Greenland Ice Sheet Melting Faster Than Expected tells that the world's seas are rising twice as fast as originally anticipated. Its ice sheet may be responsible for 1/4 of the sea level change in the past 13 years. Two trillion tons of land ice have been lost since 2003. Currently the seas are rising at more than 0.11 inches a year.
Sea Level Rise by 2109 Could Cost Galveston-Houston Billions adds that a new computer model shows between 78% (best case) and 93% (worst case) of Galveston county residents will be displaced by rising Gulf of Mexico waters. Their conservative estimate assumes a 27 inch rise in the next century. Along the northeast U.S. coast, the sea level could rise an additional 12 to 20 inches because of circulation currents.
On the other pole, If W. Antarctic Ice Sheet Melts, tells that if the ice sheet were to suddenly melt today, sea levels would rise by 10.8 feet. (This is actually down from predictions extrapolated from 40-year-old data.) Geologic evidence shows that at one time in the earth's past, sea levels rose 65 feet in a 500 year period. That would obviously require more than just the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Yet, such a change in sea levels had to come from the world's ice sheets.
There has been some bad science in sea level predictions, so what should we believe? If you live along the coast, can you tell of a change in the last ten years? Probably not. Scientists warn of a tipping point - perhaps similar to the event horizon at which point an object will be swallowed by a black hole, regardless of attempts to extricate it.
An informative web site is NASA's Global Climate Change. From it, we learn: a) global sea level has increased 4-8 inches in the past century, b) carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest in 650,000 years, c) 11 of the last 12 summers have been the hottest since 1860. Mmm. We need to stay outside the event horizon!
Comments