Antarctica might raise sea levels more than we thought

The West Antarctic is currently chucking a load of ice into the ocean, adding rapidly to sea levels.

And now, three new scientific studies have shown that the ice sheets may be more sensitive to warming than previously thought. These new findings could revise our sea level rise estimates upwards.

I spoke to Dr Alex Bradley, who was involved in two of these new studies, about what this means, and why it doesn’t mean we should give up on climate action. Speaking of which...

**What can I do?**

Here are some ideas:

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Contents:

00:00 - Intro
00:32 - Sea level rise
01:51 - West Antarctica
03:09 - Processes
05:39 - Ice sheet models
06:33 - Thwaites
08:50 - Tipping points
10:31 - Our actions still matter

#Antarctic #ClimateChange

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References

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Contains AI generated audio

[DrGilbz]

And while you're there, why not sign up to support the channel? Subscriptions help me make better content and do more interviews with brilliant scientists like Alex. ✌

[truthisfree]

Sadly, no matter what warnings are issued, how dire the science or whether it is just sane/ethical to protect the environment (for its own sake), I see little to no progress being made. For decades some people have been trying to create a more sustainable society, but political/corporate forces have undermined most of these efforts.

[Atheistbatman]

9am and 80F in Rome GA. Vegetable crops temporarily shut down (stomata close) when temps reach about 85…this used to be in afternoon even late afternoon…now it’s at 9am. That is 6+ hours/day of lost production time.
It is already happening but no one is calling it…all we hear about from every climate scientist is SLR and glacier melt
Our crops will stop growing enough to feed us before we notice that inch of rise

[NightRunner]

Something that is pretty obvious, but I don't hear discussed is that Antarctica itself will experience the very same sea level rise that we will. In fact, being a major source of meltwater, in real time the seas would be slightly higher there than elsewhere since the waters have to move outward from the melting ice at a relatively slow speed. So, while we are busy worrying about our coastlines in the industrialized world, Antarctica will be experiencing INCREASED intrusion from its own meltwater additions to its own coastlines, causing a feedback loop of accelerating melt from intrusion alone.

[miguel]

Thanks for the update. We're very lucky to have more researchers than ever committed to understanding all the changes that are coming.

[hmify]

When the AMOC further weakens or even stops, more energy (heat) will resides in the southern hemisphere and the melting we see at the moment is just a child’s party to what will happen then. That the AMOC will stop is almost a given.

[Robert-tsze]

According to ex President Donald J. Trump, the increase in the water levels will result in more beachfront property 🤭.

[richardrose]

One additional point I don’t see addressed too often; when a point force load is removed from one part of the planet’s surface ( eg. lots of ice), then the land under it rises, which also will other land masses around the world. So, even though I’ve read the calculation that if/when all the Antarctic ice melts, sea level will rise approx 200’ (+/- 60m) it may actually seem higher as the land beneath us sinks. Einstein expressed some concern that the ice might not be evenly distributed on the South Pole, which might also cause some planetary “wobble” to its rotation. Minor on a planetary scale, but perhaps major on a human scale. Fault lines could be more active and dormant volcanoes might erupt. Hard to know without better models.

[ryanhowe]

I have no idea how you ended up on my Recommended page, but I'm glad you did. This is a great piece of content.

[wmanad]

The models don't incorporate these under ice effects, they also don't include increasing methane levels and methane releases due to tundra melting. Given the models are conservative to begin with - getting funding requires not being "too radical" - we are finding the models used by the IPCC all fall short of predicting the actual changes we have been experiencing. Look up "Atmospheric Energy Imbalance: Global Warming in the Pipeline" Oxford University Press: Only half the heat entering is escaping. The amount retained is increasing exponentially. The amount retained doubled in the 18 years of direct measurement via satellite. Follow what Dr. James Hansen, one of the authors, is saying about this. Our situation is worse than most policy makers and many scientists realize. Much worse. To paraphrase Hansen, "It's hot. It will be hotter. Not everyone sees this yet. They will."

