From the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the “Friends of King Canute” department comes this laughable exercise in statistical futility.
Deep emission cuts before mid-century decisive to reduce long-term sea-level rise legacy
Rising seas are irreversible on human time scales and among the most severe consequences of climate change. Emissions released in the coming decades will determine how much coastlines are reshaped for centuries to come. New research shows that near-term mitigation could spare future generations around 0.6 meters of sea-level rise that would be caused by emissions between 2020 and 2090 following current policies, making today’s decisions critical not only for limiting warming but also for coastal impacts.
Led by IIASA researchers in collaboration with colleagues from institutions in the UK, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany, the study published in Nature Climate Change goes beyond the usual sea level projections by quantifying how much sea-level rise in 2300 will be “locked in” by emissions this century. By isolating the effect of near- and mid-term emissions, the study provides a direct link between today’s policy choices and sea levels hundreds of years from now – an aspect that has not been quantified in this way before.
“It is common for sea-level rise research to deliver projections to 2100 based on a standard set of scenarios, which doesn’t allow to isolate the longer-term sea-level impacts of today’s greenhouse gas emissions. But we have to explore these impacts on timescales beyond 2100 because oceans and ice sheets keep responding for centuries,” explains lead author Alexander Nauels, a senior research scholar in the Integrated Climate Impacts Research Group of the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. “Our study shows clearly that mitigation decisions in the next few decades will have multi-century consequences for coastlines worldwide.”
The researchers found that under current policies, emissions from 2020 until 2050 would already commit the world to about 0.3 meters of additional sea-level rise by 2300. What may seem like a modest increase would have major implications for long-term adaptation planning. Extending emissions on this trajectory until 2090 would lock in a global rise of about 0.8 meters, of which roughly 0.6 meters could still be avoided if the world started emissions reductions consistent with the Paris Agreement now. These differences can determine whether some low-lying coastal areas and islands remain habitable or not.
“Our work highlights the long-lasting legacy of today’s emissions and that adaptation planning must consider centuries ahead,” notes Matthew Palmer from the UK Met Office, a coauthor of the study. “We also illustrate that some regions like the vulnerable Pacific islands will experience even higher sea-level rise than the global average. These regional and local changes have to be understood and resolved in much greater detail to better inform decision makers.”
The authors set out to determine how much future sea-level rise is already committed by past and near-term emissions, and they show how strongly choices in the coming decades influence outcomes centuries from now.
“These choices will determine when more adaptation limits will be reached and how many adaptation options remain for coastal communities in vulnerable regions,” notes coauthor Aimée Slangen from the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research.
“The difference between decisive climate action today and continued high emissions is not just measured in degrees of warming but also in meters of sea-level rise that will reshape coasts worldwide for centuries. Importantly, we show that we still have the opportunity to limit the sea-level rise commitment we pass on to future generations,” Nauels concludes.
Reference
Nauels, A., Nicholls, Z., Möller, T., Hermans, T.H.J., Mengel, M., Klönne, U., Smith, C., Slangen, A.B.A., Palmer, M.D. (2025). Multi-century global and regional sea-level rise commitments from cumulative greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades. Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02452-5
Even King Canute had some humility. “No Kings” indeed.
My understanding was that King Knut was trying to demonstrate to his minions that his power was limited.
I remember the story being told to us in primary (elementary) school to illustrate exactly that.
The Danish King Knut was simultaneously King of Denmark, Norway, and Eastern Britain. While he concentrated on expanding his British holdings, he lost control of the Danes and Norway. Thus his detractors claimed he “could not control the seas”, while his supporters in England admired his “humility”. The myth reads both ways!
Procedure:claim exaggerated sea level rise. Then sell “mitigation” measures. Then, when the exaggerated sea level rise does not occur, claim success.
They “claim” that they are reducing CO2 emissions in places that go down the Net-Zero rabid hole…
.. but the atmospheric CO2 concentration keeps climbing at an ever increasing rate. 🙂
And if the sea level rises, but not nearly as much as predicted, demand trillions more in funding.
Deep emission cuts before mid-century decisive to reduce long-term sea-level rise legacy
By reduce I assume they really mean delay. Is that really all they’ve got?
Rising seas are irreversible
the UK Met Office,
Yes, it would appear so. Backed by a bunch of jokers.
Sea level is rising at about 1/8 inch (3 mm) per year! OMG – run for the hills… well maybe walk…or just stay where you are and don’t worry about it. If where you live is 1 foot above high tide you have almost 100 years – fifty if the rate of rise doubles overnight. I’m happy to let my future descendants (if any) deal with it 3-4 generations hence. I’m sure they’ll have better data and methods of coping by then.
