Dramatic Greenland Ice Sheet Melt This Week Actually Raises Sea Level

Via Rolling Stone/Getty Images: Melting ice this week in Greenland.

As expected, that heat wave in Europe last week moved into Greenland over the past couple of days, which is definitely not a good thing.

Temperatures there are 25 to 30 degrees above normal, with some low elevation places up there in Greenland reaching the 70s. In the middle and peak of the Greenland ice sheet, at an elevation of 10,551 feet,  it managed to get above freezing for 11 hours on Tuesday, which is extremely rare, the Washington Post reports. (In the height of summer, Summit, Greenland's normal high temperatures are just in the low teens, believe it or not.) 

The Greenland melt down this week could well be the worst in recorded history, probably besting the benchmark great melt of 2012. Rolling Stone reported that some melting occured on 87 percent of the Greenland ice sheet on Tuesday, before the peak of the heat wave.  By the way, I know Rolling Stone is primarily a music magazine, but they've gotten into some very good political and climate change reporting in recent years.

Before, say, the 1980s, it was very rare for most of the ice sheet to be melting simultaneously, though of course parts of it would experience some melting on the warmer days of summer. Still, the amount of ice lost on Greenland in the summer was always balanced by accumulations of new snow and ice during the winter.

Not any longer. Unlike ice in the Arctic ocean, which melts like ice cubes in a glass and doesn't affect sea levels, Greenlands meltwater runs off and contributes to global sea level rises.

Says Rolling Stone:  "This week alone, Greenland will lose about 50 billion tons of ice, enough for a permanent rise in global sea levels by about 0.1 mm"

Yes, that's only 0.004 of an inch, so that alone you won't notice. But as glaciers worldwide melt and Greenland continues to shed ice, and Antarctica begins to thaw, too, you can see how 0.0004 of an inch in a week can add up to a lot of sea level rise over the course of several decades.

There's more meltwater coming off of Greenland. The Washington Post said 197 billion tons of ice melted from Greenland and flowed into the ocean during the month of July.  

Of course in Greenland, like everywhere else, the warming won't be consistently this bad, and not every year will have such great melt downs. They're just becoming more frequent. In some years, like 2017 and 2018, Greenland experiences chilly summers, so on those occasions, there is very little net ice loss from the ice sheet, as the Category 6 blog notes.

But studies show that Greenland melts like the one in 2012 happen on average only once in 250 years, the Washington Post says. That another one is occuring now, just seven years later, is worrisome.

This much melt exposes older snow and ice to the sun. The older ice has bits of soot and dirt and such in it, so it's darker. That will draw in more of the sun's heat, and contribute to even more melting. That would happen before the melting season shuts down in the early autumn, or would happen again if this winter's new snow melts and exposes the old ice again.

Sea Level Rise Might Be Worse Than We Thought

Water from melting flows off the Greenland
Ice Sheet. Recent research suggests ice
sheet melting in Greenland and
Antarctica might be worse than first thought. 

The science shifts a little from time to time as to how bad sea level rise is going to get with global warming. The latest study is mostly bad news on this front.

The latest salvo in this discussion is a new study that says melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are now speeding up the process.

Global warming causes sea levels to rise in two ways: Warmer water expands. When the water heats up, it gets "bigger" meaning it has nowhere to go but up.

The other way sea levels rise is more obvious: Land based ice sheets melt, and the meltwater eventually makes its way to the oceans. Hence, higher water.

The latest research says the pace of sea level rise has picked up over the past 25 years mostly because of the melting ice sheets.

According to The Weather Channel:

"Of the 3 inches of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from leting ice. But the process is accelerating, and more than three quarters of that acceleration since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland an Antartica, the study shows."

The bottom line is that by the year 2100, sea levels could rise by two feet, instead of the one foot projections we've commonly heard are due by the end of the century.

One big wild card in all this is probably Antarctica. Will big parts of it keep melting faster and faster? Or will increased snowfall over that continent at the bottom of the Earth offset some of the melt. It tends to snow more when it's warmer, as long as it's not above freezing. A warmer Antarctic climate could increase snowfall. On top of that, some sort of natural cycle has increased snowfall in Antarctica over the past 10,000 years.

