in the recent geologic past. It stood 4-6 meters above the present during the last interglacial period, 125,000 years ago, but was 120 m lower at the peak of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago.”
And for good measure there is this:
http://www.quicksilver-cruises.com/information/gbr/
“Although coral reefs have been around for over 500 million years, the Great Barrier Reef is relatively young at 500,000 years, and this most modern form is only 8,000 years old, having developed after the last ice age.”
Stephen Skinner says:
“Global sea levels have fluctuated widely over geological time”
Fair enough, standard sort of claim. Read the NASA reference that you quoted.
All data for supporting claims appears to derive from analysis of stratigraphy of coastal sediment cores. However no provision or analysis is made for the potential effects of subsidence of coastal sediments. Indeed they seem to be assumed to be in situ at their point of initial deposition.
I view the potential of coastal subsidence over geological time to be significant. As a result the study’s cited may in large part simply be documenting coastal subsidence.
The REAL problem with sea level rise is Cruise Ships and Oil Tankers. All those ships displacing hundreds of million hundred tons of water all over the oceans, raising the sea level by who knows how many millimeters!? We’ve got to ban ships! (Or better yet, enact a displacement tax.)
When did wild speculation become publishable science? And how did unpublishable science become newsworthy? An unvalidated model has no place in serious science. At best, it’s the equivalent of a toy. It’s wasteful to give billions of dollars of grant money to “scientists” so they can play with toys. Unvalidated models are not scientific evidence and fiddling with them to get sensational results is not science. There is no evidence that warming in the future will be any different from warming in the past—mild and mostly beneficial to the biosphere to which we are inextricably bound. We need sanity in the science grant letting process. There are so many natural phenomena and teleconnections that we know so little about. Yet we waste money, time and talent on this kind of nonsense? That’s a real shame. We need leaders who can see through the smoke and mirrors of the grant process and ensure that our money is well spent. We get useful information and fundamental understanding, not wild speculation.
“When did wild speculation become publishable science?”
Well it goes back as far as the beginning of climate “science”. Maybe further back.
At what point do you think we will just go there and harvest freshwater? Au is really close by. I bet t
Oops.. Fat finger. It was off topic, anyway.
“The current rate of sea level rise is 3.3mm/year & unchanged over past 25 years.”
That number is GIA corrected. Hat Tip to the sharp-eyed WUWT reader who noticed that U Colorado dropped “GIA Corrected” from the graphs description. But what is GIA? Near as I can tell, it is ocean floor dropping in response to the continents doing glacial rebound.
So 3.3mm/yr is not really sea level rise.
GIA “corrected” data = “Sea Level Rise” + “Ocean Floor Drop”
And the “Sea Level Rise” portion is still 2.8mm/yr
What does the Gemological Institute of America have to do with climate ??
They do not do grading on ice crystals; they are not considered gem quality crystals. And they deteriorate rapidly if you try to wear one around your neck.
g
Before any net melting can occur, the Antarctic needs to start warming up. It’s been cooling significantly according to CFSR estimates since 1979 for the satellite era for latitudes 60S-90S:
There is no sign that rapidly rising CO2 levels are having any effect on temperatures in Antarctica and that raises serious questions about how much, if any effect it is having elsewhere.
Recovery from warming, which assumes that an ice age is the ideal climate? Is this now the “settled science”? Most of the Northern United States and all of Canada under 3 miles of ice is preferable to the coastline moving inland a little? Do these “researchers” ever think anything through?
Well prolonged anything will always delay something else.
g
“The researchers incorporated the physics and tested the model, driven by high-resolution climate models and past climate data.”
So they “tested” their worthless model against the other worthless models…
The claim ‘and [against] past climate data’ is a blatant falsehood. See my comment above. Constitutes clearcut academic misconduct if the authors actually said that. Especially if said in the paper itself. Would not be the first time in ‘climate science’. OLeary’s sudden SLR, Marcott’s hockey stick, Fabricius’ coral acidification are all clearcut academic misconduct provable from within those paper’s SIs. All published in Science or the Nature stable of journals. Not even negligent science. Deliberately manipulated and misrepresented ‘science’.