As the world's ice sheets melt, they cause the Earth's sea levels to rise, putting billions of people at risk for flooding and displacement. The only question is how much time humanity has to arrest climate change and thereby halt or even reverse this process. Now a group of policy experts and researchers known as the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative have released a report that offers a disturbing answer to that question: People have much less time than initially thought.
The report warns that ice sheets and ice shelves are melting much more rapidly than previously believed and concludes that if the average global temperature winds up landing at 2º Celsius above preindustrial levels, sea levels may rise by more than 40 feet.
“We might be reaching these temperature thresholds that we’ve been talking about for a long time sooner than we were thinking about years ago,” Rob DeConto, the director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Earth & Sustainability and an author of the report, told NBC News. He added that thresholds are lower than was first assumed. Even if this outcome is avoided, a certain degree of climate change-caused sea level rise is baked into humanity's future.
"Sea level rise from our past of heat trapping emissions is really baked in for the next few decades," climatologist Dr. Twila Moon, the deputy lead scientist at NASA's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told Salon in August. "We are going to be seeing sea levels rise for the next several decades."
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