Wave good-bye to the Greenland Ice Sheet?
Mike Childs
14 March 2012
On my way to speak at a public meeting in Manchester last I read a new research paper just published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The paper was a reassessment of what level of global temperature increase may lead to the irreversible melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. This matters because if it completely melts sea levels will rise by around 6 metres.
As I've previously written, the consequences of a one metre sea level rise would be extremely difficult for some countries to cope with. Egypt, for example, could lose 13 per cent of its agricultural land, 5.5 per cent of urban areas, and 6.5 per cent of wetlands.
A 6 metre sea level rise would significantly change the global atlas. Here's a neat on-line tool that shows what the physical consequences could be for the UK's coastline.
The new research suggested that with a 1.6 degree global temperature increase irreversible melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet could start. However, the research also suggests that the complete melting of the ice cap may take thousands of years.
It says if global temperatures increase to around 8 degrees centigrade then all the ice may have melted in around 2 thousand years. But if temperatures are kept to 2 degrees centigrade then only around 20 per cent of the ice will have gone in 10,000 years. Clearly the slower the melt rate, the slower the sea level rises - and the longer humans and nature has a chance to adapt.
However, in my view we should try to prevent this irreversible melting if we can. If we don't we will, in effect, have stolen vast areas of land from future generations.
But doing so will not be easy. Global temperatures are already 0.8 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels and rising by roughly 0.2 degrees per decade.
Last year Friends of the Earth published research showing that with herculean efforts to cut emissions across the globe and the rapid development and deployment of new technologies to take carbon pollution out of the air we might just be able to avoid crossing this threshold.
But if we continue to dither and delay on cutting carbon pollution we can kiss good-bye to the Greenland Ice Sheet.
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