Arctic’s ‘Last Bastion’ of Sea Ice Breaking Up

Frequent commenter Glenn Doty and I have had numerous conversations on climate change: the inexorable damage it will cause over certain time frames, as well as what we should do to mitigate that damage through emissions reductions, reforestation, and accommodation (sea walls).  He never fails to challenge my mind with thoughts that had never occurred to me, like this one: as the ice on Greenland and the Antarctic melts, the seas will rise slowly over a period of many centuries (barring new technology that might come along and save us, of course).  This means that there will always be competing ideas for where to re-establish cities.  OK, Miami’s under water.  How far inland do you want to build “New Miami?”

On Facebook, someone commented on CNN’s article The Arctic’s ‘last bastion’ of sea ice is breaking up for the first time on record as follows: “If all of this is accurate we’re already far too late to do much about it.”

Glenn replied:

The next century of warming is more or less baked in, yes… because of runaway feedback mechanisms. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to stop emissions. It can get much MUCH worse.

The range of models for sea-level rise is basically from ~0.5 meter to ~2.5 meters over the next century. The fact that the sea ice around Greenland is so much more fragile than expected shows something we more or less already knew: that the ~0.5 – 1.0 meter models were nothing short of Pollyannish. They just need to be dropped en masse, which would move the median model upwards, where it clearly should be.

But it doesn’t mean that our children are going to be living in Waterworld (though a two-century rise might well be 6-8 meters if we don’t change things fast).

We do need to split our efforts between accommodation (raising sea walls, raising coastal property or retreating from it, glassing in farmland, building extremely large water desalination projects and water distribution centers, etc…) and strong mitigation efforts. But we know that waters will rise some. We can handle a 2 meter rise in a hundred years… or even a 2.5 meter rise, though that remains an extreme outlier.

Our decedents will face a more challenging world, but they will have more advanced technology to help them. We just need to strive to give them what advantages we can, which include mitigation and accommodation strategies, but also includes reducing our debt load, leaving them some resources, and building out infrastructure, education, and research and development.

This is a huge and horrifying development, but it doesn’t materially change the game.