Key word: “legacy”
COP30 is coming !! 🙂
The “Claims” are getting more and more absurd. !
And I just saw a pink dinosaur in my backyard !
Hey, can you send him back? I’ll send you the address. He wandered away last night and I couldn’t find him in the dark.
Check your backyard. He’s probably hiding next to the ‘no global warming since 1998’ graph.
Not sure about that. Hiding a dinosaur would require Mann’s Hockey Stick graph
Told you so.
Ah, we must genuflect to our Sophistry 1st Class award winner!
Plenty of them in Florida!
As in reverse the interglacial recovery?
Astonishingly stupid. I was asking myself what kind of low information scoundrel could write stuff like this! Then I saw the Met was involved that explained a lot. How many trillions of dollars have been spent world wide in an effort to fight climate change i.e. lower CO2 emissions? Trillions and trillions of dollars and how much have CO2 emissions gone down? Exactly zero, they have instead gone up. What those trillions of dollars have bought us is higher energy prices, energy poverty, unreliable energy supply, less personal freedom, dependence on untrustworthy countries, loss of manufacturing, higher inflation in general, greater government spending to support worthless renewables and on and on. CO2 can’t cause CAGW stop saying it can, you are a liar. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators, remove all wind and solar from the grid and keep the grid updated.
Since 2000 about $13.9 trillion. Now adding about $2 trillion per year. But whose counting?
Think of the ”opportunity cost”, all the important things that have been ignored, and all the beneficial things that the world could have bought for those trillions? That’s one of the real shames.
I have a theory that leaving individuals to spend that $13.9 trillion on their own is what scares lefties the most.
I think they are like most grifters and con men. They knew money was out there to be had, they just needed to come up with a scam to dupe people out of it.
Think of the dikes and water retention walls that could have been built with that level of funding.
Bob, they are getting desperate. GISS has been demolished. Billions in research spending has been canceled. Both nations and companies are starting to walk away from the delusion of net zero. Paris Accord is a dead letter. Attendance at UNFCCC 30 looks to be a disaster this year.
So, with the political tide running out on them in every way possible, of course they are lying desperately in the hope that something might stick to the wall. The more exaggerated and ridiculous claims shows how great the panic is right now. At this time, lies are cheap. The only cost here is a few electrons on screens expended by displaying this tripe.
I was really hoping that Solar Cycle 25 would meet predictions of being weak. Oh well, I guess I’ll just cheer for another Maunder Minimum type of sunspot activity in Solar Cycle 26. I don’t have too much time left walking this planet and I desperately want to see this whole global warming scam collapse before I turn to worm food.
CO2 can cause CAGW.
OK, so show us the physics that make a small amount of CO2 more powerful to alter the temperature than a large amount of water vapour ( only use empirical data, no model outputs accepted ).
Too bad both the data and the science refute what you are so desperate to believe.
Got any objective, scientific data to go with that???
You may want to look into the paleoclimatology data that documents atmospheric CO2 levels were in the range from 3000 to 9000 ppm about 500 million years ago, during the Ordovician period. That would be about 7 to 21 times as high as today’s atmospheric CO2 concentration level . . . and there was no resulting catastrophe, Earth recovered just fine, with the atmospheric CO2 level subsequently and NATURALLY dropping down to about 180 ppm, near starvation-level for C3 plants!
Wait . . . then again, you probably DON’T want to examine that data.
Here is a pretty picture for him.
Antarctic ice cores reveal an interesting story, now going back for around 800,000 years. During this period, changes in CO2 levels tend to follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years, as illustrated in Figure 1 below.
And per AlGore,
Ironically, some of the most damning evidence again the AGW or Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory comes from Al Gore himself.
1- Climate change is the norm. Never in the 800,000-year ice core record is climate not changing.
2- Four Temperature Peaks in the last 400,000 years were all above today’s temperatures and occurred at lower CO2 levels.
3- Every ice-age began when CO2 was at or near peak levels, in other words, high CO2 levels were not enough to prevent ice ages.
4- The current record high level of 400 parts per million(ppm) CO2, a full 33% above any previous level on the chart, has failed to carry temperatures to a record high.
5- For any cause and effect relationship, the cause MUST lead the effect. CO2 does not lead Temperature, it follows it by 800 to 1,500 years. The AGW Theory is similar to claiming that lung cancer causes smoking.
6- There is no mechanism defined that explains how or why CO2 would lead temperatures to pull the globe out of an ice age.
7- There is no mechanism defined to explain how or why high levels of CO2 would trigger an ice age.
8- The only defined mechanism by which CO2 can cause climate change is by trapping outgoing infrared (IR) radiation between the wavelengths of 13 and 18 microns. CO2 can only result in warming, there is no mechanism by which it can result in cooling. CO2 can only trap outgoing radiation, that is it.
