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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Sea Level Rise Committment

I've heard of warming commitment -- how much more the surface will warm if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately (it's about 0.5°C), but until this video titled "This is the scariest graph I've ever seen," I had missed this result for sea level rise commitment -- how much sea level rise is "baked in" to the climate system if we stopped emitting GHGs today.

This 2016 paper by Hardy and Nuse finds the following for sea level rise commitment (SLRC):


(Click for a clearer image.)

It's difficult to imagine we will stay on RCP 8.5 until 2100 -- business as usual. But RCP 4.5, which does look imaginable, still has about 3.5 m of SLR, which is 11.5 ft, which already will a huge amount of damage.

There's a lot more to say about this paper, which I hope to do in the near future.

By the way, this Levermann et al 2013 paper finds a SLRC of 2.3 m/°C over the next 2000 years. Smaller than I thought.

PS: The current first comment on that Youtube video is a good one:


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