Hansen 1: Sea-level rise

More thoughts on how sea level will be influenced by global warming

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 10:37 AM on 09 Aug 2007

Read more about: climate | climate change impacts | oceans

Hansen has posted some important thoughts about sea level rise on his website. In particular, he has shortened his "Scientific reticence and sea level rise" paper and New Scientist has published it. The key conclusion:

[I]ce sheets will respond in a non-linear fashion to global warming --- and are already beginning to do so. There is enough information now, in my opinion, to make it a near certainty that business-as-usual [emissions] scenarios will lead to disastrous multi-metre sea level rise on the century time scale.

This leads directly to his emissions strategy:

The global community must aim to restrict any further global warming to less than 1�C above the temperature in 2000. This implies a CO2 limit of about 450 parts per million or less. Such scenarios require almost immediate changes to get energy and greenhouse gas emissions onto a fundamentally different path.

Hansen also offers some useful thoughts about recent research on Greenland, and has been misunderstood by the media.

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Sea Levels Will Be Lower

The Bailo Model -- built using a quantum mechanical computational device capable of divining information using qubit entanglement -- predicts a precipitous drop in sea levels by EOC.

Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

by jabailo at 11:28 AM on 09 Aug 2007

Awesome, Bailo

I can't wait to see it in a peer-reviewed journal.

In the meantime, I had this discussion recently with an economist about discounting and global warming. Something that always bugs me about economists is their insistence on substitutability. For example, that labor (human capital) can be substituted by technology (created capital) can be substituted for nature (natural capital), and that nothing has really changed, so long as the market continues to find equilibrium.

Anyway, she was talking about how investing in reductions to CO2 may be against our better interests, because of the cost (plus discounting) of the investments. If we wait, our incomes (assuming they continue their trajectory) will continue to rise, and so we'll have more capital to invest in things to stem things like rising waters. In this view, putting up massive walls around entire countries in the future is basically as good as avoiding the scenario completely. And so we'll be able to spend our money on other things (more Hummers?), which humans seem prone to do anyhow, all the while increasing overall levels of capital (because it's infinite!) so that someday we can deal with this mess.

Weird.

by blueberrysushi at 10:30 AM on 10 Aug 2007
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