A Refresher Course

Back in 2015, BRT did a post, Past the point of no return, a short piece on the possibility of the collapse of a large part of the western ice shelf of Antartica, something echoed in spades in a NY Times piece prosaically titled Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly with consequences rather dire to say the least, particularly after the year of our lord 2100. 

With ice melting in other regions, too, the total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100, the researchers found. That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.

The situation would grow far worse beyond 2100, the researchers found, with the rise of the sea exceeding a pace of a foot per decade by the middle of the 22nd century. Scientists had documented such rates of increase in the geologic past, when far larger ice sheets were collapsing, but most of them had long assumed it would be impossible to reach rates so extreme with the smaller ice sheets of today.

What the times piece did not discuss was Albedo, a prime driver as to why GW is accelerating beyond anything researchers could have predicted just a few years ago.

When looking at this striking image of an ice berg calving from the King Baudouin Ice Shelf, one readily sees the tremendous difference in the albedo from ice to water whereby the Antarctic, like the Arctic, will gradually become a heat sink due to the continual melting of the sea ice caused by global warming. Calving is a normal event but the decreased albedo on both poles is quietly disconcerting to say the least. 

Hate to say this but BRT was on this a year prior to the Times.