UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica whose melting rates are rapidly increasing have raised the global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s, and are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case climate warming scenarios.
According to a new study from the University of Leeds and the Danish Meteorological Institute, if these rates continue, the ice sheets are expected to raise sea levels by a further 17cm and expose an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century.
Since the ice sheets were first monitored by satellite in the 1990s, melting from Antarctica has pushed global sea levels up by 7.2mm, while Greenland has contributed 10.6mm. And the latest measurements show that the world’s oceans are now rising by 4mm each year.
“Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined,” said Dr Tom Slater, lead author of the study and climate researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.
“The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise.”
The results are published today in a study in the journal Nature Climate Change. It compares the latest results from satellite surveys from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE) with calculations from climate models. The authors warn that the ice sheets are losing ice at a rate predicted by the worst-case climate warming scenarios in the last large IPCC report.
Dr Anna Hogg, study co-author and climate researcher in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: “If ice sheet losses continue to track our worst-case climate warming scenarios we should expect an additional 17cm of sea level rise from the ice sheets alone. That’s enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world’s largest coastal cities.”
So far, global sea levels have increased in the most part through a mechanism called thermal expansion, which means that volume of seawater expands as it gets warmer. But in the last five years, ice melt from the ice sheets and mountain glaciers has overtaken global warming as the main cause of rising sea levels.
Dr Ruth Mottram, study co-author and climate researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute, said: “It is not only Antarctica and Greenland that are causing the water to rise. In recent years, thousands of smaller glaciers have begun to melt or disappear altogether, as we saw with the glacier Ok in Iceland, which was declared “dead” in 2014. This means that melting of ice has now taken over as the main contributor of sea level rise. “
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Further information
The study, “Ice-sheet losses track high-end sea-level rise projections,” is published today (31 August) in Nature Climate Change.
This study is an outcome of the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise (IMBIE) supported by the ESA Climate Change Initiative and the NASA Cryosphere Program.
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The Great Ice Meltdown and Rising Seas: Lessons for Tomorrow
17 cm is a bit over 6 inches. Oh boy are we in trouble.
During the period from 1900 to the present, the tide gauge at the Battery in NYC has recorded over twice that. While I would not object to a Biblical flood wiping out NYC and deBlasio it sadly appears to be a tad late at the moment.
Its worse than that it displaces a mere 16 million people. Get an economist to run the cost to resettle 16M people versus spend trillions of dollars on emission controls each year for 80 years.
LdB, you posted “. . . it displaces a mere 16 million people.”
Do you have any facts to go with that assertion?
LdB is riffing on this,
“According to a new study from the University of Leeds and the Danish Meteorological Institute, if these rates continue, the ice sheets are expected to raise sea levels by a further 17cm and expose an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century”
Yep I just accepted the number of additional people they claimed the extra melt displaces.
Gordon if you have a different number in mind then tell us all about it never let me get in the way of Climate Science(tm) claims.
LdB, the issue is that the above article states specifically “. . . expose an additional 16 million people to annual coastal flooding by the end of the century.”
You stated “. . . it displaces a mere 16 million people.”
EXPOSING people to periodic flooding is not the same thing as DISPLACING people to the extent of having to “resettle” (your word) them. Just checkout out the cities of Venice, Italy and Miami, Florida and Mumbai, India., where humans have learned to live with flooding.
At that rate the entire population of the US would be displaced by a sea-level rise of about 12 feet. Hmmm…
ALLLLLLLLL the way back to the ancient times of 2015, NASA’s ICESAT data showed NET Antarctic land ice was INCREASING by about 100 billion tons/year since 1992… oh, my….
Leftists, of course, hated that NASA report because it didn’t match their pathetic CAGW doom-and- gloom narrative, so CAGW hacks miraculously “fixed” the data to show a net LOSS of 100 billion tons/year since 1992… which is now gospel…oh, goody…
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses
“Houston, we have a problem”…….
Sea-level change! Sea-level change! Ice-melt! Ice-melt! OMG! We’re doomed, we’re all doomed!