A NASA study, using satellite analysis, says the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001. That rate slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

It's possible this net gain trend will reverse itself in coming decades. Plus, everybody knows that parts of Antarctica are indeed showing a melting trend. And other research, including the new work I described above, contradicts the NASA findings.

As you can see, scientists really need to continue figuring out Antarctica and how it relates to climate change.

Meanwhile, things are worse in some areas than others. Changing sea currents and sinking land in some parts of the U.S. East Coast are making things worse. After sinking land amid rising sea levels can never be a good thing.

The combined land sinking and sea level rise means that the sea level in the past 100 years has shown a net gain of 11 inches in New York and Boston, 16 inches in Atlantic City, 18 inches in Norfolk, Virginia and 25 inches in Galveston, Texas.

While some of the research is still a little murky, one thing is clear: It's only going to get worse.

Antarctic Sea Ice Is Having A Rough Year, Too

A mountain near the western coast of Antarctica with a fractured
ice shelf to the left of it on the water. Ice shelves
are deteriorating in Antarctica, and that could mean
more global sea level rises. 

We've been watching the Arctic sea ice extent off and on all year in this here blog thingy because it's been struggling along at record lows, or near record lows most of the time.

That's not good news, of course, because the sea ice up there has been diminishing for decades, thanks in large part to global warming. That ice loss, in turn, might screw up northern hemispheric weather patterns.

For the record, the Arctic sea ice minimum for the season did not set a record low as some people expected, but after a quick start to the re-freeze season up there in September, lots of warm air has pushed into the Arctic in October, so the re-freeze has slowed down to a disconcerting crawl. 

There's a chance, perversely, that the low sea ice extent might be partly responsible for changes in the jet stream that have brought occasionally brutally cold and snowy winters to parts of North America and western Europe.

And now, let's take a look at the Antarctic, where things this year are not going so great, either. Ice extent there is among the lowest on record, which is a switch because the overall trend has been for increased ice extent around the Antarctic in recent decades.

Oh sure, some of the outer ice shelves have been eroding dangerously, but the overall sea ice has expanded somewhat, thanks to atmospheric circulation changes that caused upwelling of colder water around Antarctica that have promoted more easily freezable waters, notes Bob Henson at Weather Underground. 

Also, summertime melt water has increased from the Antarctic continent, reducing the salinity of the ocean water around there, making it easier to freeze.

This year, though, brought another shift in the weather patterns around Antarctica. It might be a one year deal, but it did break down the ice at the bottom of the Earth, that's for sure.

It remains to be seen if this year's low Antarctic ice extent is a one year shot, or the beginning of a trend.

A more worrisome development around Antarctica is the stability of the ice shelves.

Warmer ocean water seems to be chewing up the undersides of ice shelves along the coasts of Antarctica. These ice shelves act as dams that keep glaciers in place, or at least slow them down so they move at, um, a glacial pace down Antarctic slopes.

In the past, there's been basically an equilibrium. Some glacial ice makes it to the ocean and melts, but new ice is manufactured in the cold Antarctic interior, so all was good.

Since the ice shelves are melting more, that opens the door for the glaciers to move faster, going off into the sea and eventually melting.

The ice that comes down from the land and ends up in the ocean to melt is bad, because that contributes to global sea level rises. The new ice manufacturing process in Antarctica's interior can't keep up with the ice loss created by the newly speedy glaciers.

The problem can keep escalating because the more ice at the bottom of the ice shelf melts, the more is exposed to the warmer ocean water, and the melting just rolls on.

Still, the melting might have recently slowed a little bit, at least temporarily. The most intense ice shelf melting in Antarctica seems to have occurred between 2002 and 2009, notes NPR.

Even so, the fear is the melting will continue and the ice shelves in coastal Antarctic waters will collapse entirely, and the glaciers will flow toward the sea in a gallop. A gallop by glacial standards anyway.

That, in turn would accelerate sea level rises.

So yeah, people in toasty Miami and countless other coastal locations ought to care about what's going on in Antarctica. 

Jim Hansen Says Your Favorite Coastal Cities Are Going To Drown

If sea levels rise substantially with climate change
what do we do with this big South Florida neighborhood?  

This hasn't been the greatest week in climate change news.

