Even the Ambitious Climate Targets Will Cause Ice Loss ‘Well Beyond the Limits of Adaptation’

Even the Ambitious Climate Targets Will Cause Ice Loss ‘Well Beyond the Limits of Adaptation’

When it comes to the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, no news (well, almost no news) is good news these days. There are good arguments that the sheer potential to remake the entire map of the world, known in relatively clear terms for decades now, represents the single biggest and strangest failure of climate policy — how, given the stakes, have we collectively failed to act for so long? And now, a new study finds that the general attitude that can explain it away — sure the ice will melt, but not now — is pretty misguided itself.

Even the 1.5-degree Celsius target in the Paris Agreement, which most scientists now say is likely an impossible reach, would be “too high” for the ice sheets survival. And in fact, even the current degree of warming, of about 1.2 degrees C above preindustrial levels, “if sustained, is likely to generate several metres of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations.” That’s from US and UK researchers, writing in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, this week. It’s not great.

They combined several lines of research, and attempted to answer the question of what, exactly, is a “safe limit” for the ice sheets. The result: it’s probably behind us, more in the range of 1.0 degrees C of warming or so.

At that level, we could probably avoid a rapid acceleration of sea level rise, where rates exceed about one centimeter per year. Beyond that rate, things get hairy, and we’d be looking at “displacing hundreds of millions of people and causing loss and damage well beyond the limits of adaptation.” The 1.0-degree limit is consistent with what scientists were calling for three or four decades ago, when keeping the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 ppm was a semi-reasonable goal; it’s across 420 ppm now.

In short, the ice is on its way out, and without a truly remarkable reversal the type of sea level rise people imagined might occur in some distant millennium is on its way in — soon. And when that starts happening? From one of the study’s authors, according to The Guardian: “You’re going to see massive land migration on scales that we’ve never witnessed in modern civilization.”

 
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