(All while running around in circles, wringing hands, crying, shouting, gnashing teeth, essentially having a breakdown)
Maybe we should be a bit more worried about the culture breaking down into anarchy instead……
Their prognosis seems to be somewhat in conflict with
K. R. Clem “Record warming at the South Pole during the past three decades”
from June 2020, which basically states the antarctic warming and ice melt over the last 30 yeasrs was driven by peaking oceanic cycles.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0815-z
“These results underscore the intimate linkage of interior Antarctic climate to tropical variability. Further, this study shows that atmospheric internal variability can induce extreme regional climate change over the Antarctic interior, which has masked any anthropogenic warming signal there during the twenty-first century.”
“Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined,”
Woohoo! It’s worse than we thought…now that’s an original claim. (<– Yes, sarcasm)
Greenland is still covered in more ice than when the Vikings settled there, as demonstrated by ruins and artifacts that continue to be uncovered. You can panic all you want, the FACT remains that Greenland is in no big hurry to become ice-free. Just another natural cycle.
“Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica whose melting rates are rapidly increasing have raised the global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s”
Even if, as Mr Dressler explained above, this is dubious, if it’s true what on earth is all the panic about?
I keep looking for this dreaded SLR everywhere, I scan Google earth historic sat images from 20+ years ago (from 2003 they’re generally much clearer) and compare coastlines and small islands and islets from all over. I even search for old war recon photos of certain areas if possible, mostly of pacific islands like Midway or Kwajalein for example to have a much, much older comparison.
All those places that the SLR monster is coming for, the Netherlands and Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, you name it I’ve looked at it. It is nowhere to be seen, or a least I can’t find it.
There is practically no change anywhere as far as I can see, apart from a few displaced sandbanks, but certainly no mass land disappearance with hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of affected people as websites like globalflood.org would have us believe.
Places like the Maldives, which should have sunk under years ago according to alarmist dogma, are actually growing and creating more land as they can’t cope with the number of people wanting to go and live and work there, and it’s the Dutch who are making it happen.
https://www.vanoord.com/activities/creating-more-land-maldives
If anybody knows where the SLR monster has struck please let me know, /not sarc (honest request)
AFAIK no one has satisfactorily explained how the temp went down from 1940 to 1970 but the sea level kept rising. There clearly is another mechanism in play and this mechanism even if known has not been quantified.
” how the temp went down from 1940 to 1970″
After “adjustments”.. it didn’t 😉
Here is the problem with academic research. The collection of data usually takes a year or so, analysis, p-hacking and other statistical cook ups, exploring the literature, writing up takes so long that the weather is going in the other direction by the time of publishing!
Although there was a definite cooling trend in “scientific data-based average global surface atmospheric temperature” (however you want the interpret that phrase) over the period of 1940 to 1975:
1) that amount of cooling may not have been sufficient (in creating new ice on land) to fully offset the amount of Earth’s land-supported ice that continued to melt and drain into the oceans as a result of long-term Holocene warming,
or, perhaps,
2) the net of volumetric uplift and subsidence on the seafloors of all of Earth’s oceans was positive in the uplift direction, thereby being the predominate cause of a continuing rise in global sea level despite a cooling atmosphere over those years. (N.B. Uplift, subsidence, and plate tectonics are not even mentioned in the above article by researchers from the University of Leeds and the Danish Meteorological Institute . . . so much for thorough scientific research and peer review, if any, conducted by the journal “Nature Climate Change”.)
As to the “why” for this ~35 year interval of global atmospheric cooling, chalk that up to factors not known or considered by the IPCC and its various CMIP1-6 climate model comparison jokes . . . you know, historic-but-inconvenient climate change variability that needs to be adjusted away (aka “Karl-ized”) to make the CO2-as-the-root-cause-of-catastrophic-climate-change meme sellable to gullible politicians and the low-information public.
“Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined”
That does not imply that therefore this researcher is right that global warming is the cause of the ice melt. It implies that this researcher does not understand the ice melt dymamics in these two regions because his agw bias and his atmosphere bias prevents him from a proper study of the geological features of these very geologically active regions.
