More on Thermohaline Circulation

In a previous post “The Thermohaline Circulation Only Stops for Extreme, Unrealistic Models,” I compared the amount of fresh water used in “hosing experiment” models to drastically reduce the thermohaline circulation (THC, or Meridional Overturning Circulation, MOC) to the amount of water flowing over Niagara Falls, or flowing from all rivers into the Arctic,  or coming off of Greenland due to melting ice.

The key number was one Sverdrup, or 1 million cubic meters of fresh water per second.  One Sverdrup of fresh water artificially dumped into the Labrador sea, for 100 years would have the feared effect.  But it turns out that one Sverdrup of fresh water is 350 times the amount of water flowing over Niagara falls, and about 300 times the amount of water from melting ice that flows off of Greenland.  It was seen that there is not plausible source for this amount of extra fresh water to be dumped into the arctic.

An interesting letter that appeared in Science a year ago gives a little more perspective,  So I have reproduced it in full here:

Freshwater Forcing: Will History Repeat Itself?

IN THEIR RESEARCH ARTICLE “REDUCED North Atlantic deep water coeval with the glacial Lake Agassiz freshwater outburst” (4 January, p. 60), H. F. Kleiven et al. present compelling evidence for an abrupt deep-ocean response to the release of freshwater from glacial Lake Agassiz into the northwest Atlantic about 8400 years ago. Such data are particularly important in evaluating the response in ocean models of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) to freshwater forcing. For this event, the freshwater forcing was likely large but short; Clarke et al. (1) estimate that the flood had a freshwater flux of 4 to 9 Sv [Sverdrups] released in 0.5 years.

In this context, we are aware of no possible mechanism that might reproduce such a forcing in response to global warming, and all available model simulations, including those with estimates of maximum Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) melting rates, indicate that it is very unlikely that the MOC will undergo an abrupt transition during the course of the 21st century (2). Multimodel ensemble averages under Special Report on Emissions Scenario (SRES) A1B suggest a best estimate of 25 to 30% reduction in the overall MOC strength (2). In one example, 14 coupled models simulated a 100-year 0.1-Sv freshwater perturbation to the northern North Atlantic Ocean—17 times the recently estimated melt rates from the GIS [Greenland Ice Sheet]—and the MOC weakened by a multimodel mean of 30% after 100 years; none of the models simulated a shutdown (3). Another model simulated greenhouse gas levels that increased to four times preindustrial values and then remained fixed; the resulting GIS displayed a peak melting rate of about 0.1 Sv, with little effect on the MOC (4). One model simulation uses the SRES  freshwater forcing as an upper-bound estimate of potential GIS melting. In this case, the MOC weakened but subsequently recovered its strength, indicating that GIS melting would not cause abrupt climate change in the 21st century (5). Accordingly, we urge caution in drawing comparisons of the abrupt change 8400 years ago to future scenarios involving, for example, the melting of the GIS and its relevance to human societies.

PETER U. CLARK¹, THOMAS L. DELWORTH², ANDREW J. WEAVER^1
1Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.
²Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA.
³School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8W 3P6, Canada.

References
1. G. K. C. Clarke, D. W. Leverington, J. T. Teller, A. S. Dyke, Quat. Sci. Rev. 23, 389 (2004).
2. G. A Meehl et al., in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, S. Solomon et al., Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 2007), pp. 747–845.
3. R. J. Stouffer et al., J. Clim. 19, 1365 (2006).
4. J. K. Ridley, P. Huybrechts, J. M. Gregory, J. A. Lowe, J. Clim. 17, 3409 (2005).
5. J. H. Jungclaus, H. Haak, M. Esch, E. Roeckner, J. Marotzke, Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, 10.1029/2006GL026815 (2006).

So, the event that occurred 8400 years ago involved 4 to 9 Sverdrups of fresh water.  This is THOUSANDS of times greater than the flow of the Niagara Falls today.  It is THOUSANDS of times greater than the amount of fresh water flowing from melting Greenland ice today. It is multiples bigger than the entire fresh water budget into the Arctic.

