SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATE: July 23, 2015
SNIP:
It has been widely discussed — but not yet peer reviewed. Now, though, you can at least read it for yourself and see what you think.
A lengthy, ambitious, and already contested paper by longtime NASA climate scientist James Hansen and 16 colleagues appeared online Thursday in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussion, an open-access journal published by the European Geosciences Union. The paper, entitled “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming is highly dangerous” is now open for comment — peer review in this journal happens in public.
And given how much attention the work has already received, it’s likely to generate plenty of comments from fellow scientists.
The study raises the possibility of a more rapid rate of sea level rise in this century than forecast by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose research is widely regarded as the gold standard of climate research — but also often criticized for being too conservative.
Moreover, the study postulates that this faster sea level rise, brought on by the melting of parts of Antarctica and Greenland, could lead to a number of climate change “feedbacks” that could shut down the oceans’ circulation; stratify the polar seas with warmer waters trapped below cold surface layers; increase the temperature difference between low and high latitudes; and generate stronger storms.