Three links below.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/06/27/antarctica/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/07/01/arctic/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/07/16/antarctica-slr/
I’m sure the doors of Barack Obama’s new mansion on Martha’s Vineyard will be opened to all the cryo-babies who are displaced by sea level rise acceleration. I’m pretty sure about that, with him being a savior of mankind and all, who promised to stop the seas from rising. ha ha ha ha ha…. let’s see if Griff can figure this out.
I think Obama was a fool to buy that property.
I guess he thinks it will see him out and he’s not worried about it having any future value to pass on to his kids…
Well, I’ve got to give you credit for your 100% commitment, Griff. No, Obama is not worried… he’s not worried about the sea rising enough to destroy his new mansion. He knows that a big storm is a different story, but if a big storm approaches while he’s there, and storm surge threatens, he’ll be able to burn jet fuel in a giant fossil fuel powered helicopter to carry him to safety. And he’ll know when any potential storms are approaching because fossil fueled hurricane hunter airplanes will be tracking those storms, and fossil fuel powered electricity grids give him access to 24 hour news and electronic monitoring devices. Pull your head out, Griff, before it sticks that way.
Hey, according to what I’ve heard from many different quarters, the man still walks on water . . . SLR? . . . what, him worry?
According to Obama, when he was elected, the seas stopped rising.
From U Reek A Lert
Nuff said.
Apparently some melt from under the ice sheet.
man made?. lol !!
Volcanic activity wouldn’t have anything to do with it, of course 😉
er… no. Detail as to why not is in here:
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2844/fire-below-ice-above-volcanoes-glaciers-and-sea-level-rise/
Griff, are you still trying to boil water from above..
You think melt-water from under the ice is caused by “climate change”.. really !
Only you could be that DUMB !
In Antarctic there are pools of WARM water in several areas.. not geothermal though, is it fool !
——————-
And you should really actually READ what you link to , bozo..
“If their channels happen to carry them over hot spots in the mantle, they can flow all the faster.
“Heat content within an ice sheet raises the temperature, and therefore lowers viscosity” of the ice at the base of the glacier,……………. The result: lubrication of the glacier’s movement.”
Thank you confirming exactly what I said. !!! 🙂
You can always be relied on. 🙂
Another quote…
“A dramatic example is found in Greenland, where a long “thermal track” was recently revealed beneath the miles-thick ice sheet that covers the giant island.”
“They also tracked its heat, tracing the scar from northwestern to southeastern Greenland.
“It may mean that Greenland can expel its ice faster than we are anticipating in predictive models,”
This fluctuates from place to place as the ice melts from below, causing sudden drops, for instance, when rivers of meltwater at the ice sheet’s base drain rapidly into subglacial lakes downstream.
Thank you for even further confirmation.. well done griff.
Yet again producing a link that shows exactly the opposite of what you say it does, and confirms the facts you are making an hilarious attempt to argue against..
So funny. 🙂
If you look at that again, it shows a small influence over the ‘crack’ – but points out that the area of influence (small influence) is NOWHERE NEAR THE AREAS OF HIGH ICE LOSS.
volcanoes are not causing Greenland ice melt, not a prime driver of it.
climate change is.
And yet your hysteria is simply that, hysteria. Iceland is covered with ice, as is Antarctica and the Arctic. No matter what hysterical horsesh*t you grandly proclaim it is still just hysterical horsesh*t. You already know that, it is all you ever do. Oh, and griffie? What happened to “I will never come to this website ever again!”? It keeps not happening although you have screeched it several times. Guess that tells us just how honest and believable you are.
Wow! Longest read ever, but I enjoyed the banter. I’m not a scientist or geologist, but enjoy reading stuff that helps my little brain, not hurts it. Lol
I have a question: What would happen if oceans rose by 3 feet by 2050 and if it did, what would/could possibly cause it?
I got interested in all the GW hype about the Maldives going under water. 4 decades later, the land mass has increased significantly with many resorts being built near the water’s edge. The lies continue…