“I personally am not planning to tell people that I know what [amount of warming determines if] ice shelves will or won’t break off, leaving cliffs that will or won’t crumble rapidly, so, for now, I have to leave large, rapid changes within my error bars, and I believe I have a duty to tell people this.” Richard Alley in an email to Jeff Goodell
It’s all about the water. In this case, water in it’s frozen form, at the southern pole in Antarctica.
If you don’t follow Jeff Goodell, who is an environmental writer for Rolling Stone, you should. He even wrote a book on sea level rise which is the topic of this diary.
In a piece titled What’s Another Way to Say “We’re F-cked”, Goodell highlights the work of top climate scientist, Richard Alley. Alley is not your typical brilliant climate scientist, he takes it a step further with skill sets that his contemporaries take seriously.
Richard Alley is not a fringe character in the world of climate change. In fact, he is widely viewed as one of the greatest climate scientists of our time. If there is anyone who understands the full complexity of the risks we face from climate change, it’s Alley. And far from being alarmist, Alley is known for his careful, rigorous science. He has spent most of his adult life deconstructing past Earth climates from the information in ice cores and rocks and ocean sediments. And what he has learned about the past, he has used to better understand the future.
For a scientist of Alley’s stature to say that he can’t rule out 15 or 20 feet of sea-level rise in the coming decades is mind-blowing. And it is one of the clearest statements I’ve ever heard of just how much trouble we are in on our rapidly warming planet (and I’ve heard a lot — I wrote a book about sea-level rise).
To judge how radical this is, compare Alley’s numbers to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released on Monday. That report basically argued that if we don’t get to zero carbon emissions by 2050, we have very little chance of avoiding 1.5 Celsius of warming, the threshold that would allow us to maintain a stable climate. The report projected that with 2 Celsius of warming, which is the target of the Paris Climate Agreement, the range of sea level rise we might see by the end of the century is between about one and three feet.
So why is Alley arguing that the risk of catastrophic sea-level rise is so much higher than the report that is often cited as “the gold standard” of climate science?
The below video shows Richard Alley in a Skype chat with his students. He speaks the truth what others fear to say publicly. Alley does not claim that rapid sea level rise by such an extreme will happen before 2100 is a certainty, but there is a risk. So we can’t rule it out, however, and that should scare the beejeebus out of all of us. Including, the climate change deniers that live inland or do not inhabit a Mediterranean environment who delude themselves that horrifying changes will only happen to people somewhere else.
x xVimeo VideoGoodell continues:
For one thing, IPCC reports are notoriously conservative. They are written in collaboration with a large group of scientists and are often watered down by endless debate and consensus-building. (There are 18 lead authors and 69 contributing authors on the chapter that considers sea-level rise.) For another, they rely on published science that is often out of date — or at least, far from the cutting edge. The new IPCC report has already been criticized for low-balling risks by climatologists like Penn State’s Michael Mann, who has pointed out that the report understates the amount of warming we’ve already experienced as a result of burning fossil fuels, which means that we are much closer to the 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius thresholds than the report implies.
Alley simply has a broader understanding of ice dynamics than many scientists, who tend to be highly specialized in their research. Alley’s analysis includes not only geology and paleoclimatology, but also a big dose of physics and engineering — which is especially helpful when it comes to understanding the possibility of rapid ice sheet collapse. (To help me visualize how quickly ice cliffs on Antarctic glaciers can disintegrate, Alley sent me a video of a 1978 landslide in Norway.) In the IPCC report, “tipping points” in the climate system, such as ice-cliff collapse, are either disregarded or buried deep in the 1,000-page document.
This is a brief overview of ice sheet collapse.
As someone who is fascinated with glacier porn, I wanted to share this video that Alley sent to Goodell via email, publicly, and not just as an embedded link as it is in the above blockquote.
It is, what Alley visualizes will happen to the high ice cliffs in West Antarctica. JFC it’s scary.
The video is from a clay landslide taken in 1978 in Norway. The film is grainy, but that was the technology at the time.
x xYouTube VideoAlley along with all other climate scientists state that it is critical to hold warming to 1.5C. Let’s hope we have not passed that threshold already.