Water World: Slipping Toward Climate Catastrophe

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Posted on July 12, 2007, Printed on July 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/56125/

Editor's Note: George Monbiot is a British journalist and author whose expertise is on climate change and other environmental issues. Monbiot's article reveals that government ineptitude in the face of increasingly frightening scientific data on climate change is not limited to the United States: The UK government is dangerously negligent on energy and climate issues even though it knows better.

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic.

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimeters this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.