We learned, as I noted Tuesday, that June, 2015 was the hottest on record, according to NOAA. And this year has a strong chance of being the hottest on record, beating the mark set last year.

Then former NASA chief climatologist Jim Hansen came along to really put people in a bad mood. For good reason, too.

Hansen is the guy in 1988 who brought climate change to the national conversation during congressional testimony during that hot summer.

Climate change has been, pardon the pun, a hot button issue ever since.

Hansen's science and general predictions since then about global warming have been spot on, but he's got a lot of people hoping he's totally wrong about how sea levels will change as the planet warms.

He says sea levels will rise by about 10 feet by 2100, much faster than outfits like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC project. The IPCC has been saying the sea level rise would be something like three feet by the year 2100.

Many coastal cities tend to be just a few feet above sea level now, so you can see how a rise three times as much as current predictions would be a HUGE problem.

Here's how The Daily Beast put it as they described Hansen's latest research and comments on sea levels

"This roughly 10 feet of sea level rise - well beyond previous estimates - would render coastal cities such as New York, London and Shanghai uninhabitable. 'Parts of (our coastal cities) would still be sticking above the water,' Hansen says, 'but you couldn't live there.'"

We've heard these dire warnings about coastal cities and sea level rises again and again as we talk about global warming.

What's different here is Hansen says this coastal inundation will come much sooner than previous research projected.

Hansen's work indicates Earth's ice is melting faster and the oceans are getting higher much faster than expected.

If Hansen and the 16 other scientists he worked with on this are  right, it would be much harder than expected to buttress coastal cities against the rising tides. And they'd have to do it much faster.

It would cost untold billions of dollars to do this, and the faster you have to raise that kind of money, the harder it is.

As the Daily Beast noted, Hansen's work might throw a monkey wrench into the big United Nationsl climate summit in Paris this coming December.

The goal there is to limit Earth's warming to 2 degrees Celcius, but Hansen says even an increase of 2 degrees would be catastrophic, especially for coastal areas.

So, will everybody at the summit just give up and say we can't fix this and to hell with it? Who knows?

CAVEATS

There are some caveats to this Jim Hansen bombshell. The research isn't peer-reviewed yet, having been published in an open access journal in which peer review takes place after publication, not before.

It will be a while yet to see whether other scientists poke holes in Hansen's conclusions after they review it.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, a guy not shy about warning about the dangers of climate change, said he is a little skeptical of Hansen's assumptions that melting of ice shelves will accelerate constantly with time.

Might there be slowdowns in the rate of ice warming? We don't know. Still, Mann said Hansen's research is good in that it puts out provocative ideas for other scientists and policy makers to chew over.

It'll be interesting to see how well Hansen's research holds up under scrutiny. As I noted, he does have a track history of being very accurate with his work.


RISING TIDE IN SOUTH FLORIDA

If Hansen is right, one place that's particularly screwed if Hansen is right is South Florida

The Globe and Mail had a piece  about the trouble the southern tip of Florida is in if sea levels rise even slower than Hansen and his buddies suggest:

"Few places are as geographically ill-equipped to deal with rising water as southern Florida. Not only is much of the land barely a few feet above sea level, it also sits on a bed of porous limestone and sand, maked measures such as dikes far less effective.

Higher sea levels would eat away at the barrier islands that buffer the coast against powerful storms - which is hugely problematic, given that more powerful storms are one of the hallmarks of climate change. The rising water also threatens to slip inland and contaminate the wells that provide much of the region's drinking water."

Even for people in South Florida who live above the level that water is projected to rise to, they're still screwed. Yes, the house might be above water, says Harold Wanless, chair of the Department of Geological Science at the University of Miami.

But Winless said, sewage services are kaput, there might not be electricity, and the roads to and from this house might be under water. Sounds lovely, no?

Eventually, a lot of people are going to have to abandon South Florida. They're still building seaside condos and shopping centers and entertainment places like mad. So what happens to all that when the water rises?

As the Globe and Mail points out, what if insurance companies stop covering these at-risk properties? It you can't insure your house or building, it's basically worthless.

If people abandon lots and lots of threatened property, then what? Are banks left on the hook for abandoned mortgages? What happens to commerce in what's left of the area. Where do you put all the people who leave South Florida? Will there be severe economic ripple effects throughout the nation?