Note that in my previous post I referred to hosing experiments that pumped up to one Sverdrup of fresh water into the oceans.   The authors of the above letter refer to hosing experiments that used only 0.1 Sverdrups – yet they still point out how gigantic this is compared to actual sources of fresh water in the Arctic today.

So, when Al Gore ominously implies that that the Greenland Ice Sheet [GIS] is going to melt down and dump enough fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean to shut down the Thermohaline Circulation, remember the works of Clarke, et.al., in the above letter: “we urge caution in drawing comparisons of the abrupt change 8400 years ago to future scenarios involving, for example, the melting of the GIS [Greenland Ice Sheet] and its relevance to human societies.”

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The Thermohaline Circulation Only Stops for Extreme, Unrealistic Models

Return to Criticisms of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”

Gore gives a cartoon description of the ocean circulation system when he explains what has become known as the thermohaline circulation, or the meridional overturning circulation.  In his simplistic scenario the surface ocean current that flows north in the Atlantic, bringing warmth to northern Europe will be halted by melting ice from Greenland, subsequently throwing Europe into an ice age. 

Here is Gore’s explanation in his own words from the Inconvenient Truth movie:

The Earth’s climate is like a big engine for redistributing heat from the equator to the poles.  And it does that by means of ocean currents and wind currents.  They tell us, the scientists do, that the Earth’s climate is an non-linear system – just a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual, some of them come suddenly, in big jumps… And so, all those wind and ocean currents that have formed since the last ice age and have been relatively stable – they’re all up in the air – they change. 

And one of the ones they’re most worried about, where they’ve spent a lot of time studying the problem is in the the North Atlantic where the gulf stream comes up and meets the cold winds coming off the Arctic over Greenland and that evaporates the heat out of the gulf stream and the steam is carried over to western Europe by the prevailing winds and the Earth’s rotation.  But isn’t it interesting that the whole ocean current system is all linked together in this loop, they call it the ocean conveyor.

And the red are the warm surface currents, the Gulf Stream is the best known of them.  But the blue represent the cold currents running in the opposite direction…

Up in the North Atlantic, after that heat is pulled out, what’s left behind is colder water, and saltier water, because the salt doesn’t go anywhere. And so, that makes it denser and heavier.  And so that cold heavy dense water sinks at the rate of 5 billion gallons per second.  And then that pulls that current back south.

At the end of the last ice age as the last glacier was receding from North America the ice melted and a giant pool of fresh water formed in North America, and the Great Lakes are the remnants of that huge lake.  An ice dam on the eastern border formed, and one day it broke, and all that fresh water came rushing out, ripping open the St. Lawrence there, and it diluted the salty dense cold water, made it fresher and lighter so it stopped sinking, and that pump shut off.

 And the heat transfer stopped.  And Europe went back into an ice age for another 900 to 1000 years.  And the change from conditions like we have here today to an ice age took place in perhaps as little as ten years time.  So that’s a sudden jump.  Now, of course, that’s not going to happen again because the glaciers of North America are not there… Is there any other big chunk of ice anywhere near there…?  Oh, yeah [Gore says ominously, as the image pans to ice covered Greenland] we’ll come back to that one…

Later in the movie Gore tells us that Greenland is rapidly melting.  The point being that it will provide a massive amount of fresh water that will stop the the thermohaline conveyor and  “would raise sea level almost 20 feet if it ‘went,'” Gore tells us.  He tells us about water seeping to the bottom of the ice sheets where it “lubricates where the ice meets the bedrock” causing the ice to slide toward the ocean.

