lightblueline

In a report just released from the National Academy of Sciences, NASA researchers (and lightblueline painter, Dr. David Lea) are warning that the Earth may be on the brink of a climate not seen for a million years--a time when the oceans were 80 feet higher than today. "We conclude that global warming of more than 1°C, relative to 2000, will constitute "dangerous" climate change as judged from likely effects on sea level and extermination of species."

On SEA LEVEL RISE (the focus of lightblueline) they have the following to say [please refer to the original for footnotes]: "Sea level implications of BAU [business as usual] and AS [alternative scenario] scenarios can be considered in two parts: equilibrium (long-term) sea level change and ice sheet response time. Global warming [less than] 1°C in AS keeps temperatures near the peak of the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years. Sea level may have been a few meters higher than today in some of those periods (10). In contrast, sea level was 25–35 m higher the last time that the Earth was 2–3°C warmer than today, i.e., during the Middle Pliocene about three million years ago (32).

Ice sheet response time can be investigated from paleoclimate evidence, but inferences are limited by imprecise dating of climate and sea level changes and by the slow pace of weak paleoclimate forcings compared with stronger rapidly increasing human-made forcings. Sea level rise lagged tropical temperature by a few thousand years in some cases (28), but in others, such as Meltwater Pulse 1A 14,000 years ago (33), sea level rise and tropical temperature increase were nearly synchronous. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (10) assumes negligible contribution to 2100 sea level change from loss of Greenland and Antarctic ice, but that conclusion is implausible (17, 34). BAU warming of 2–3°C would bathe most of Greenland and West Antarctic in melt-water during lengthened melt seasons. Multiple positive feedbacks, including reduced surface albedo, loss of buttressing ice shelves, dynamical response of ice streams to increased melt-water, and lowered ice surface altitude would assure a large fraction of the equilibrium ice sheet response within a few centuries, at most (34).

Sea level rise could be substantial even in the AS, 1 m per century, and cause problems for humanity due to high population in coastal areas (10). However, AS problems would be dwarfed by the disastrous BAU, which could yield sea level rise of several meters per century with eventual rise of tens of meters, enough to transform global coastlines."

Read the whole article here:

Global Temperature Change

Read the ABC article about this report:

Earth Headed for Warmest Temps in a Million Years