I haven't read the paper yet to see whether this is good science or not, but even if it is, it depends on at least one assumption that may not be at all valid: namely, that there are no tipping points in this process that would dramatically change the rate of sea-level rise once passed. The problem with this kind of extrapolation is that no one has ever experienced this phenomenon before, and so we don't actually know if you can just scale up the effects of warming like this, or whether the dynamics of the system will change in ways we can't easily predict past a certain point. Ask the crew members of the space shuttle Columbia how trustworthy predictions of unprecedented phenomena are when based on such assumptions. Oh, that's right, you can't, because they burned up on re-entry, despite the fact that the best mathematical models predicted that the damage to their heat shields shouldn't have been enough to put them at risk.
Posts by Evo1ve
1 publicly visible post • joined 3 Oct 2012
Biting the hand that feeds IT