Then he shows a series of pictures purporting to show the amount of melting in Greenland.  Gore says…

“In 1992 they measured this amount of melting in Greenland … Ten years later this is what happened…And here’s the melting from 2005”

 

Hosing Experiments

But what if…?  What if there were a huge amount of low density fresh water dumped into the North Atlantic where the high density water is supposed to be sinking, just like the giant Canadian lake crashing through the barrier of ice the Gore told us about?  This possibility is explored with computer models known as  “hosing experiments.”  In a hosing experiment a model that simulates the ocean and atmosphere circulation patterns is modified to artificially dump huge amounts of extra fresh water, as if from a giant hose, into some location in the ocean.   It has been found that when enough fresh water is forced in, the circulation can be slowed, but rarely stopped. 

How much fresh water do the hosing experiments use to nearly stop the thermohaline circulation?  Typically (or here), they use one million cubic meters of fresh water per second, for 100 years!!!  (One million cubic meters per second has its own unit name: One Sverdrup or 1 Sv).  How does 1 Sv compare to, say, the rate of water flowing over Niagara Falls?

168,000 cubic  meters of water fall over Niagara Falls every minute.  That is about 2,800 cubic meters of water per second.  So one Sverdrup of water is the same as about 350 Niagara Falls!  (1,000,000 / 2,800  = 357).  So, roughly speaking, if 350 Niagara Falls were dumped into the oceans around Greenland continuously for 100 years, then we could expect to see a significant slow down of the thermohaline circulation.

River systems discharging into the Arctic Ocean.

How does one Sverdrup compare to the freshwater discharge of ALL the rivers emptying into the arctic ocean?  One Sverdrup of fresh water amounts to nearly 32,000 km³ of water per year  (1 Sv  x 10⁶ m³ s^-1/sv x (86,400 s/day) x (365 day/year) = 31,536 km³/year).  The total fresh water discharge from all rivers into the arctic is only about 4,300 km³ per year.  So, typical hosing experiments that nearly stop the overturning circulation add a water volume about 7 times the amount of water from all rivers discharing into the Arctic Ocean combined.

What about Greenland?

Gore ominously implies that the amount of fresh water needed to turn off the overturning circulation is just waiting to pour off of  Greenland, due of course (drum roll), to CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming.   His pictures of Greenland, shown above, imply that about half of Greenland’s 2.8 million cubic kilometers of ice have melted in the 13 years between 1992 and 2005.  This is wildly misleading.  Only a miniscule fraction of the area shown in Gore’s Greenland images actually melts every year.   This is evidenced by mass balance studies, which show Greenland loses on the order of hundred cubic kilometers of ice every year,  which translates into a measly 0.003 Sverdrups.

100 km³ /year= 10¹¹ m³/year

(10¹¹ m³/year) / (365 days/year) / (86,400 seconds/day)
             = 3 x 10³ m³/second
             = 0.003 Sv

Put another way, one Sverdrup of fresh water is 86.4 km³/day.  So the hosing experiments pouring in one Sverdrup put about as much fresh water into the ocean each day (86.4 km³) as Greenland provides in a year (100 km³).

But if Greenland actually started melting, by some extraordinary circumstance,  300 times faster, then it would yield 1 Sverdrup, or 1,000,000 cubic meters, of fresh water every second.  What would happen after 100 years of melting at that rate?  Well, that’s a trick question, because at a melting rate that gives 1 Sverdrup of freshwater Greenland would run out of ice in about 90 years.  This is because Greenland has only 2.85 million cubic kilometers of ice, and one Sverdrup of water is the same as about 31,500 cubic kilometers of water per year.  Ignoring the difference in density between ice and water, then 2.85 million cubic kilometers divided by 31,500 cubic kilometers per year gives 90 years.

Conclusion

You don’t hear as much about the threat of the collapse to the thermohaline circulation today as you did a few years ago.  This is because it has become recognized as being a very far fetched possibility, even by most alarmists who want to maintain a shred of dignity.  But I have a feeling we will not see this wildly exaggerated threat removed from new editions of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” anytime soon.

