Tuesday, November 09, 2010

James Hansen: "I find it almost inconceivable that BAU climate change would not yield a sea level change of the order of meters on the century timescale"

Hansen on reticence and the threat of sea level rise | The Energy Collective
[Hansen] The nonlinearity of the ice sheet problem makes it impossible to accurately predict the sea level change on a specific date. However, as a physicist, I find it almost inconceivable that BAU climate change would not yield a sea level change of the order of meters on the century timescale. The threat of a large sea level change is a principal element in our argument (Hansen et al 2006a, 2006b, 2007) that the global community must aim to keep additional global warming less than 1°C above the 2000 temperature, and even 1°C may be too great. In turn, this implies a CO2 limit of about 450 ppm, or less. Such scenarios are dramatically different than BAU, requiring almost immediate changes to get on a fundamentally different energy and greenhouse gas emissions path..

1 comment:

Athlete said...

I though Hansen's grandchildren were going to fry if CO2 exceeded 350 ppm? Now he is saying 450 ppm. How many times are the warmers going to move the goalposts?