If Jim Hensen is right, things are going to get very VERY messy in the coming decades. And not just with the climate and sea levels alone.

Antarctic Hot Spell Gets The Headlines, But The Real Trouble Is In The Ice

Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the
Antarctic Pennisula just recorded what might be
the warmest temperature on record for
Antarctica. But that's not the
real danger in Antarctica if the world warms.
Thawing ice sheets could cause big problems.  

The climate world was abuzz last week with news that Antarctica had its warmest temperature on record.

Readings of 63.5 degrees were reported at Base Esperanza and 63.3 degrees at Marambio, says Christopher Burt at Weather Underground. 

Both weather stations are on the Antarctic Pennisula, which juts north toward the warmer environments of the southern tip of South America.

The standing record for Antarctica was 59 degrees at Vando in 1974, which is definitely closer to the South Pole than the stations that had readings in the 60s last week.

There's no question that the hot temperatures Esperanza and Marambio were highly unusual for Antarctica.

Since records are spotty and don't go back all that far on Antarctica, and not many people are there to monitor the weather there, there's a good possibility it has been hotter than that 63.5 degrees last week.

The bottom line: If you're talking about those warm temperatures in the context of global warming, it's interesting, but doesn't tell you all that much about it.

A little more buried in the headlines, though, was something more ominous, at least in the long term.

Last year we learned that the West Antarctic ice sheet, a huge mass of ice down there, was less stable than originally thought. As warmng ocean water infiltrates underneath it, the ice sheet could eventually collapse, allowing masses of ice on land to flow toward the oceans and melt.

This would raise sea levels substantially around the world, which of course is not a good thing, especially if you live in a coastal city just a few feet above sea level.

Now, we learn the even bigger, gigantic glacier of East Antarctica is also under the same threat of collapse, says the Washington Post. 

Again, warm ocean water is getting beneath the East Antarctica ice sheet, especially the ice shel of the Totten Glacier, thinning it from below.

Says the Washington Post:

"The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It is losing an amount of ice 'equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbor every year,' notes the Australian Antarctic Division."

That's alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet - which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that's a 'conservative lower limit' says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin."

If ice floating on the ocean melts, it's not THAT big a deal in terms of sea level. If ice floating on the ocean melts, it's like an ice cube melting in a glass. The glass doesn't overflow when the ice melts.

But the ice floating on the ocean on the West and East Antartica Ice shelves is holding back masses and masses of ice on land. If the ice shelves melt, the ice from the land moves toward and into the ocean and melts.

That's why the scientists studying this thing are worried about sea levels rising.

Of course, the combined 22 feet of sea level rise from melting the West and East Antartica ice won't happen by, say, Friday. This will go on over decades and centuries, and be a big problem for future generations.  Greenland in the northern hemisphere is melting, too, so that adds to the sea level rise.

The immediate problem is, a little bit of sea level rise can cause big problems.

Gradually, coastal areas will see increased flooding, erosion from storms and salt water intrusion from sea water on fresh water supplies increase. It's already starting to happen. Just ask anyone in Miami, Florida or Virginia Beach/Norfolk, Virginia, for instance, about the increasing number of floods during many high tides.

As is always the case with these types of scientific studies, experts are going to have to do a lot more poking and prodding and questioning and replicating to make sure the conclusions about the East Antarctica ice shelf melting are true.

Nobody has yet physically gotten any equipment into the water beneath the ice shelf to confirm that it's warming as much as they think it is, and the ice is going as fast as they think it is. Instruments and observations do confirm there is a thinning of the ice, but scientists need to refine the measurements more.

Scientists are busily getting on with that work, we're told.

Polar Bears, Halloween And South Florida: A Couple Of Weird Global Warming News Items

Global warming has helped change migration
routes for polar bears, prompting a Canadian town
to ban door to door trick or treating.  

Global warming, or concerns about it, keep taking on odd manifestations in the news.

Lately, I'm hearing about polar bear scares, Halloween, and maybe the 51st state of South Florida.

Let's start with the Halloween polar bears.

Way up north in Canada, in the little town of Arviat, on the cold northwest short of Hudson Bay, the kids won't be going door to door trick or treating on Halloween.

Instead of fake ghosts and goblins scaring the kids, and the whole town, it's real live polar bears.

