Yet, this could also raise considerable skepticism within the scientific community given that the scenarios portrayed by it for rise in sea level occur even more rapidly than what has been ratified by the UN Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change.
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Major American cities that could be affected are New York City, Boston, Miami and Seattle. Just six feet of water would do this to Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, this to Harvard University in Massachusetts, and this to Galveston, Texas.
Since the melting ice from polar regions will result in cooling ocean surface temperatures while overall global climate continues to warm due to man made greenhouse gas emissions, these extreme temperatures will produce violent and more unpredictable weather.
To come to their findings, the authors used a mixture of paleoclimate records, computer models, and observations of current rates of sea level rise, but “the real world is moving somewhat faster than the model”, Hansen says. The consequences of melting ice sheets will change water circulation patterns and will bring more fresh and cold water into the world’s oceans.
Later in the alarmist segment, Axelrod played a clip of Hansen’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes a decade ago in which he suggested climate change “will be a situation that is out of our control”. In a wide-ranging December 2013 study, conducted to support Our Children’s Trust, a group advancing legal challenges to lax greenhouse gas emissions policies on behalf of minors, Hansen called for a “human tipping point”-essentially, a social revolution-as one of the most effective ways of combating climate change, though he still favors a bilateral carbon tax agreed upon by the United States and China as the best near-term climate policy. That’s why this year is a critical year”. That dire prediction, in Hansen’s view, requires “emergency cooperation among nations”. A leading climate scientist recently warned that sea levels are rising at a more rapid rate than previously expected. This suggests that a non-linear process is involved, meaning an up to 10 foot sea level rise in the next 50 to 200 years.
AXELROD: James Hansen co-authored the new journal article raising that alarming scenario.
JAMES HANSEN: This is the biggest threat that the planet faces.
“If we get sea level rise of several meters, all coastal cities become dysfunctional”, he said.
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“There’s plenty of reason to worry about sea level rise, but I don’t see 10 feet happening by end of century”, says Joughin.
