is it a black swan? Maybe just an extreme, unforeseen outcome of the current climate crisis set in motion by global warming.

Global arming is a rather straightforward phenomenon, well measured with standard physics tool (heath radiance physics, spectrum analysis etc)

Climate change encompasses all the effects on the global interconnected system of atmosphere, land and seas. Good luck in figuring out preciusely what will happen, extreme outcomes might be hidden behind unphatomable mechanisms.

For example , sea level rise hinges on the melting spped of Greenland and the South Pole, the 2 biggest ice masses (the arctic sea is a rather smallish ice mass and might be gone for good pretty soon)

Consensus is for 80-120 sea level rise by year 2100 and some vague 7 meters going forward, if we do really bad at containing emissions. But what if we missed some mechanism which melts glaciers more quickly?

Fascinating & deeply disturbing talk by @climate_ice & @twilamoon detailing mechanisms of ice melt in Greenland, many important ones are not yet included in ice-melt (& hence sea level) models. Empirical ice melt for Greenland is now at or greater than was estimated for RCP8.5!

— Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) November 2, 2021

Now at seminar on ice melt in Antartica by Rob DeConto. Many different mechanisms to Greenland, key ones also not in IPCC. Deeply concerning potential for serious contribution to ice melt & further sea level rise from Antartica (a small proportion today) -much more post 2100.

— Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) November 2, 2021

So Kevin Anderson likes to go ice melt seminars but here we have a point, IPCC models might be underestimating the forces in play. What extreme outcome are we risking here?

Meltwater Pulse 1A is a sudden rise of sea levels in the range of 16 to 25 meters in the span of 4 or 5 centuries, happened right fter the last glaciation some 15,000 yers ago, the deluge ? here’s wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A.

I got to know about the Meltwater Pulse from Lawrence Krauss Physics of Climate Change, hereis what he says “sea level has varied by more than 10 meters within a few centuries, as can be seen during the period between fourteen and fifteen thousand years ago—compatible for example with a total loss of sea ice in Greenland within a millennium.”

Compatible with total loss of sea ice in Greenland within a millenium. Sea ice? Only sea ice? Uhm, thing to checl, I thought it required the melt of the overland glacier, in some places 5 km thick.

So you see why it is worth studyng glaciers in Greenland and Antartica, a black swan might be swimming soon in hthe main orad fo your coastal city. Maybe in 100 maybe in 500 hundred years, why should we care ?