NY times article on Greenland ice sheet melt

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(F8L @ Jan 17 2007, 01:37 AM) [snapback]377060[/snapback]</div>

:lol: :lol: :lol:
The original posting is from the NY Times, and you are skeptical of EPA! Ha. That is hilarious!

In any case, see here for Wikipedia's discussion. Looks like IPCC IS92 scenarios predict 110 mm to 770 mm from 1990 to 2100. That is 1 to 7 mm per year. How one could get from that to several feet in the "coming decades" must be a really interesting exercise in creative modeling techniques! :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/science/...&ei=5087%0A

This the NY Times coverage, so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but page 2 of the article discusses that the recent acceleration in melting is unexpected and unpredicted. I thought the truly interesting part was a quote from a seemingly reasonable source suggesting that, with extrapolation of the current melt rate, he would not rule out sea level rises of 1 - 2 feet "in the coming decades". Which, of course, would be quite costly.

Clearly that's not the consensus view. I had been thinking that consensus near-term projected sea level rise was orders magnitude smaller. Do you know of any other sources who concur with this view, that at this point rapid sea level rise cannot be ruled out?

The relevant quotes are below:

" Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. ...

“When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work, which puts us on shaky ground,” said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

There is no consensus on how much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near future, Dr. Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(chogan @ Jan 17 2007, 05:37 AM) [snapback]376711[/snapback]</div>

As for "rapid sea level rise being ruled out" - anything is possible. This does not mean plausible.

My understanding was the best estimates are of Greenland ice melt contributing on the order of 2-3 mm rise in sea level per year. That's about an inch in 100 years. From all sources, "Global warming is most likely to raise sea level 15 cm by the year 2050 and 34 cm by the year 2100" per EPA, based on IPCC data. That's about 6-13 inches in 100 years (again, from all melt sources as well as presumably thermal expansion) - a far cry from 1-2 feet in the next few decades from Greenland alone (or the 7 meters Al Gore touts).

Note that EPA also says: "Along most coasts, factors other than anthropogenic climate change will cause the sea to rise more than the rise resulting from climate change alone."

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TimBikes @ Jan 17 2007, 06:26 AM) [snapback]377080[/snapback]</div>

Someone should go up to Greenland right away and inform it that global warming is a myth. That will keep the ice sheet there from melting!

 

well the numbers i see here are old news. a few centimeters a decade?

well, i have also heard that we could be looking to as much as half dozen centimeters a year by 2030.

i dont know how much of this is true because i have researched this issue before and found no scientific data for it, but i have a friend of mine who grew up in Forks, WA. it is on the Olympic Peninsula facing out to the Pacific. they had a beach house. a shack really (ocean front property here is not very valuable. the water is not navigable by small craft and its considered suicide to go for a swim here) they used for camping when he was a kid. he claims that the beach has shrunk from over 100 feet wide to its current state which varies from 20-40 feet wide in the past 30 years or so.

i have been to the shack and it sits up high, but is right on the beach and even at low tides, the water is no more than 30-40 feet. now from all data i have seen, the oceans have only risen something like 3-5 inches. so i discount his story to storms changing the beach or something. but during my random searches, i came across several other people commenting the same thing and claiming no storms were involved. (there were storms...but none were claimed to have any effect of the beaches. ya i know, kinda hard to believe right?)

so in this case, i look at people pointing at something to make a conclusion when in reality there are probably several contributing factors. my same friend when he was younger, the only way his parents would let him go into the water (water temps here are about 45º all year round here... i mean COLD!@!@!) was to tie this tether to him that was attached to a pole that was in the water. he said the pole used to stick out like 4-5 feet and was only like 3-4 feet into the water. well now the pole only sticks about a foot or two out of the water. i attribute a lot of this to everything being bigger when you are a kid. but that is a lot of difference.

 

It could also be the migration of the beach due to currents parallel to the shore. Over time they move a tonne (thousands, actually) of material and if there's not enough material upcurrent then you loose the beach. If you looked north or south there might be more beach in one of those directions. Then again, there might not be depending on the shoreline.

 

Forks is on the open Pacific Ocean. there is no sound, no protected water, no cove, no nothing. that is why its probably the most valueless oceanfront property in the united states. boats cant land there. the current is very swift, the wind unrelenting, the rocks treacherous.

with Forks up against the pacific ocean AND in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, they probably get 200" of rain a year. if you want to see some monster trees, that is the place to go. if you can see 2-3 years of firewood in a single stump, you know you are looking at what was once a BIG tree

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA @ Jan 18 2007, 06:55 PM) [snapback]377530[/snapback]</div>

Sounds like the west coast of Ireland. From the way you describe it it sounds like beach erosion is the more likely candidate. Of course just a few inches of sea level rise would probably submerge a lot of beach. My understanding, though, is that sea level hasn't risen that much in the last 50 yrs.

 

Call it one meter and try this:

Interactive sea level rise map

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tripp @ Jan 18 2007, 08:23 PM) [snapback]377500[/snapback]</div>

Most likely, the loss of beach is due to someone else up-current using rip-rap to protect their section of the coast from erosion. When I lived in Oregon 5 to 10 years ago, I remember hearing that they going to severly restrict the use of rip-rap because it caused erosion to occur in other places.

Rip-rap is the big chunks of rock that they line the shore with to protect the shore from the waves and currents and prevent erosion. The problem is that all along the coast ocean currents sweep sand down the shores. When you stop erosion at one point, that sand from that point that used to be swept down to the beach a couple of miles away stays put instead. That means the beach doesn't get any new sand, but the currents still continue to errode the sand of the beach and sweeps it further along the coast. The result is that the beach shrinks.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva @ Jan 18 2007, 08:58 PM) [snapback]377596[/snapback]</div>

That is an interesting map - however, again, even 1 meter is over 2X what the mean projected sea-level rise IPCC is predicting 100 years hence. Should we take this seriously? Yes - but I would like to see a map configured to IPCC scenarios which again, range from 110 to 770 mm total rise (not 1 to 6 METERS), and not all of which is attributable to anthropogenic causes. Even better would be an interactive map showing projected sea level change due to anthropogenic factors and the resulting differential under different greenhouse gas reduction/mitigation strategies.