Polar ice melt and sea level rise: earth climate in uncharted territory

Figure 2.

Rate of sea-level rise obtained from tide gauge observations (red line, smoothed as described in the Fig. 2 legend) and computed from global mean temperature (dark blue line). The light blue band indicates the statistical error (one SD) of the simple linear prediction (upper plot). Sea level relative to 1990 obtained from observations (red line) and computed from global mean temperature (lower plot). The red squares mark the unsmoothed, annual sea-level data [5].

Figure 3.

Greenland (a) and Antarctic (b) mass change deduced from gravitational field measurements by Velicogna (2009), as read by M.Sato from Velicongna’s 2009 graph, and the derivative of these curves, i.e., annual changes of the Greenland (c) and Antarctic (d) ice sheet masses. From Hansen and Sato [1]

Figure 4.

Sea level vs CO2 plot, showing glacial and interglacial data points from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, values of Earth atmosphere and sea levels during the pre-industrial period, shift of the Earth atmosphere and sea level since the 18^th century (red near-horizontal arrow) and mid-Pliocene (3 m.y.) CO2 and sea level values (red vertical arrow). After [1]..