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Global Warming Today

Greenland meltwater will take slow wave around globe

14:19 07 July 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Fred Pearce

Pacific nations threatened with disappearing beneath the waves as sea levels rise have been given a partial reprieve – for a few decades at least. But Europe and North America could be at much greater risk of floods than previously appreciated. So claims the first systematic analysis of what will happen to the water from melting Greenland ice.

In the past five years, research has suggested that sea levels could rise by more than a metre in the coming century, as rising temperatures cause Greenland's ice to slide into the oceans and melt. This would be enough to entirely engulf coral-island nations like Kiribati and Tuvalu.

But now Detlaf Stammer of Hamburg University, Germany, says that most of the melted water will stay in the Atlantic for at least 50 years, where sea levels will rise much faster as a result. Only small amounts will make it into the Pacific Ocean in that time.

Slow wave

"It is often assumed that sea levels will rise instantaneously, but that is unlikely, given what we know about ocean dynamics," says Stammer. "The Greenland ice cap is much less of a threat to tropical islands in the Pacific than it is for the coasts of North America and Europe."
Stammer plugged data about the amounts of meltwater released from the Greenland ice sheet since 1948 into a computer model. This then calculated how that water spread around the oceans over 50 years.
He shows that meltwater forms a "wave" of rising sea levels that gradually works its way south from Greenland, down the American coast, reaching the tip of southern Africa after about a decade.
After that, it slowly spills east through the Indian Ocean. According to Stammer, the "additional" water only reaches the Pacific after about 30 years.

Today the IPCC released its 4th installment of its report on global warming. It has found that only .12 percent of world GDP would be needed to stave off the harmful effects of climate change. Echoing the Stern Report it shows that the only thing we should be afraid of is doing nothing. The report focused on economic changes that need to be made, pointing out that emissions must start declining by the year 2015 to prevent the world’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrialized temperatures. (a scenario that would be catastrophic)
Read the summary for policy makers here (doc)
While some governments try to delay action, the switch to a cleaner and more efficient energy system is already underway, according to a new report from WWF.
A new briefing from the global conservation organization, Stop Climate Change: It Is Possible highlights 15 ways in which people, business and governments work with WWF to reduce CO2 emissions and help slow global warming.
The report highlights initiatives from around the world, ranging from India to Brazil, that save energy and reduce carbon pollution.
In Thailand, a new law encourages the clean production of energy from biofuel plants that will feed into the electricity grid. Elsewhere, major businesses have signed up for WWF’s Climate Savers programme and are actively reducing their carbon emissions. And in the UK a new campaign shows that people can simply unplug their phone chargers to cut standby power consumption.
“Taking action brings real savings and other benefits to consumers and businesses while preventing dangerous climate change,” says Hans Verolme, Director of WWF’s Global Climate Change Programme. “The planet is running a fever and people are working with WWF to cool it - global warming is costing us dearly already but by acting now we can avoid future calamities.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) third working group, meeting in Bangkok today, showed that the cost of doing nothing about global warming is far higher than the cost of cleaning up our economies.
The WWF has said that to stay below a dangerous rise in temperature of 2°C the world needs to reduce global CO2 emissions by over 50 per cent by the middle of this century. Independent economic assessments have confirmed that this pays off. A claim backed up in todays report.
“We have all the technological and economic tools available today - governments now need to implement clean energy solutions and remove the obstacles that still prevent their break-through,” says Dr Stephan Singer, Head of WWF’s European Climate Change Program and expert reviewer of the report by IPCC Working Group III. “The facts are clear - preventing climate change is the best deal for the global economy, so why are we still waiting?”

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