Back in l981, as a relatively young man, a physicist named James Hansen led a team that reported in Science on Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.
The paper predicted that the warming signal would emerge clearly from the noise of natural variability by the end of the century. In the 21st century, said Hansen and his co-authors, we would see the opening of "the fabled Northwest Passage."
It's now a commercial shipping route.
Well, last year Hansen with a colleague published another paper, in which in his quiet way he predicted, in broad strokes, what will happen this century if we do not phase out fossil fuel consumption very soon.
It's called Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change.
There's a lot to it, and I encourage readers to take a look, but for today's purposes, I will focus solely on the sea level rise part of the paper. Hansen points out that we do not need to look to climate models to estimate how much ice Greenland will lose, and Antartica may lose, with global warming. We can look to the past, when we know from isotope records how warm it was, and, correspondingly, the sea level.
He writes:
Earths paleoclimate history shows that eventual sea level rise of many meters should be anticipated with the global warming of at least several degrees Celsius that is expected under business-as-usual [BAU] climate estimates. Yet the danger of sea level rise has had little or no impact on global energy and climate policies.
Hansen is right, of course, about our society's slow response to the threat. He goes on to say why this threat has been ignored:
The explanation, at least in part, must be belief that ice sheets respond only slowly to climate change.
Being a thoughtful, logical man, he assumes we must be the same.
He gives us too much credit, I fear. Though it's true some people are up in arms…
Via Tom Toles sketchbook.
Kit Stolz 