The Decade We're About To Exit Smashed Climate Records Across The Board, Across The World
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West Antarctica’s towering glaciers, home to enough ice to raise sea levels by 10 feet or more if they melted, have begun an inexorable retreat. Almost every single glacier in Earth’s high mountains is shrinking now, reshaping life in those high elevation zones. It’s also hitting life far downstream, where billions of people depend on the water that has long been sourced from snow and ice in the high peaks above.
Both ocean-trapped heat and melting ice contributed to record-breaking sea levels across much of the planet. A warmer ocean expands, driving those levels higher, and simultaneously, melt from Greenland and Antarctica has added about 36 millimeters of extra fresh water to the world’s oceans in the past 10 years, and the rate is jacking up every year. The injection of fresh water is changing the composition of the ocean in the Far North, which is in turn slowing down the conveyor belt of current from north to south that controls the world’s weather, with uncertain—but not positive—effects.
Behind all of the change is one clear driver: atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 2009, atmospheric CO2 concentrations hovered around 390 parts per million. By 2014, the number blew past 400 parts per million. Today, we hover around 410 ppm. The planet hasn’t seen concentrations that high since at least 2.6 million years ago. And at that time, no ice sheet existed in the northern polar regions and forests grew on Antarctica, sea levels were likely more than 40 feet higher than today, and the planet as a whole operated under very different conditions.
“This last decade mattered a lot and it looked pretty bad,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia University and NASA GISS. “We’ve just got to make it so the next one is different.”
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/12/the-decade-we-finally-woke-up-to-climate-change/
