Greenland is melting in a heatwave. That's everyone's problem | Hacker News Reader

Greenland is melting in a heatwave. That's everyone's problem

cnn.com

27 pointspseudolus10 comments

During [2012] Greenland's ice sheet lost 450 million metric tons -- the equivalent of more than 14,000 tons of ice lost per second.

During a year like 2012 or 2019, water produced by Greenland's ice sheet adds more than one millimeter to global sea levels, according to Box. But countries in the tropics could see a rise of two millimeters or more, he said.

One millimetre? It’s hard to get panicky about that, unfortunately.

Seriously? It's the entire ocean... it's only going to get worse and possibly accelerate. What does a decade adding 1cm do to salinity, microscopic life, water temperature, storm surge and god knows what else? I read your quote from the article and panicked. I'm even more panicked that there's people who can read something like that and not be deeply alarmed. What's happening to our planet makes me sick, and your apathy makes me even more sick.

Well I’m very concerned about climate change, and I agree that choosing that measure to alarm the reader is harming the cause, because a lot of people will think the same as your parent. It is hard to see 1mm of water and feel threatened.

We need to understand that there are 7 billion people on Earth and we need to communicate to ALL of them, lest you want Trump/Johnson/Salvini/etc. reactionary movements dismissing climate change or complaining about actions. 1mm ocean rise asks for being ignored. Why not address direct effects to people? People that die, migrate, wars... how many dead people implies 1mm change? That would be much more useful.

At 1mm a year it would take one thousand years to get one metre of sea level rise.

That’s not the sort of slogan that’ll likely motivate a lot of change.

That’s ignoring the potential for runaway feedback loops.

I’m just saying that it didn’t, in fact, cause much change, as evidenced by the business-as-usual scenario we find ourselves in seven years after 2012.

It's not the only source of sea level rise, or even the major one - that I believe is expansion from rising sea temperature. So it's an additional 1mm on top of the others, and any catastrophic glacier collapses such as may be approaching with Thwaites in the Antarctic.

The more that melts results in changing albedo and smaller thermal mass to encourage an accelerating melt - a small runaway feedback loop. Rising air and sea temperatures will accelerate it further.

You and I may not care that much - yet, but those in the Marshall Islands, Maldives and other low lying regions almost certainly care about every millimetre. Sea level rise is probably the least dramatic effect of climate heating, but the most inexorable. It takes a while to melt 650,000 cubic miles of ice, yet we seem to be managing to get going. It will accelerate.

It should be cause for major concern.

One mm isnt a lot. But if the entire ice sheet of greenland melted it would result in a sea level rise of 6 meters.

https://www.keele.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/august/rapid-melt...

That's a lot of water. It can impact the salinity as well.

Very "drop in the bucket-y".

They mention in passing that last year was the coldest in decades (in Greenland). What did that do to the ice? Did it increase?

It is not just the water. It is also changing the reflectivity (albedo) of the earth which results in even faster increasing temperatures. This might lead to a self sustained acceleration as soon as the permafrost is melting and the CO2 is released into the atmosphere.

http://www.promice.dk/DarkeningIce.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com