Return to Criticisms of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”

Reply to John Mashey

I recently had an exchange of comments with some folks at Millard Filmore’s Bathtub concerning one of my previous posts about sea level rise near Boston.  The discussion seemed to really strike a nerve with alarmist nag John Mashey.  He scolded me with the following comment- you can almost see him wagging his finger:

Mashey’s comment

Mr Moriarity’s views on SLR at this time are simply not worth reading, for reasons I will explain.

NOAA collects the data, but the past is not the future. For very good scientific reasons, NOBODY serious about climate science does a simple linear projection of last century’s trendline into the next one, unlike Mr. Moriarty’s suggestion.

That would be about as silly as claiming solar PV [invented where I used to work] scientists should already be getting 100% efficiency.

Within ~30 minutes’ of Tom’s NRELare places thick with expert climate scientists, which makes him one of the lucky people who can easily go talk to experts:

NCAR
UC Boulder
USGS-Denver

I’m a AAASmember: I did a quick search of Science (An adequately prestigious journal) for “sea level rise”, and from the first hit page picked out a few recent SLR articles by Colorado authors, all of which I’d already read, along with the relevant IPCC TAR and AR4 chapters, etc, etc. (*I’m* no SLR expert, but I often talk to people who are. )

Mr. Moriarty has strong views on SLR, and surely is a AAAS member and has read these papers, all of whom think SLR will be a serious (acclerating) problem. He *could* write an article for Science showing them wrong, which would make him (properly) famous, given the mass of physics that would haveto be overturned to preserve a simple linear trend.

See How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?, 2005, 8 authors from NCAR.

See Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise”, 2006, of whose 6 authors, 2 are at NCAR,1 at UC-Boulder, and 1 at USGS-Denver.

See Glaciers Dominate Eustatic Sea-Level Rise in the 21st Century”>,2007, of whose 8 authors, 5 are at UC Boulder.Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise, 2008, of whose 3 authors one is at UC-Boulder.

See “On the basis of calculations presented here, we suggest that an improved estimate of the range of SLR to 2100 including increased ice dynamics lies between 0.8 and 2.0 m.”

(That’s probably as good a single estimate as you get right now. People are trying to model melt dynamics for places that have been frozen through recorded human history, complexified by various nonlinear effects, tipping points, etc. Ice-sheet issues are *hard*.)

NCAR says Community Ice Sheet Model Will Aid Understanding of Sea Level Rise.

“Scientists think that this mechanism might trigger the rapid retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – which could raise sea level by a meter or more within a century or less.”

See Dan Cayan (SCRIPPS)talk @ SFBCDCconference a year ago. This was not news,but right in line with mainstream science.

Specifically, see p 18-19, noting that some of the models are from NCAR. I used to sell supercomputers to NCAR and talk to their scientists. They are quite competent.

NCAR and USGS (and some of UCBoulder) are Federally-funded to do good science for us all. If Mr. Moriarty denigrates *their* work, he might want to think about the fact that most of *his* career has been supported by *Federal* tax money.

That’s money from me and the companies I’ve worked for. My home state (CA) since 1983 is far and away the biggest *net* contributor to the Federal budget, and none of NCAR, NREL, Fermilab, or Argonne are here, but we helped pay for them. [And this is OK with me, since I like to think America is a *country*, not just a collection of independent states; all those labs have made good contributions.]

LOOKING AHEAD
NCAR has regular lectures. So does UC-BOulder’s NSIDC.

If Mr. Moriarty actually wants to learn about the science, he has *real* experts nearby to visit, often.

I’m done.

My reply

John thanks for the thoughtful comment.  I hope you have had a chance to wind down get off your high horse during the holiday weekend.

Congratulations on being a AAAS member.  So am I.  And so are 120,000 other people.  For those of you who are impressed by John’s membership in the AAAS, let me fill you in on the strict requirements for membership.  Send a check – then you are a member. 

