Let me preface this by saying that I believe climate change and decarbonization to be one of the critical challenges of our time. That said…
This article’s title and its content are completely at odds. Here’s a critical passage:
> As the ice sheet melts, its surface will be at ever-lower elevations, exposed to warmer air temperatures. Warmer air temperatures accelerate melt, making it drop and warm further. Global air temperatures have to remain elevated for hundreds of years or even longer for this feedback loop to become effective; a quick blip of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) wouldn’t trigger it, Höning said. But once the ice crosses the threshold, it would inevitably continue to melt. Even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were reduced to pre-industrial levels, it wouldn’t be enough to allow the ice sheet to regrow substantially.
> “We cannot continue carbon emissions at the same rate for much longer without risking crossing the tipping points,” Höning said. “Most of the ice sheet melting won’t occur in the next decade, but it won’t be too long before we will not be able to work against it anymore.”
So…we potentially have hundreds of years to bring temperatures back down before the “tipping point” triggers? Forgive me for not being super alarmed.
100 years ago we’d just barely started dumping carbon into the atmosphere. That is a long time.
EDIT: to be clear, yes of course it not enough to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere in the next hundred years, but it does give us (potentially) decades to figure out large-scale carbon capture and sequestration even if we exceed the thresholds described here (1000 gigatons).
This article’s title and its content are completely at odds. Here’s a critical passage:
> As the ice sheet melts, its surface will be at ever-lower elevations, exposed to warmer air temperatures. Warmer air temperatures accelerate melt, making it drop and warm further. Global air temperatures have to remain elevated for hundreds of years or even longer for this feedback loop to become effective; a quick blip of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) wouldn’t trigger it, Höning said. But once the ice crosses the threshold, it would inevitably continue to melt. Even if atmospheric carbon dioxide were reduced to pre-industrial levels, it wouldn’t be enough to allow the ice sheet to regrow substantially.
> “We cannot continue carbon emissions at the same rate for much longer without risking crossing the tipping points,” Höning said. “Most of the ice sheet melting won’t occur in the next decade, but it won’t be too long before we will not be able to work against it anymore.”
So…we potentially have hundreds of years to bring temperatures back down before the “tipping point” triggers? Forgive me for not being super alarmed.
100 years ago we’d just barely started dumping carbon into the atmosphere. That is a long time.
EDIT: to be clear, yes of course it not enough to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere in the next hundred years, but it does give us (potentially) decades to figure out large-scale carbon capture and sequestration even if we exceed the thresholds described here (1000 gigatons).