Polar bears never used to be a problem in Arviat, although they've always lived in the region. However, there's a lot less ice near the western shore of Hudson Bay then there was years ago.

The polar bears used to migrate this time of year on that ice, because the seals they eat are on the edge of that ice. But since it's not there anymore, they migrate through, or at least much closer to the town of Arviat these days, says Eric Holthaus, writing in Slate.

Hudson Bay has warmed by about three degrees Celsius since the 1990s, and scientists blame most of the hotter Hudson Bay on global warming.

An article in Men's Journal says many people in Arviat are afraid of being mauled by these hungry bears, and there have been a number of close misses already.

From Slate:

"'Picture 1,200 kids going door to door in Arviat in the middle of polar bear season,' Steve England, the town's senior administrative officer, told the CBC. 'It's a pretty obvious conclusion of what tragedies could come out of that.'"

So, the kids of Arviat will have a Halloween party indoors at a community center this year, which frankly isn't as great in my mind as trick or treating.

Nobody will dress up as a seal for Halloween in Arviat this year, that's for sure. And it's a weird thing to say, but the town's Halloween has been cancelled, or at least modified, because of global warming.

Now, we'll leave the Great White North for the palm trees and tropical breezes of South Florida.

High tide in Miami: Sea level rise means
high tide now often reaches the streets,
 even when there is no storm.  

The city of South Miami, which is of course in South Florida, passed a resolution recently calling for Florida to be split into two states, with the nation's 51st state becoming South Florida, says the Sun Sentinel newspaper. 

South Miami's Vice Mayor, Walter Harris, said lawmakers in Florida's state capitol of Tallahassee isn't providing South Florida with proper representation or addressing its concerns when it comes to rising sea levels.

South Florida is on very low ground and rising sea levels have already started to cause flooding during normal tides. There hasn't been a hurricane there in years, so what happens when a storm surge blasts in with the higher seas?

They're going to have to figure out how to deal with rising sea levels, and some people in South Florida think the state isn't doing enough.

"It's very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean," said South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard. "They've made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that."

Part of the frustration in South Florida probably has to do with Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who won't even say whether he believes humans are contributing to climate change and sea level rise. Scott is locked in a tight race for re-election against Charlie Crist, who does say humans are changing the climate and we have to adapt to the changes it's causing.

So yes, climate change is now affecting politics in any number of ways.

Like other little secessionist or state-splitting rumblings in the United States (See: California, Texas, Vermont) I don't think this South Florida idea will go far.

Drown Your City: What Extreme Sea Level Rise Would Look Like

One of biggest threats from global climate change is the rise of sea levels. Since most people around the world live in coastal cities, this is a big problem, since global warming would swamp most of the world's biggest population centers.

Lower Manhattan if the sea level rose by 262 feet  

Andrew David Thaler is a North Carolina marine biologist who runs the Southern Fried Science site

In it, he uses GIS modeling and Google Earth images of cities to show how badly they'd be underwater if sea levels rose by 80 meters, or about 262 feet.

That's the most extreme prediction of how much sea levels would rise if the world were continue to warm through the burning of fossil fuel.

So yes, these are worst case scenarios, but it's still interesting to see what would happen. Judging from the images, it's clear that even if we are to fall well short of the biggest sea level increases due to warming, we'd still be in big trouble.

Washington DC after a 262 foot sea level rise  

Images in this post are Thaler's renderings of what an 80 meter, or 262 foot rise in sea level would mean in selected cities.

The images are crudely rendered, but you can really see how under water some areas will get.

This assumes major ice sheets, like on Greenland, Antarctic and elsewhere melt.

Obviously, even if global warming is worse than even the most extreme predictions, sea level rises won't get this bad any time soon.

We won't see it in our lifetime, anyway.

However, though we won't see any apocalyptic views that are apparently in Thaler's work, any sea level rise due to global climate change would be bad.

San Franciso after an 80 foot sea level rise

Some scientists have said we've already "locked in" four feet of sea level rise through global warming and that will come in the next few decades. So any storm that comes along will flood coastal cities more than they do now.

That means a run of the mill storm that causes minor coastal flooding in cities now would cause massive destruction in the future if the same sized storm hit.  

And we don't need anything like last year's Hurricane Sandy again.