Oh, by the way, thanks for inventing solar PV, I guess without you I wouldn’t have a job.

Let’s talk about the papers you cited: 

#1  How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?  Science 18 March 2005: Vol. 307. no. 5716, pp. 1769 – 1772. 

John, did you actually read this paper?  Meehl, et. al., consider three possible scenarios from the Special Report for Emissions Scenarios (SRES).  Specifically, scenarios B1, A1B, and A2.  They ran two models on each of these scenarios. Here is what they found for 21st century steric sea level rise:

Low range scenario B1, model PCM: 13 cm

Low range scenario B1, model CCSM3: 18 cm

Low range scenario A1B, model PCM: 18 cm

Low range scenario A1B, model CCSM3: 25 cm

Low range scenario A2, model PCM: 19 cm

Low range scenario A2, model CCSM3: 30 cm

Let me translate that:  Under their worst case scenario and their most sensitive model you get 30 cm (12 inches) by 2100  Wow – pretty scary.  Note that the map at  “Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the California Coast,” which I mentioned in my earlier comment to alleviate your fear of the west coast going under water, and in which you need to zoom way, way in to even find the affected areas, were based on a much greater 140 cm (56 inch) sea level rise by 2100.

So John, why did you cite this paper.  Let me guess: You read the abstract and saw the words “additional 320% sea level rise.”  But you didn’t actually read the article, did you? These numbers don’t exactly fit the alarmists’ (Gore and Hansen for example) picture of cities under water by the end of the century.

#2  Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise , 24 March 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5768, pp. 1747 – 1750

This paper has a preposterous flaw.  It assumes a 1% yearly increase in atmospheric CO2 levels for the 21st century.  That sounds pretty innocuous – “What’s the problem with the assumption of a 1% increase?”, you might ask.  The problem is that the actual increase is about 0.5% per year.  Check this yourself here.  (By the way, John, that’s a NOAA website.  NOAAis one of those entities with labs in Boulder that you imply I have never heard of.)  This 0.5% trend has been fairly consistent for decades.  You can get the raw data from Mauna Loa, take the derivative, even take the second derivative, and see that 1% is preposterous. 

You might say “Big deal, 0.5% or 1%, what’s the difference.”  This is like a compound interest problem.  Take 1.005 to the 100th power (0.5% increase for 100 years) on one of your super computers, then take 1.01 to the 100th power (1% increase for 100 years).  The rest of you readers can simply try this on your desktop scientific calculator.  See the difference?  Pretty big, isn’t it?

Here is a paper that you seem to have overlooked in your comprehensive literature search: An overview of results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Covey, et. al., Global and Planetary Change, Vol 37, 2003. 

Covey et. al. write about the same 1% per year CO2 increase, but warned “The rate of radiative forcing increase implied by 1% per year increasing CO₂ is nearly a factor of two greater than the actual anthropogenic forcing in recent decades, even if non-CO₂ greenhouse gases are added in as part of an “equivalent CO₂ forcing” and anthropogenic aerosols are ignored.”  They conclude that this 1% “ increasing-CO₂ scenario cannot be considered as realistic for purposes of comparing predicted and observed climate changes during the past century.”

#3  Glaciers Dominate Eustatic Sea-Level Rise in the 21^st Century, Meier, et. al., Science, 24 August, 2007, Vol 317, 1064-1067

Meier, et. al, calculated a 560 mm rise in sea level due to melting ice by 2100 based on an accelerating rate of global ice melting.   They managed to concluded that the amount of ice melting each year had been, on the average, 32 Gigatonnes (Gt) greater than the previous year from 1995 to 2005.  They simply extrapolated this yearly 32 Gt increase out to 2100.   A 32 Gt yearly increase in the amount of global ice that melts each year, over the 10 year period from 1995 to 2005, would mean 320 Gt more ice was melting in 2005 that in 1995.  That translates into a sea level rise rate in 2005 that must have been 0.9 mm greater than the sea level rise rate in 1995 (320 Gt/year x  2.7 microns/Gt  = 0.9 mm/year).

