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Water, Water Everywhere: Will We Be in the Drink? [1]

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Date: 2023-01-11

By the early 1960s, physicist Edward “Father of the Bomb” Teller had become (of all things) a prime mover for what we now call climate science. Somehow, he assessed the sensitivity of Antarctic ice to greenhouse gas-hiked temperatures- to the point of projecting a (literal) sea change not within centuries, but within decades.

Sure enough, in 1973 the University of Maine’s Terence Hughes found Antarctica’s Florida-size Thwaites Glacier to be shrinking- along skewed lines that augured eventual collapse.

More woe was in the offing. In the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Thwaites is arrayed (north-to-south) in the shape of a sleeveless, flowing dress. Narrow at the top (where it flows into the Amundsen Sea), it widens to nearly 350 miles across...smack near the WAIS’s middle.

The “Florida” scaling can be extended to the point that the size of the entire WAIS compares to our Deep South (including the Sunshine State). Imagine said Sheet bereft of the ice that’s kept sea water from invading its very heart. (Suffice to say, one can surmise the whole shebang’s debacle may not be far off.)

According to Carolyn Beeler (on PRI The World, 7/1/2019), its demise stands to raise sea levels by at least several feet. Though that may not sound like much, even the 3-foot rise (by 2100) projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would wreak no small havoc.

But here’s the thing. Cited by Daily Kos Community’s A Siegel, the Rising Seas Institute’s John Englander effectively scolds the IPCC for omitting consideration of any rise that may stem from Antarctica (because it cannot be readily modeled by computers).

In terms of logic, compare that omission to going without an overcoat because (hypothetically) weather models can’t tell if temps will hit -10F or -50F while you’re outside.

Cited in Science News, Smithsonian, and elsewhere, recent observations indicate Thwaites may be gone within several years (at most). So let it be stressed. With the Thwaites-less WAIS open to relatively warm inflow, pretty much the entire sheet could soon follow; the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences’ Ted Scambos sees the glacier effectively “drag[ging] most of the West Antarctic ice with it.”

Perhaps reading between the lines a bit, that bodes at least a 6-foot sea level rise fairly quickly- say, within a generation, if not a decade. (If memory serves, that lines up nicely with what Dr. Teller foresaw.)

In “The Seas Will Rise” (Daily Kos 1/8/23), A Siegel provides a map (credited to PLOS One) showing what would/will happen to the contiguous 48 states given precisely that much extra aqua. Sleeping with the fishes will/would be most of Florida. New Jersey. Rhode Island. Louisiana. Delaware. The densely populated parts of New York and California.

Plus most of Maryland- not to mention the land it donated for the site of our nation’s capital. (Which might make it hard to procure federal funds to curb climate change.)

Be it resolved: we’ve been in thrall to a long-term flood of bad pols. Right now (to afford a last-ditch switch to clean energy), couldn’t we use the trillions of dollars George ‘WMD’ Bush blew to make a mess of Mesopotamia (while trying to grab some petroleum)? Wouldn’t it have been sweet if Ronald “Trees Cause Pollution” Reagan had left intact our White House’s exemplary, prescient solar panels?

In 2009, Donald Trump signed an acknowledgement that the prospect of catastrophic climate change was “scientifically irrefutable.” Had he not opted to flip-flop (for no stated reason), couldn’t we all sleep a lot better? (Not to mention White House hopeful Mike Pompeo licking his chops at the prospect of drill-baby-drilling in ‘newfound’ oil fields that, prior to ubiquitous fossil fueling, were ice fields.)

You could call that a vicious circle. A feedback loop. Or a noose that, much like the poet’s albatross (killed near Antarctica, of all places) rings our necks.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/11/2146494/-Water-Water-Everywhere-Will-We-Be-in-the-Drink

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