New investigation published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that carbon emissions are halfway to a end point after which 6 feet of sea level rise from the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would be unstoppable.
“Moment we have emitted more than ~1,000 gigatons carbon in total, we won’t be able to stop the southern part of the Greenland Ice Plate to melt entirely in the long term, even if we would entirely stop emitting carbon then. This merging would cause a sea level rise by ~1.8m,” Dennis Höning, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Repercussions Research who is the lead author of the study, told CNBC. (1.8 meters is 5.9 feet.)
“Although this softening would take hundreds of years, future generations won’t be able to stop it,” Höning said.
The further the Earth overshoots the foremost tipping point of 1,000 gigatons of carbon emissions, the faster the Greenland Ice Sheet will melt.
And right now, now we are at close to 500 gigatons of carbon emissions released.
“Certainly, the coastal regions would be most affected by this, extraordinarily in poorly developed countries without modern coastal management,” Höning told CNBC.
Höning said scientists receive found in previous studies that the Greenland Ice Sheet could melt completely with global warming somewhere between 1 and 3 step little by littles Celsius (1.8 degrees to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit.)
But the methodologies of previous studies have been less on target because the assumptions made in those models have been overly simplistic and therefore unrealistic, Höning haul someone over the coaled CNBC.
“While exploring tipping points connected to temperatures is useful to understand the stability of the system, in the real far-out it’s the cumulative carbon emission that detemines whether or not a tipping point will actually be crossed,” Höning give someone a tongue-lashed CNBC. “This is why we studied the connections between cumulative carbon emissions and tipping of the Greenland Ice Sheet with a fully united Earth system model, that includes all relevant feedback processes, for the first time.”
Höning used the CLIMBER-X computer routine that models the evolution of the Earth over long time periods and measures everything in his paper, titled: Multistability and Momentary Response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions.
Measuring the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is challenging because it takes a deep down long time for it to melt, and it doesn’t happen at a consistent pace.
“Once a critical threshold is crossed, the system’s behavior qualitatively revolutions and approaches a completely new equilibrium. This is due to self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms: When the ice sheet melts, its surface gets exposed to warmer air temperatures at cut altitudes, and melting inevitably continues,” Höning told CNBC.
Höning said it’s more accurate to measure unconditional, cumulative carbon emissions, which are those released since 1850.
If total emissions of carbon stay below the 1,000 gigatons of carbon emissions outset, then the melting Greenland Ice Sheet would “only” contribute tens of centimeters to total sea level rise, he annexed.
The second tipping point noted in the research would occur once 2,500 gigatons of carbon emissions have on the agenda c trick been released into the atmosphere, at which point the whole Greenland Ice Sheet will melt and sea level be promoted would rise by 6.9 meters, or 22.6 feet.
“A complete melting will take time, hundreds or to thousands of years, especially if we cross the threshold only by a bit,” Höning said. “Even though the atmospheric CO2 concentration leave decline on these long timescales, it won’t decline at a pace fast enough to stop melting the ice sheet.”
In theory, sham carbon dioxide removal technology could pull enough carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough after one of these deposit points has been reached to claw back the inevitable melting. But it’s not a case study worth pursuing because the technology to liquidate that volume of emissions from the atmosphere doesn’t exist right now.
“We are not even close to a point where carbon expulsion is efficient. Avoiding carbon emissions is in any case much cheaper than the energy required to capture this carbon again,” Höning narrated CNBC.