Melting glaciers caused almost 2cm of sea level rise this century, study reveals
Guardian1 day ago
According to a study published in the journal Nature Wednesday, the world's glaciers collectively lost 6.542T tonnes of ice between 2000 and 2023, causing an 18mm (0.7 inch) rise in global sea levels. The average loss is 273B tonnes of ice annually — equivalent to 30 years of global water consumption.
The study — titled the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise — combined data from 450 contributors across 35 research teams and analyzed 233 regional estimates of glacier mass changes. Glacier mass loss was found to be around 18% greater than that of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
It found that in 2002, glaciers — excluding the continental ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica — covered 705,221 square kilometers (272,287 square miles) and contained approximately 121,728B tonnes of ice. However, glaciers have lost about 5% of their total volume over the past two decades.
Glaciers are excellent indicators of climate change, and the accelerating glacier loss serves as a critical warning sign and a reminder that global warming will significantly impact people's lives until urgent and concrete actions are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This study should address the challenges of managing scarce freshwater resources and contribute to developing effective mitigation strategies to combat rising sea levels amid a changing climate.
The glacier melt pattern shows regional variability and natural climate fluctuations, with some areas experiencing less severe impacts. This suggests the need for region-specific adaptation strategies rather than one-size-fits-all solutions. Moreover, this study is as unreliable as previous studies of global glacier changes, which relied on less accurate or incomplete data to predict that glacier mass loss will accelerate until the end of this century. Reductionist climate alarmism leads downstream to bad environmental policies.