“My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in fifty years, we don’t know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf…
I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you’ll hear it in Sydney… Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don’t know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts…
Once you have started that process, we wouldn’t know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don’t know whether sea level will stabilize. There’s no point of retreat where you can safely go back to…
I doubt whether our global civilization could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring.”
What Does Professor Tim Flannery, Top Climate Scientist, Worry About?
Creative Greenius 