[kristiinaverro]

Great content! Thanks for also giving a stage to fellow scientists; I really appreciate the visuals!🐧

[nat]

I've been saying this for over ten years now. Even then, there was so much uncertainty in the models. Where we are, we can see it all going down, and it is happening very fast. People have been raising docks and piers out of necessity, and many are starting to see depreciation on waterfront homes below a certain height and distance from the water. Last winter, we had 3 one hundred year storms within 2 months of each other. This is the beginning? I think we might be in trouble.

[donniemoder]

are kind of gonna need you to move all your stuff to higher land, if you want to keep it. Ya see... we miscalculated how much the ice would melt...yea....so...better pack up and uproot everything in your life and expect to live a little less large...maybe, probably, a lot less large.

[miroglass]

All I want to know is when will Mar-a-largo be under water?

[YourDesignerGuy]

I so appreciate your videos. Please keep it up.

[johnwilliamson-cz]

Two stats to remember:
1). We burn 100, 000, 000+ barrels of oil each day.
2). If all the ice melts, 66 metres sea level rise.

[bartroberts]

Physics question: the last great melt took ~8, 000 years to raise sea levels 120m, between 19, 000-11, 000 years ago.

We're warming twenty times faster now than then due to fossil emissions.

Do you agree that means:
a) the 66m-80m of potential SLR this time
b) will happen in about 400 years,
c) at a pace of about 20 cm per year on average,
d) at a cost of ~$1 Trillion USD per cm?

[tomduke]

i wonder how they managed to make a model that says that it will not tip. we know it is melting faster every year and we have no realistic way to stop that. so for all intents and purposes it can be considered tipped today. they must have gone pretty insane into the carbon-removal dial and cranked it up to 11. rofl

[darinhitchings]

@DrGilbz, not bad at all... however I still maintain that you haven't *begun* this conversation unless you state the following: the transient response of a positive feedback cycle (aka tipped tipping point) in feedback control theory is an *exponential function of time*. It's an avalanche. An arbitrarily small perturbation that triggers such an avalanche can lead to an arbitrarily large change in the state of the system in question. The gain in some sense in terms of d[momentum]/d[energy expended] trends towards oo...

That's for starters. The second thing I would add is that "the conversation about climate change begins and ends with feedback cycles. Nothing else is even relevant in comparison". If people understand feedback cycles, they understand the implications of climate change and vice-versa. It's the side-effects of our actions that trigger other side effects that trigger yet more side-effects that will rule our destiny, so to speak.

I'm writing a chapter for a book right now (with professors from the U.K. as a matter of fact...). I've done quite a lot of reading on these topics by now, and many other topics that 99% of humans would fail to associate with climate change... Stuff like pollution, biodiversity loss, changes to the Surface Micro Layer, coral health, forest fires, ground water extraction, invasive insects, the urban heat island affect, changes that we're having on the water cycle, the AMOC of course, and many other kinds of feedbacks that cross between the human sphere and the physical one. People, including many an IPCC scientist are still looking at the world through a straw. And that is why decade upon decade upon decade our best-case scenario now looks worse than the worst case scenario that was being predicted 10 years ago. We're utterly failing to generate 0 mean error estimates. Our innovations sequence is pink. We have failed to generate a minimum variance unbiased estimator. Our error residuals are correlated. I can say it in 10 different ways... but seeing as few people have ever studied stochastics, that probably won't mean much to many of the readers.

"Agriculture is the Achilles Heel of Humanity" says Naomi Klein. Smart woman. Sea level rise is going to wipe out most of the world's rice production which supplies 20% of our calories. Salt water intrusion is having a serious impact on coastal farmland. The wet bulb effect. Extreme precipitation, the insects, ground water depletion... a loss of pollinators... All of these things are going to be impacting our society in serious ways within 20 years. There are currently 634 million people who will be directly impacted by sea level rise... and I am not estimating that'll be come 2100, but more like 2045-2050. I listened to a NASA Goddard scientist say "the sea level rise I began my career thinking would happen by 2100 I now estimate will happen by 2050". We continue to underestimate many, many different factors on all sides... let alone the covariance between these factors. And that'll be devastating.