Better get ready for an Ice Age glaciation, because according to Big Al, the last 4 times CO2 was high, they start.
The interesting thing about that chart is that, at that scale, current CO2 is off the top of an additional chart height. The left side of the chart is graduated from 170ppm to 295ppm so doubling the height would take you from 295ppm to 420ppm. At the same scale, the right side (temperature anomaly) tops at +4°C but graduates (-10°~+4°) so the new top would be an additional. +14° And top at 18°C projected anomaly. At the given scales CO2 at 420ppm should give an anomaly of near 18°C.
So, while temperature drives CO2, CO2 doesn’t drive temperature to the same extent.
Excellent, although I do take issue with your statement in your Item 8 that “CO2 can only trap outgoing radiation, that is it.”
CO2, as a greenhouse gas, and secondarily to H2O which predominates, does not “trap” outgoing LWIR radiation from Earth’s surface. It only momentarily absorbs such radiation and then very quickly—within the order of milliseconds or less—thermalizes (i.e., shares) that energy with the overwhelming number of N2 and O2 molecules in the atmosphere via molecule-to-molecule collisions. Subsequently, it is the entire atmosphere that emits that LWIR-originated energy to deep space via thermal radiation.
Not if you are implying that adding CO2 to air can make thermometers hotter, it can’t!
Are you stupid, or just ignorant and gullible?
Next thing you will be saying that CO2 can increase the amount of water in the oceans!
Dumb and dumber. Which are you?
CO2 can cause CAGWphobia. It regularly affects Liberals and some certain Aspergers sufferers
Please organise a demonstration of the awesome power of CO2 to affect global temperatures. In open atmosphere of course, no messing about with the gas in a tube and with traditional LIG thermometers, nothing remotely ‘programmable’. Otherwise you might get accused of making it all up.
These used climate hucksters are out to sell us a lemon.
“If life gives you lemons, you throw lemons at ’em!” – Michael Rooker, Call of the Dead
“Led by IIASA researchers in collaboration with colleagues from institutions in the UK, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany, …” [Reference
Nauels, A., Nicholls, Z., Möller, T., Hermans, T.H.J., Mengel, M., Klönne, U., Smith, C., Slangen, A.B.A., Palmer, M.D. (2025)]
Clowns from a minimum of five institutions with nine listed authors getting paid. God knows how much was spent on CliSciFi climate modelturbation and institutional overheads. All of it to make a ‘scientific assessment’ (wild assed Leftist ideological crap guesses) about what sea levels will be 275 years from now, within an accuracy of 0.1m.
Draw your own conclusions without my biased language.
So, where is their actual proof?
Proof is racist.
They don’t have any proof.
If they did, they would have produced it a long time ago.
And that’s why no Climate Alarmist will reply to your post.
Just took my dog for morning walk.. and I was thinking..
WUWT needs a “Ludicrous” dial for these sorts of claims. !
It would have to go to 10.. them some extra steps for this sort of claim.
This “claim” just needs more cowbells ! 😉
No way. It needs an ’11’ on the dial, just like in Spinal Tap.
Wasn’t it Space Balls that had a RV spaceship with a Ludicrous drive?
Pikers. Why not go to 2525? No imagination.
Great reference!
Gotta wonder how many people caught that one.
Truth is, I didn’t realize it until I’d typed it.
Well hat’s off to you for the honesty. I would have accepted the credit 🙂
Music to my ears. 🙂
if man is still alive…
Dang, I went and dated myself again..
Zava and Evans ??
Zager and Evans, but close enough.
The odds are high that sea level will be down by a meter or more as we’ll be well into the return of glaciers by t hen.
Assume zero knowledge about the physics and statistics used and this is still clearly nonsense. 48 references all in this millennium. I do know zero about “commitment ensemble members” and almost zero about magic. They don’t have sense enough to name things better and they are certainly committed whether they know it or not. From the paper–
“We use simple models calibrated against complex models, for both the climate and sea-level responses, to enable the analysis of our commitment scenario set. MAGICC v.7.5.3”
The irony is that we could have some sea-level rise for reasons they don’t seem to care about or understand. –“Our results, in some cases even showing a negative sea-level response, underscore that a detailed assessment of the GRD effects and GIA of the Earth, as well as other processes contributing to vertical land motion (VLM) that we did not consider here, is crucial to determine the regional climate-driven SLR commitment in combination with non-climate-driven changes.”
Professor (at least those like I and many others had)–“Then your models are useless.” Student–“But this is what they told me is going on.”
“We use simple models calibrated against complex models, for both the climate and sea-level responses, to enable the analysis of our commitment scenario set. MAGICC v.7.5.3”
Please tell me you made that up? They used models calibrated against other models?
