Friday, April 14, 2006

Stoat: Media garbling: "Scientists forecast metre rise in sea levels this century"

Returning to the theme of sea level rise related to melting ice on Greenland and Antarctica, here is a more sober read of the recent data: Stoat: Media garbling: "Scientists forecast metre rise in sea levels this century"

So this is (once again) the idea that once CO2 levels get high enough, we will be committed to melting Greenland. Which is fair enough, but it *isn't news*. Is it something to worry about? That depends on a lot... suppose we assume this melt happens linearly over 1kyr; thats 5m/1kyr = 5mm/yr, or 0.5m/century. And you can add on thermal expansion and maybe some Antarctic melt and other stuff on to that. But still, 0.5m/century is not *fast*. It is, though, cumulative. How will our descendants cope with 5+m of SLR? I would guess that this would cause large problems over many parts of the world, if we were at todays tech levels. But we won't be: we'll be back in the stone age by then... or we'll have reached the nearer stars... who knows, really?
They key nugget is the 1,000 years horizon. The temperature may quickly rise to a point sufficient to melt Greenland — but it will still take time to complete the job. Lots of time.

No comments: