Here’s a post card from the deep north. Asheville’s temperature above Atlanta’s by 2099, sea level rise certain, hurricanes and wildfires maybe.

Here’s another worrier.

Thanks for the thanks, everyone. I’m off on the first decent holiday since 1999. I’ll be back blogging maybe by about November.

I’d like to acknowledge Peter Wood’s help and thank him in preparing the post.

Seeya.

I hope and anticipate that even us humans will over a full century or more be able to stabilise atmospheric carbon at a satisfactory level below the previous maxima – even if all the tundra methane belches out, it’s not very persistent.

Steve D, I should leave it to Brian to explain, but my take away understanding was that the glaciers haven’t ever been known to move remotely fast enough for enough water to be carried to the ocean. This constraint is probably in large part inherent in the geography, the fact that Greenland has a ring of mountains, so there’s a big lens of ice sitting in the middle that’s not keen to just slide off anywhere.

Which is a good thing.

The sea ice at the Arctic has now been found to have melted away by as much as half, according to a preliminary report issued Tuesday by NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

Steve D I think it has some force, especially in Greenland. Apparently the ice dynamics far outweigh the ‘surface mass balance’ thing, which is the difference between straight melting and snow precipitation. But if the heat’s really on you’d expect the meltwater to find a way. It’s just that it would need a hell of a lot of heat to make a big difference in a short time. I think they’ve got a reasonable handle on that one for Greenland, but are probably on the low side because of underestimating the amount of warming.

If “perception managers” world-wide could galvanise eathlings into fighting a Global War on Greenhouse Gases we might stand a chance of preventing some of the apocalytic consequences of rising sea-levels. Unfortunately, such initiatives compromise Big Carbon’s bottom line, therefore the corporate psychopaths who dictate BC’s policy are incapable of considering them.

Meantime, as our orb twirls effortlessly upon its axis, each day that “nothing is being done” draws us closer to the truth.

On the upside, at least there’s a place in cyberspace where can bone-up on our pending downfall:)

One problem with the 2100 timeline is that we might get a snapshot of where sea levels could be then, but where are they heading to?

wilful, I think the best answer is the paleoclimate record, which from Hansen’s stuff I set out in this post as follows:

I can’t do tables so here’s five statements that link levels of CO2e and temperatures (referenced to pre-industrial) with sea level rise.

180ppm give a temperature of -5C and a sea level of -120m

280ppm give a temperature of 0C and a sea level of 0m

280-300ppm give a temperature of 1.7 to 2.7C and a sea level of 4-6m

380 (360-400)ppm give a temperature of 2.7 to 3.7C and a sea level of 15 to 35m

425 (350-500)ppm give a temperature of 5.7C and a sea level of 75m

The last one is problematic, because it refers to a situation about 35mya, when India hadn’t smacked into Asia, hence the Himalayas weren’t there, nor were the Andes, the Americas hadn’t joined, Antarctica was less isolated, the ocean currents were bound to be different and even the shape of the ocean basins would have been different. The second last, however, refers to a time 3mya when things were pretty much as they are now.

Even if the ice sheets take 6000 years to melt, a figure that has been mentioned, that still gives an average of 1.25m per century. The effect of even this leisurely melt would be that you never have stable coastlines, and once the golden sands disappear they won’t reappear until there is greater stability.

Another way of looking at it is that if all the ice goes with a 6C rise, which it almost surely would, that gives you an average commitment of about 13m for every 1C. Remember during the last glacial maximum when the temp was about 6C lower than now you had a sea level 120m lower.

So the commitment involved in even small temperature changes is likely to be quite large, the main question is how long it takes to come to be. We need to find a way back to the paradise of the Holocene or what’s left of it.