Dire Climate Warning by NASA Scientist

Raises Questions
NASAs former climate chief has issued a stark new study that finds that the worlds current
climate goal could be inadequate and may not prevent catastrophic losses from rising seas, ocean
temperatures and changes in global weather. But the extreme nature of his projections has some
scientists questioning the methods he used and the results he reached.
Global leaders and scientists have agreed that keeping global warming to within 2C of preindustrial temperatures represents a safe level of climate change. The new findings, published as
a discussion paper in the European Geophysical Unions Atmospheric Chemistry and
Physics journal, indicate something else. They show that 2C of warming could lead to runaway
ice melt at the poles, causing sea level rise and ocean circulation changes by 2100 that are much
more extreme than most current projections.
The new study says that limiting warming to 2C does not provide safety, as such warming
would likely yield sea level rise of several meters along with numerous other severely disruptive
consequences for human society and ecosystems.
The research was lead by James Hansen, the former head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and current Columbia University faculty. Hansen rose to prominence for his research and
Congressional testimony in 1988 about the role of carbon dioxide and other human greenhouse
gas emissions in causing the global temperature to rise. He has advocated for keeping
atmospheric carbon dioxide around 350 parts per million (ppm) to avoid dangerous climate
change. They recently passed the 400 ppm milestone globally.
The paper uses paleoclimate data and modeling to show that if ice sheets in Greenland and West
Antarctica continue to double their melt rates every 10 years as they currently are, sea levels
could rise up to 16 feet as soon as 2100.
RELATED

Is The Worlds Main Climate Goal Misguided?

Halfway There: Countdown to Paris Climate Talks
Sea Levels Could Rise At Least 20 Feet

A sudden influx of fresh, cold water to oceans around Antarctica and Greenland could have other
notable impacts. The study argues that it could slow down ocean conveyor belts that shuttle
water around the worlds oceans and alter air temperatures and storm tracks. Most provocatively,
the study indicates it could cause cooling over the southern third of the globe as well as parts of
the northern Atlantic and Europe and slow warming in other parts of the globe.
The changes the study outlines are dramatic and much more alarming than the upper limits most
scientists have outlined as possible if human greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current
trends. The upper level of sea level rise projections from the most recent Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change report indicates a rise of 4 feet by 2100 is possible. There is some

evidence the West Antarctic Ice Sheet which contains enough ice to raise seas by 13 feet
has entered collapse, but its unlikely to completely melt away by centurys end.
I agree with the overall magnitude of sea level rise that they are interpreting for the last
interglacial, Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida, said. What does not
come across in this paper is that there is still debate regarding the timing of ice-sheet collapse
during this warm period.
Dutton led research published last week in Science showing that sea levels rose by 20-30 feet
about 125,000 years ago, the same period analyzed in the new Hansen study. She is working with
a group of scientists to get a better handle on how fast ice melted then as well as during other
periods of rapid sea level rise in the past 3 million years.
Setting the rates can be a challenge, but were starting to develop tools and techniques to
understand them, she said.
Likewise, there is some indication that ocean circulation is already slowing in the North Atlantic
due to Greenlands current melt. But the new findings might overstate its impact on air
temperatures and the chances of ever-increasing melt rates in Greenland, according to Michael
Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State who authored a paper on the topic early this year.
Their scenario assumes exponentially increasing meltwater over time, which may not be
realistic, he said. Moreover, it is based on the use of a low-resolution ocean model which does
not resolve key real-world ocean currents like the Gulf Stream. In the real world, such current
systems play a key role in transporting heat to higher latitudes, and make it much more difficult
to cool off the extratropics simply by a slowdown/collapse of the conveyor belt.
The journal the findings are published in is an interactive journal, meaning that an editor has
approved the paper but it will go through peer review in the public eye. Hansen said the reason
for publishing this way rather than wending through the peer review process was to make the
findings available to the public and policymakers ahead of the Paris climate talks this December.
The situation is more urgent than many politicians seem to realize and weve made the scientific
story clearer, Hansen said.
What may end up becoming clearer is the peer review process, however. The discussion of the
paper will unfold in front of the public and could result in major revisions to the paper before it
is officially accepted for publication. This could well be a standard for the future of science
publishing, though Mann questioned the idea of shining such a bright light on the results before
they have been through the peer review process.
In its current form, the paper stands as an outlier for the scope and severity of the changes global
warming could bring, making it an unlikely candidate to influence policy discussions. Kevin
Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the paper is
ill-suited for that kind of use, anyway.

The new Hansen et al. study is provocative and intriguing but rife with speculation and what if
scenarios, he said. It has many conjectures and huge extrapolations based on quite flimsy
evidence but evidence nonetheless. In that regard it raises good questions and topics worthy of
further exploration, but it is not a document that can be used for setting policy for anthropogenic
climate change, although it pretends to be so.