The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Antarctic ice sheet melting; Miami doesn't care

I just started reading The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery, which contains a fairly good overview of climate change and how we're making it happen. It's important to understand that climate change has happened rapidly throughout history, meaning changes of 2-4°C (4-7°F) have occurred over decades rather than millennia.

So, having started that book yesterday, I'm warmed (so to speak) by this morning's Washington Postarticle on the shrinking Antarctic ice sheet:

The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking significantly.
The new findings, which are being published today in the journal Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the next several centuries.
... [T]he amount of water pouring annually from the ice sheet into the ocean—equivalent to the amount of water the United States uses in three months—is causing global sea level to rise by 0.4 millimeters a year.

That may not sound like a lot, but (a) it's not the only ice sheet melting in the world and (b) it equates to a 30 cm (1 ft) rise in sea levels over the next century.

One more time: Global warming is great for Chicago, bad for Miami, disastrous for Bangladesh. And my own children will probably have to decide whether to build seawalls and polders around our coastal cities. The children of my Filipino friends probably won't have that option.

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