Nature: America Can Deal For Real W. Climate, Or Prepare For $1 Trillion/Year Coastal Flooding Loss
Either we reverse President Trump’s climate policies and embrace the Paris Climate Accord quickly or all of America’s coastal cities will be inundated in decades.
That’s the unprecedented conclusion from top scientists in a special new issue of the journal Nature dedicated to Antarctica. They warn that if the Paris Accord fails to reverse emission trends, we will see “economic losses from the flooding of coastal cities [that] exceed US$1 trillion per year” within decades.
What happens to Antarctic is of existential concern to our coastal cities because it contains enough landlocked ice to ultimately raise sea levels more than 100 feet — and we are near a point of no return beyond which collapse of large parts of the Antarctic ice sheet will be unstoppable.
The Nature article that has been getting the most media attention is a detailed analysis of ice loss using three different methods that lead to one grim conclusion: Antarctica lost more than a trillion tons of ice from 2012-2017 — five times the rate of ice loss in the 1990s. But in another equally important article, “Choosing the future of Antarctica,” a global group of scientists — all winners of the Tinker-Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica — have taken the unusual step of laying out two specific futures for the world in 2070.
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https://thinkprogress.org/trumps-policies-will-destroy-americas-coastal-cities-warn-top-scientists-654164b69c9a/
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