Irreversible Warming Will Cause Sea Levels to Rise for Thousands of Years to Come, New Research Show

[xchrom]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001191531.htm

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ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2012) — Greenhouse gas emissions up to now have triggered an irreversible warming of Earth that will cause sea levels to rise for thousands of years to come, new research has shown.

The results come from a study, published today (Oct. 2) in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, which sought to model sea-level changes over millennial timescales, taking into account all of Earth's land ice and the warming of the oceans -- something which has not been done before.

The research showed that we have already committed ourselves to a sea-level rise of 1.1 metres by the year 3000 as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions up to now. This irreversible damage could be worse, depending on the route we take to mitigating our emissions.

If we were to follow the high A2 emissions scenario adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a sea-level rise of 6.8 metres could be expected in the next thousand years. The two other IPCC scenarios analysed by the researchers, the B1 and A1B scenarios, yielded sea-level rises of 2.1 and 4.1 metres respectively.

[pscot]

1. At the present increasing melt rate

the ice won't last thousands of years.

[AverageJoe90]

5. Greenland's may not, unfortunately. nt

[CRH]

2. The model seems a bit conservative to me, ...

It seems the carbon already spent in the atmosphere, will take care of the Greenland ice sheet and with the feedbacks probably Antarctica as well. That with the expansion of warming ocean water should raise sea levels much more and much sooner.

Me thinks decades not centuries.

[AverageJoe90]

4. Sea level rise will be bad, but unless something else gets involved(HAARP?), I don't think so.

[AverageJoe90]

3. Not quite buying the 'irreversible warming' part.

Most of this article was decent, but it does bother me that they say that it's not reversible like it's etched in stone, when it is only a dubious theory, at best.
It is indeed true that the ice sheets may indeed take some centuries to recover but that doesn't mean global warming can't be reversed. In fact, there is scientific research that says otherwise, and some of it doesn't involve these silly pie-in-the-sky geo-engineering fantasies that have been going around.

On the other hand, to be perfectly honest, and this may seem a tad ironic to some, I think their sea-level rise predictions are way too optimistic.......