Melting Greenland Ice Sheet Could Cause 1 Foot Sea Level Rise By 2050

The world is on fire, and climate change is impacting everything around us, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. A new study has found that the increasing melting of ice sheets in Greenland could now lead to a 1-foot rise in sea levels in just 28 years. Climate change is not a far-off threat: It is here and we have to deal with it in real time. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A new study published in the journal nature. Climate change says that even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately, right now, no more emissions effective immediately, Greenland would still lose 3.3% of their ice sheet, which would result in a 12 inch, one foot sea level rise across the planet. We have hit the point of climate change that even if all emissions were to cease to exist right now, we're still headed for catastrophe. That is what this new report tells us. And the worst part about that is is that's the optimistic part of it, right? They still carry that message that do not despair. We can do something. We can actually stop even worse things from happening, but this one foot sea level rise at this point, you know, based on my reading of this does appear inevitable and that's a terrifying thought. And it's something that, of course everybody's been warned about many times for several decades now. And we as a country only just recently passed our very first piece of, I guess, climate legislation ever, ever folks. That's how bad we have been as a country. You know, that's not even including. I know, but other countries are bigger polluters. I get it. I'm not a moron. Okay. One other country is a bigger polluter and that's China. We're number two. And then I think it's India. And we could go down and down and down, down that list, but that's not important.

We should be the leaders on this issue and we're not. And the reason we're not is because every couple years, we end up with a dufus in the white house, typically with an R next to their name that pretends that climate change doesn't exist, or that tells us that climate change is a Chinese hoax or is too dumb to understand what sciences is telling them. We have Republican politicians who when asked about climate change, say, no, it's not real, but I'm not a scientist man. And this is what we get. We're gonna get a foot of sea level rise by the year 2050. So we got 28 years and a foot of sea level rise by the way, just so everybody understands, cuz I know there's a lot of people who don't quite understand this. It's like, oh, that means the water comes, you know, closer to shore by one foot. No, no, no, no, no. A sea level rise of one foot.

And then that one foot extends all the way out until it hits the shore again. Right? As the shore curves down up, they meet. So a one foot sea level rise is about an eight to 10 foot, uh, encroachment of water. That's how that works. Depending on the way the shoreline is sloped. So it's a significant problem. But again, we could be working on this. We could be doing something about it because if we do not, and again, that 3.3% melt of Greenland's ice sheet is only if we stopped all the emissions right now, it gets so much worse. Um, when you look at it, if Greenland's ice sheet were to disintegrate completely sea levels would rise more than 22 feet enough to double the frequency of storm surge flooding in many of the world's largest coastal cities by the end of the century.