The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
BTW, the article is ominous about the fate of West Antarctica:"INHERENTLY UNSTABLE" (first sentence of the article!).
Then I looked at the pretty pictures, and looked again, and looked on the side, where East Antarctica, most of Antartica, is found. How interesting.
There I saw a positively enormous area where the icecap bottom is LOWER than 200 METERS BELOW SEA LEVEL.Yes 200 meters below! Imagine the disaster when warm water is going to slip below that...
Thus, if anything, I found the conclusions scarier than ever. I want to see an article incorporating all what can blow up in a flash of steam in EASTERN ANTARCTICA. Now. Methinks it's got to be of the order of twenty meters of seal level rise, just looking at it.
So thank you science, thank you lord, and let's be real nomads, and run for the hills!
A bad emotion reinforced by a little bit of the wrong knowledge often spells disaster.
PA Patrice Ayme Patriceayme.com Patriceayme.wordpress.com http://tyranosopher.blogspot.com/
To me a one meter+ rise is quite conceivable, and perhaps likely, over a forty year period.
And Patrice seems to suggest he is as pessimistic about this. What are your reasons/thoughts behind this?
I ask because there are at least two groups that I know which do not think this is likely. The first the AR4 from the IPCC, the second the Dutch water boards. My uncle used to work for the latter, and the consensus remains that for 2100 the Netherlands will not face a 1 meter rise of sea level.
Granted, I'm one of the first to say that in climate change we don't know what we don't know, and a lot uncertainty remains, but on what is this pessimism based?
Moreover, upon warming I see a reason for the EAST Antarctic basins to melt. They front the sea at the polar circle (i.e., way far from the pole).
I will put all this together in a post on patriceayme.wordpress.com... But I can't believe the sun... Will not save us, because if the CO2 keeps on going up, the oceans will turn into diluted lemon juice... PA Patrice Ayme Patriceayme.com Patriceayme.wordpress.com http://tyranosopher.blogspot.com/
but on what is this pessimism based?
I fear current models assume that the ice sheets will melt in place and perhaps the rate of calving of icebergs into the ocean will increase at about the rate of increase we have recently observed. Were you able to inform me otherwise I would be relieved. I am concerned that recent reports of melt water toward the center of these ice sheets creating channels to bedrock will increase and will increase the rate of motion in second order or higher ways.
I think it is more likely that we will document accelerating processes at work within a decade or so than that we will confirm existing models. I have no way of knowing how fast melting will occur, but a one meter rise seems much more likely to me than a 10cm rise by mid-century. I am also concerned that responsible and competent authorities are not creating models that are based on accelerating melt rates and ice movement and using them to evaluate which model best fits observation. If they are and if they have published results, I have missed the report.
We have all deplored the extent to which Bush era science was subjected to political censorship. But I do not think that this problem has vanished with the change of one administration in one country. Nor do I think that current estimates err on the side of pessimism. To me the question is how much less optimistic should we be. "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
A lot of the climate models seem to have modelled the ice sheets as ice cubes when they behave more like a drop of honey. Ice cubes are very poor heat conductors, insulate their own interior, and only melt on the surface. A drop of honey gets less viscous and flows more easily as it warms up. But I am not an expert on climate modelling.
Lately I have been reading articles in Science News and elsewhere about glacial lakes melting holes through very thick glaciers and disappearing through said holes. It appears that this additional water further lubricates the interface between the ice and the rock below, increasing the rate of glacier flow.
Then I have seen footage of how meltwater pours into deep crevasses in the Antarctiva ice sheet, going directly to the bedrock where it lubricates the interface between the ice and the rock. I am not convinced large chunks of the Antactica ice cap couldn't simply slide into the sea as a result of this lubrication. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
A few responses up, nanne actually links to one of the articles that illustrate the point, namely:
Don't understand me wrong, if global temperatures creep up another 2 degrees, we are in deep serious - which is why business-as-usual GHG emissions cannot hold.
The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
by Oui - Dec 9 6 comments
by Oui - Dec 5 10 comments
by gmoke - Nov 28
by Oui - Dec 97 comments
by Oui - Dec 96 comments
by Oui - Dec 815 comments
by Oui - Dec 620 comments
by Oui - Dec 612 comments
by Oui - Dec 510 comments
by Oui - Dec 44 comments
by Oui - Dec 21 comment
by Oui - Dec 181 comments
by Oui - Dec 16 comments
by gmoke - Nov 303 comments
by Oui - Nov 3012 comments
by Oui - Nov 2838 comments
by Oui - Nov 2713 comments
by Oui - Nov 2511 comments
by Oui - Nov 243 comments
by Oui - Nov 221 comment
by Oui - Nov 22
by Oui - Nov 2119 comments