
Greenland is melting in a heatwave. That's everyone's problem - pseudolus
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/31/europe/greenland-heatwave-climate-crisis-intl/index.html
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TheSpiceIsLife
_During [2012] Greenland 's ice sheet lost 450 million metric tons -- the
equivalent of more than 14,000 tons of ice lost per second._

 _During a year like 2012 or 2019, water produced by Greenland 's ice sheet
adds more than one millimeter to global sea levels, according to Box. But
countries in the tropics could see a rise of two millimeters or more, he
said._

One millimetre? It’s hard to get panicky about that, unfortunately.

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gibbonsrcool
Seriously? It's the entire ocean... it's only going to get worse and possibly
accelerate. What does a decade adding 1cm do to salinity, microscopic life,
water temperature, storm surge and god knows what else? I read your quote from
the article and panicked. I'm even more panicked that there's people who can
read something like that and not be deeply alarmed. What's happening to our
planet makes me sick, and your apathy makes me even more sick.

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TheSpiceIsLife
At 1mm a year it would take _one thousand years_ to get one metre of sea level
rise.

That’s not the sort of slogan that’ll likely motivate a lot of change.

That’s ignoring the potential for runaway feedback loops.

I’m just saying that it didn’t, in fact, cause much change, as evidenced by
the business-as-usual scenario we find ourselves in seven years after 2012.

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NeedMoreTea
It's not the only source of sea level rise, or even the major one - that I
believe is expansion from rising sea temperature. So it's an _additional_ 1mm
on top of the others, and any catastrophic glacier collapses such as may be
approaching with Thwaites in the Antarctic.

The more that melts results in changing albedo and smaller thermal mass to
encourage an accelerating melt - a small runaway feedback loop. Rising air and
sea temperatures will accelerate it further.

You and I may not care that much - _yet,_ but those in the Marshall Islands,
Maldives and other low lying regions almost certainly care about every
millimetre. Sea level rise is probably the least dramatic effect of climate
heating, but the most inexorable. It takes a while to melt 650,000 cubic miles
of ice, yet we seem to be managing to get going. It will accelerate.

It _should_ be cause for major concern.

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gniv
They mention in passing that last year was the coldest in decades (in
Greenland). What did that do to the ice? Did it increase?

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fxj
It is not just the water. It is also changing the reflectivity (albedo) of the
earth which results in even faster increasing temperatures. This _might_ lead
to a self sustained acceleration as soon as the permafrost is melting and the
CO2 is released into the atmosphere.

[http://www.promice.dk/DarkeningIce.html](http://www.promice.dk/DarkeningIce.html)