But we have very good sea level rise data that covers the period from 1995 to 2005.  And John, you will be delighted to know that this data is maintained by the University of Colorado, in Boulder.

Take a good look.  Note that the sea level rises a rate of 3.2 mm per year from 1995 to 2005 as indicated by the line fit and the notation in the bottom right corner.  It does not start out at 3.2 mm per year in 1995 and go to 4.1 mm per year (3.2 mm/year + 0.9 mm/year) by 2005.  The rise rate clearly does not increase by 0.9 mm per year over that period of time. 

What should have happened by 2009?  Well, according to Meier the global rate at which water was added to the oceans should have continued increasing by an additional 32 Gt/year and therefore there should be 448 Gt { (2009 – 1995) x 32 Gt/year = 448 Gt/year) } more water added to the oceans per year in 2009 than in 1995.  That translates into a rise rate that is 1.2 mm/year greater in 2005 than in 1995.  If the slope of the line fit in the above graph were actually 3.2 mm/year in 1995, then by Meier’s logic it should have been 4.4 mm/year by 2009.  However, the graph clearly shows that, if anything, the rise rate is less in 2009 than in 1995.

Please feel free to actually read the paper by Meier, et. al.  Please examine their source of data and their data reduction.  Here is a nice sample of how they determined that the amount of ice melting from glaciers and ice caps (as opposed to ice melting form the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets) is increasing:

 

They took a scattered set of Meier’s own data, showing the melting rate of glaciers and ice caps, and fit it to a line.  It is traditional to give some numerical indication of the quality of a line fit.  In this case Meier chose not to provide such an indication.  So I digitized his data and did it for him: the r-squared value of this data is less than a dismal 0.1.  They found the slope of the line to be 11.9 Gt/year/year and thus concluded that for each year between 1995 and 2005 the glaciers and ice caps were losing 11.9 Gt more ice than the previous year.  Then they extrapolated that rate out another 95 years.  To extrapolate a function out 10 times the actual data’s domain is risky under any circumstances.  When the data is this scattered as this, it is just plain silly. 

They then undertook equally rigorous analysis of ice changes from the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet and the East Antarctic ice sheet, added the results together and came up with their 32 Gt/year/year acceleration rate.

#4.  Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise, Pfeffer, et. al., Science, 5 September 2008, Vol. 321. no. 5894, pp. 1340 – 1343

To their credit, Pfeffer et. al., work in this paper to put an upper limit on the sea level rise by 2100.  This immediately separates them from the wildest alarmists like Al Gore and James Hansen.  Their conclusion is the maximum sea level rise by 2100 is 2 meters.  But they say in the abstract “More plausible but still accelerated conditions lead to total sea-level rise by 2100 of about 0.8 meter.”  This is still quite high and apparently caught your eye, right John?

But what must happen for this 0.8 meter sea level rise?  Pfeffer et. al., use the following logic:

“Rapid, dynamically unstable discharge of ice through calving is restricted to glaciers with beds based below sea level. We identified and calculated the aggregate cross-sectionalarea of Greenland’s marine- terminating outletglaciers by using surface and bed topography (16) and measured ice velocities (5) to identify all potential pathways for rapid discharge, including channels presently flowing rapidly as well as potentially unstable channels (Fig. 1 and table S1). Cross-sectionalareas (gates) for each outlet were calculated at the point of greatest lateral constriction by bedrock in the glacier’s marine-based reach. Ice stream widths in Antarctica can vary in time, but for Greenland outlet glaciers cross-sectional areas are constrained almost entirely by bedrock topography. Of the 290 km2 total aggregate gate cross-sectional area, we identified 170 km2 as the aggregate marine based gate area where drainage to the ocean is not blocked by near coastalsills standing above present day sea level. All dynamic discharge (Table 2) must pass through these gates by 2100 to meet2- to 5-m SLR targets. We considered four scenarios: velocities were calculated for both the “marine based” gate (170 km2) and the “total aggregate” gate (290 km2) given both projected SMB and 10× inflated SMB losses. We then considered whether those velocities are realistic.”