Sea level rise is going to kill more people than many other factors you mentioned... because it's going to lead people to fight with other people. Scarcity breeds aggression, yeah? Between the wet bulb effect and sea level rise I anticipate ~2 billion people in flight by 2040. And there are more feedback cycles in play than I can possibly write about here. I was invited to give a talk at Sunrun, an American residential solar installation company... and I talked for an hour and didn't finish. I would need many hours even to cover the surface level content. People are *radically* underestimating how bad things can get and how fast. We are linear minded beings that deal incredibly poorly with exponential time phenomena. That goes for the Japanese at the end of WWII who said "we're not afraid of any new fangled bomb, it's an empty threat". It goes for president Trump when he eliminated the pandemic response dept of the US government. It goes for how we content with forest fires. It applies to all the spenders out there who rack up debts on credit cards they can't pay off, and therefore take out a 2nd credit card to try to pay off the first, which just compounds the problem. And it goes for people's inability to anticipate the massive effects technology has had... everything from trains, combustion engines, microchips, lasers, digital cameras, the internet, AI technology, etc... People don't understand that when you use technological outputs as inputs to make more technology (e.g. CAD software, programming languages, wikipedia, continuous integration tools, etc...) that is an exponential growth process. It's a process that has 'babies' in some sense where those babies grow up to have more babies... and things keep replicating from there.

Which reminds me of how serious it is that we have 8 billion people. According to the environmentalist Bill McKibben, if we all want to live the kind of lifestyles that people live in the U.K., let alone the U.S., then there are resources for 680 million people to live on this planet in that fashion. We currently have 12x more people than that, and we're going to have 9.7 billion people by 2080 a recent student suggested (except that study is making the same massive extrapolation errors that everyone else is. Our society is going to come flying off its rocker by 2045... because there are more feedback effects in play here than of the world has thought about before).

I should mention that McKibben said "if we lose the U.S. wheat crop for 1 year from freak weather events (or nasty bacteria, or whatever...), that's a national disaster. If we lose it for 2 years in a row, that's a recipe for WW3".

I'll conclude this comment with the following observation: forget about what happens when there's no more food on the shelves. That's not actually the weak link. Even if the prices of food merely triple, that in and of itself will end our civilization. Because the have nots will go to war with the haves. In the US 20% of the population spends > 33% of their income on food. In Kenya it's like 56% of the population that spends more than 33% of its income on food. If food prices triple, we're talking about 20% or 30% of 8 billion people who are going hungry, and they won't be happy about it. Meanwhile, we live in a world where thousands of farmers feed billions of people. A single farmer can feed 10 million people/year. And that's why we have so many people living in cities. So guess what happens if riots break out and everyone is fighting over food? It means people aren't working and society breaks down. And it means supply lines fail and replacement parts aren't being made and there's no ability to keep our technological base well oiled and maintained. We live in a world where it takes the concerted efforts of many millions of people to e.g. create microchips that go in the computers that run tractors... If you think about the rubber, steel, oil, aluminum, phosphorous, urea, the battery technology, the GPS technology, materials for sensors and displays, etc, etc... there's a pyramid there of millions of people who must *collaborate* in order for these machines to keep running. We can't be collaborating if we're busy fighting... or if there are hordes of 100 million refugees on every side of every border.

And btw, if terrorists are occupying the Suez canal, and drought is impacting the Panama canal... we are getting pushed higher and higher up a ladder of technological and fossil fueled dependence from which there's no easy way down. If supply lines aren't running, we have issues. If people aren't being fed, we have something far worse than WWIII. We have complete mayhem 28 days later style.

The roman empire lasted for 500 years. How long did it take to tear down the city of Rome in the end? 5 days. That's nonlinearity for you. And it's time that the world population learns to adopt mental models that are appropriate for our times.

[beth]

Climate change has progressed faster than expected so far, and I'm operating on the assumption that that pattern will continue.