James Hansen, an early global warming whistleblower is publishing again. More bad news, folks: “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous”
Hansen and team of scientists studies indicates that:
“There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 °C warmer than today.
Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings (…) ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration (…)
ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters. (…) Paleoclimate data reveal that subsurface ocean warming causes ice shelf melt and ice sheet discharge. (…)
slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability. Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms.(…)
Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous. (…) ”