The Next Five Years Will Shape Sea-Level Rise For The Next 300, Study Says

All of this has major implications for the global sea-level-rise commitment, the study finds.Emissions today impel rising seas over centuries, the researchers were able to calculate a surprisingly large impact of present choices on sea levels in the distant future.


Researchers were able to calculate a large impact of present choices on sea levels in future. (File)

The world is far off course from its goals in cutting greenhouse gas emissions - and research published Tuesday illustrates one of the most striking implications of this.

Namely, it finds that for every five years in the present that we continue to put off strong action on climate change, the ocean could rise an additional eight inches by the year 2300 - a dramatic illustration of just how much decisions in the present will affect distant future generations.

"One important point was to reveal that sea level [rise] is not in the far future, it's now, and because the system is so slow, we just can't see it at the moment," said Matthias Mengel of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the lead author of the study, which was published in Nature Communications. "But we cause it now."

The study, which also included scientists at institutions in Australia, Austria and Germany, takes as its premise that the world will work to achieve the Paris climate agreement's sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The goal is to limit warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which requires that the world essentially cease adding any more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050 or so.



For every five-year delay in the peaking of emissions, the middle-range sea-level projection for 2300 increased by 20 centimeters, or about eight inches, the study found.

"The more cumulative emissions, the more warming, the more sea level," Mengel explained.

And that's just the central estimate in the study. At the extreme end of what's relatively unlikely but still certainly possible, the research found that each five-year delay could mean as much as an additional meter, or over three feet, of sea-level rise. That is because of the ever-growing chance of major destabilization of the Antarctic ice sheet. In some small number of scenarios, even with the sharp emissions reductions contemplated by the Paris agreement, the Antarctic ice sheet still gives up meters worth of sea-level rise.

"It tells us that we are really uncertain, we don't know enough about the ice sheets," Mengel said.

Eight inches of sea-level rise is about what the planet experienced during the entirety of the 20th century, Mengel said. That itself highlights just how much worse sea-level rise could get in the future, as global warming increasingly warms the oceans (causing them to expand) and melts glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctica.

It is important to note that Mengel's study considers only sea-level rise scenarios that are consistent with the very ambitious goals of the Paris agreement. The world is not at all on a pathway to achieve those goals right now. And even in these rosy scenarios, the study finds that seas could rise by between 2.3 and 4 feet by 2300, or about .75 to 1.33 feet per century.

If we miss the Paris targets, sea-level rise could be far worse.



In that work, a team of scientists with NASA and several institutions in the United States, Norway and the Netherlands found that the southern continent is losing about 183 billion tons of ice per year - thanks in part to an annual increase of 36 billion tons in the amount of total ice released from the continent into the ocean between 2008 and 2015.


"When we compare our current mapping of Antarctica to the one that was done in 2008, we're seeing an acceleration in West Antarctica, very little change in East Antarctica, and very little change in the peninsula overall," said Ted Scambos, an Antarctic expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and one of the study's authors.

The West Antarctic ice loss is 214 billion tons per year on average, annually, Scambos said. An additional 31 billion tons are lost from the Antarctic peninsula, and 61 billion are gained in East Antarctica because of snowfall, according to the scientists' estimates.

It all points to the same conclusion - just where the ocean laps at shorelines experienced by a child in the year 2300 will very much depend on the present, and which pathway we choose to take, at a time when critical decisions about climate change are being made.

"The Paris agreement, it's strict on what can happen," Mengel said. "It bounds our future. . shifts the focus to the next decades."


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