They note that “The present-day average velocity of all Greenland outlet glaciers is 0.56 km/year when weighted by drainage basin area or 1.23 km/year when weighted by gate cross-sectional area.”  For the large sea level rises that they consider, these velocities must increase.  If we just look at the case that requires the smallest velocity increase to reach 2 meters of sea level rise by 2100 (i.e. the case that most favors your argument), then Pfeffer reports that the velocity for the discharge gates must go up to at least 26.8 km/year.

And they don’t say that this velocity must be achieved after 100 years of a slow acceleration.  Rather, they say “These velocities must be achieved immediately on all outlets considered and held at that level until 2100. Delays in the onset of rapid motion increase the required velocity further”

As you can see, the 2 meter rise requires the glacier velocity at the discharge gates to increase by at least a factor of 22. Right Now. Today. And then remain at that extraordinary velocity until 2100, winter, spring, summer and fall.

Here are some statements from the paper concerning their own velocity calculations: “The scenario velocities far exceed the fastest motion exhibited by any Greenland outlet glacier.”  “A comparison of calculated (Table 2) and observed (1.23 km/year) average velocities shows that calculated values for a 2-m SLR [sea level rise] exceed observations by a factor of 22 when considering all gates and inflated SMB and by a factor of 40 for the marine gates without inflated SMB [surface mass balance], which we consider to be the more likely scenario.”  “Although no physicalproof is offered that the velocities given in Table 2 cannot be reached or maintained over century time scales, such behavior lies far beyond the range of observations and at the least should not be adopted as a central working hypothesis.”

By extension, the glaciers would have to increase velocity by a factor of 9, today, right now,  and continue at that rate until 2100 to achieve the 0.8 meters. 

What would cause the glaciers to increase their velocity to such an extent?  The going theory at the time the Pfeffer paper was written was that melting water would make its way to the bottom of the glaciers and lubricate their motion to the sea.  Even Al Gore talks about this in his famous “An Inconvenient Truth.”  But data subsequent to the Pfeffer paper have shown that not to be the case. “Large and Rapid Melt-Induced Velocity Changes in the Ablation Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet,”  R. S. W. van de Wal, et al., Science 321, 111 (2008).

Van de Wal, et. al., note:

Here, we present ice velocity measurements from the major ablation area along the western of the ice sheet. The data set contains simultaneous measurements of ice velocity and ablation rates, which makes it possible to study the relation between ice velocity and meltwater input on longer (>5 years) and shorter (~1 day) time scales…

Annually averaged velocities are completely decorrelated to the annual mass balance, whereas a correlation might be expected if there is a strong feedback between velocities and melt rate, leading to enhanced flow, surface lowering, and increased melt rates…

In earlier work (4, 7), it has been suggested that the interaction between meltwater production and ice velocity provides a positive feedback, leading to a more rapid and stronger response of the ice sheet to climate warming than hitherto assumed. Our results are not quite in line with this view. We did not observe a correlation between annual ablation rate and annual ice velocities. Ice velocities respond fast to changes in ablation rate on a weekly time scale. However, on a longer time scale, the internal drainage system seems to adjust to the increased meltwater input in such a way that annual velocities remain fairly constant. In our view, the annual velocities in this part of the ice sheet respond slowly to changes in ice thickness and surface slope.

So, it looks like you will have to live with the disappointing news that the planet is not doomed by rapid sea level rise after all.  And your approval for grand plans to save places like Boston and San Francisco may not be needed.  Don’t lose hope though, with any luck the planet will be threatened by a giant meteor and the services of your brilliant mind will be needed after all.