Mitrovica agrees.
“When I give talks about this, people don’t believe me,” says Mitrovica. He doesn’t blame them, either. “It’s just wacky when you think about it, completely counterintuitive,” he says. “But it’s true.”
It’s even measurable, despite the fact that the melting of the ice sheets has barely begun. Even when you correct for other effects, says Mitrovica, you can still see that Europe’s sea level rise is less than you’d expect. “It’s profoundly puzzling,” he says, “until you realise you’re seeing the gravitational signal of Greenland melting.”
Advertisement
When he started looking at regional effects, Mitrovica recalls, some climate-change deniers were noting that sea-level rise was happening at different rates in different regions, arguing that this proved there was no global trend, and thus no global warming. That was already a bogus argument, but now that he and others have begun investigating the gorilla in the living room, it’s even more absurd. The science is so straightforward, he says, that “if you saw that sea level was rising uniformly around the world, it would be proof that the big ice sheets are not melting.”
Discuss in our Forums
See what other readers are saying about this article!
Click here to read & post comments.
15 posts so far.
About the Author
Michael D. Lemonick is the senior writer at Climate Central, a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to communicate climate science to the public. Prior to joining Climate Central, he was a senior writer at Time magazine, where he covered science and the environment for more than 20 years. He has also written four books on astronomical topics and has taught science journalism at Princeton University for the past decade.