Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Report from AGU meeting: One meter sea level rise by 2100 “very likely” even if warming stops?
Goodell reports that Dr. Eric Rignot, Principal Scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “rocked the house tonight (tues) with his talk on polar ice melt”:
The room was packed, SRO, spilling out into the halls. I only caught the tail end of the talk, unfortunately, but he concluded that one meter sea level rise by 2100 is “very likely” if the rate of ice melt just stays the same, leaving unsaid the fact that it is likely to rise even higher if rate of melt accelerates. Said that the way we are studying ice in the poles today is “like climbing Mt. Everest in tennis shoes,” because our monitoring and measurement is so bad.

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