Wow! New and improved MAGIC!
No wonder their “commitment scenario set” is so vibrant and awe-inspiring!
Buy one, get one free.
I had to look up MAGICC v7.5.3. It’s real. The grifters are now outright making fun of the fools who believe this garbage.
Given the naming, I wouldn’t be surprised if it just took other models to produce GIGO results.
So there is a side benefit from declining educational levels in climate scams.
From the above article:
“New research shows that near-term mitigation could spare future generations around 0.6 meters of sea-level rise that would be caused by emissions between 2020 and 2090 following current policies, making today’s decisions critical not only for limiting warming but also for coastal impacts.”
Well, let’s examine that claim a bit more closely,
1) With all the $ trillions spent over the last 20 or so years around the world leading to today’s current policies, and taking into account that nearly all of the 195 nations that “committed” to reducing their individual carbon emissions under the “legally binding” (hah!) Paris Agreement of 2016 to little such effect today, I can only shake my head in wonder that anyone thinks things will be different in the future, no matter how much money is spent going forward.
2) Despite the 20 or so years of efforts and money committed as mentioned in Item 1 above, the most accurate measurements of global sea level rise (SLR) show it persisting on an essentially liner rise rate of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/year . . . see the trend as measured over 32 years at https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/socd/lsa/SeaLevelRise .
3) So, despite the 9 years that have passed since most world nations signed up to the Paris Agreement, and those years being included in the trending measurements mentioned in Item 2 above, a 3.6 mm/year maximum rise rate would calculate to, yeah, (2090-2020) years*3.6 mm/year = 252 mm = 0.25 m of SLR, nowhere near the claimed “around 0.6 meters of sea-level rise”.
So, what exactly is the “near-term mitigation” that hasn’t already been tried at global levels . . . unsuccessfully???
Independent of the above, would the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis please be so kind as to provide objective scientific evidence that “climate change™”/SLR is in any statistically-significant way related to human “emissions” of CO2. I haven’t seen such, especially taking into account that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation.
Finally, the Nature Climate Change publication of the IIASA claims should never have describe them as having performed “new research” . . . it is much more like the IIASA just presented “new speculations”.
You’d think that if there were real concern about sea level rise, erecting sea walls would be a lot more cost effect solution.
There’s an issue with this paragraph…
Projected sea level rise on 0.3M by 2300
While extending until 2090 gives a projected 0.9M
I believe 2300 might have been intended to be 2030 but 3/10 Meter (about a foot) by 2030 seems grossly over exaggerated
2300!!!
This paper provides another data point to an increasingly pronounced alarmist trend. As past climate ‘catastrophe’ projections have failed (Arctic summer sea ice, accelerating SLR, weather extremes) such projections go increasingly into an improbably long future. Fortunately for skeptics, this has two direct consequences.
I think it’s wither a typo (2030 instead of 2300) or it’s a most.accurate projection of 0.3M (about a foot) by 2300
I think there is a new tack in rising tide alarmism. They realise that earlier projections for an immediate acceleration have been falsified, so the new models delay the acceleration to try to increase their credibility by not being immediately falsified.
I recall a couple of months ago there was a paper that attracted much press attention based on its alarmist projections. It was only by reading the paper itself that you found out that the projections were only alarmist for 2300-2500 or later. The press release made no mention of timescales, and the hacks duly wrote it up as if it were all happening next week, and completely ignored the huge uncertainties.
ThIs is from a study of the implications of a collapse of Antarctic ice, under RCP 8.5 of course:
They are Well Versed at “Moving the Goal Posts”
Hmmm, it took 10,000 years for the Laurentide Ice Sheet to melt away. What makes them thing Antarctica, a continent that spends 182 days in full dark below zero temperatures, will vanish a similar amount of ice in 700 years?
Hey, hasn’t anyone noticed that the warming has halted, and temperatures are now cooling down, solving the problem?
“meters of sea-level rise” = “a global rise of about 0.8 meters”
Add a bit of hyperbole, why don’t you.
Sheesh.
Those living in 2300 can vote then. WE have to vote now.
I vote for our present well-being, which includes not fouling our nest.
Practical solutions for practical people.
One of the Great things about not coming here often is remembering GREAT articles. I think it is time to do a GREATEST HITS once per week pinned article from the past, and my suggestion for one would be the, “Where the Boys Are” article from about a decade ago. In it, the author compared Miami Beach of 10 years ago to Miami Beach in that 1960 movie. IIRC they had a picture of a pier with shellfish on the pilings at the exact same level in this last decade as the shellfish that can be seen in the movie.
Would be interesting to see if that is still the case.