Fire and Flood by Eugene Linden

Author:Eugene Linden [Linden, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141999975
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2022-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Now it is twenty years later, and a good question for a public opinion expert might be how many people now see climate change as a bigger danger than the Soviets posed during the Cold War.

In that first decade of the 2000s, the Arctic saw the most dramatic changes in climate. Scientists, prominently Jennifer Francis, then at Rutgers and now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, explored how these changes in circulatory patterns might impact the lower latitudes. She didn’t have to wait long to find confirmation for most of her predictions as persistent cold spells (misleadingly dubbed “polar vortexes”), heat waves, and droughts became hallmarks of midlatitude life in North America during the very next decade, as did their connection to the extreme changes in the northern cryosphere.

Nor did scientists who were worried about the stability of the ice sheets have to wait long to see whether their shrinkage would contribute to sea level rise. A study done by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas in 2006 found that the Greenland Ice Sheet was melting twice as fast as previously estimated based on satellite data going back to 1996. Later that year another study out of the University of Texas confirmed the acceleration, and subsequent studies out of the University of Bristol documented a further acceleration of the melting of the ice sheet in the years following 2006. The message of these studies was that Greenland was melting and the melting was accelerating.

As for Antarctica, melting and iceberg calving from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were already contributing to sea level rise, although the question of how much would, in 2007, become a cause célèbre. Subsequent analysis showed that melting from all the ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) contributed between about 1.3 and 1.5 millimeters of sea level rise in 2006. This doesn’t sound like much, but total sea level rise that year was roughly 3 millimeters, meaning that the ice sheets were contributing more than 40 percent of that increase.

This set the stage for some real drama over the next year as scientists and policymakers prepared to release the fourth IPCC assessment in 2007. By this point, most scientists agreed that sea level was rising about three times as fast as during most of the previous century, that the rate of sea level rise was accelerating, and that melting from the ice sheets was a significant factor in both the rate of sea level rise and the acceleration of the rate. On top of that, the consensus was that the rate of sea level rise would continue to accelerate; credible arguments that it would slow or level off were exceedingly difficult to find.

So how did the fourth assessment Summary for Policymakers treat sea level? It lowered its upper estimate of sea level rise from 88 centimeters in the previous assessment, published in 2001, to 59 centimeters. Both the 2001 and 2007 upper estimates for sea level were lower than the upper estimate of the first assessment in 1990.

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