Catastrophic Sea Level Rise within Three Generations

[xrm67]

24. Doubling time of less than 5 years has been established.

Last edited Thu Apr 9, 2015, 10:58 PM - Edit history (2)

What don't you get about this? Can you read the sentence in bold which was published in every news media outlet?

'Incredible' rate of polar ice loss alarms scientists

The planet’s two largest ice sheets – in Greenland and Antarctica – are now being depleted at an astonishing rate of 120 cubic miles each year. That is the discovery made by scientists using data from CryoSat-2, the European probe that has been measuring the thickness of Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers since it was launched by the European Space Agency in 2010.

Even more alarming, the rate of loss of ice from the two regions has more than doubled since 2009, revealing the dramatic impact that climate change is beginning to have on our world.

The researchers, based at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research – used 200m data points across Antarctica and 14.3m across Greenland, all collected by CryoSat, to study how the ice sheets there had changed over the past three years. The satellite carries a high-precision altimeter, which sends out short radar pulses that bounce off the ice surface and then back to the satellite. By measuring the time this takes, the height of the ice beneath the spacecraft can be calculated.

It was found from the average drops in elevation that were detected by CryoSat that Greenland alone is losing about 90 cubic miles a year, while in Antarctica the annual volume loss is about 30 cubic miles. These rates of loss – described as “incredible” by one researcher – are the highest observed since altimetry satellite records began about 20 years ago, and they mean that the ice sheets’ annual contribution to sea-level rise has doubled since 2009, say the researchers whose work was published in the journal Cryosphere last week.

The Hansen article I inked to and which you are quoting from is more than 2 years old and was before the recent discoveries mentioned above. The polar ice caps are melting more than twice as fast as what Hansen and others had predicted. What don't you get about that?

And about the 70 feet of SLR already locked in, that was in my article as well which you evidently have trouble comprehending:

Melting polar and glacial ice and thermally expanding ocean water have accelerated SLR to the highest rate in at least 6000 years, and an estimated 69 feet SLR has already been set into motion.

Edit: In my last comment I did say 70 meters and actually meant feet. 69 feet = 21 meters, still beyond catastrophic.