| A lot of people are going to read only the headline and shout "MIT says global warming isn't true" into their science denial bubbles! From my reading of this, the study does not say that sea-level rise won't happen, it's just saying one theoretical mechanism for RAPID sea-level rise might not be correct, so it'll be slower than some models predict. The study relates to ice cliffs on land and the theory that if the ice shelves in the sea break apart, then the ice cliffs on land will break apart rapidly, contributing to rapid sea-level rise. Ice already in the sea doesn't raise sea-levels but ice currently on land would. The study uses modelling to demonstrate that runaway event is unlikely, so the sea-level rise from that even should be removed from estimates. There's another paper about this from February_:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0901-4 Some quotes from the papers: - "We’re saying that scenario, based on cliff failure, is probably not going to play out. That’s something of a silver lining. That said, we have to be careful about breathing a sigh of relief. There are plenty of other ways to get rapid sea-level rise." - Ice cliff collapse... "is not required to reproduce sea-level changes due to Antarctic ice loss ... without it we find that the projections agree with previous studies (all 95th percentiles are less than 43 centimetres)." A couple more things: - Both papers still agree that sea-level rise will happen, but maybe not so fast and not so much. (Whether your house is under one foot of water or two doesn't make much difference to if you can live there.) - If your discussion point against climate change is based on the models being wrong/inaccurate/too varied, then you have to discount this evidence, as it too is based on modelling. - MIT's press department need to write better headlines. |