The model looks at sea level rise from thermal expansion only, noting that ice melt is too difficult to determine:
"In response to greenhouse gas warming, sea level is expected to rise due to the thermal expansion of sea water as the ocean warms. Because the deep ocean will warm much more slowly than the upper ocean, the thermally driven rise in sea level is expected to continue for centuries after atmospheric CO2 stops increasing. To illustrate, Fig. 4 shows the increase of global mean sea level in the GFDL 4xCO2 coupled climate model experiment. Even though CO2 no longer increases after year 140, sea level continues to rise steadily well beyond year 500. The final equilibrium sea level change in the model is 1.9 meters for a CO2 doubling (not shown) which is roughly the level attained in the CO2 quadrupling experiment after 500 years. The equilibrium rise for the quadrupling experiment has not yet been simulated."
...
"The sea level rise projections in Fig. 4 are the expected changes due to thermal expansion of sea water alone, and do not include the effect of melted continental ice sheets.With the effect of ice sheets included, the total rise could be larger by a substantial factor. However, projections of the contribution of the ice sheets to future sea level rise are not presented here due to the difficulties of performing a credible calculation. For reference, the volume of ice in the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets is equivalent to a sea level rise of 7 and 73 meters, respectively (IPCC, 1995)."
Here is the whole study:
Comments
Post new comment