Current budget legislation being hashed out in the US Senate seems likely to slow US progress on emissions. So this new paper comes as unwelcome piling-on.
Efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C under the Paris Climate Agreement may not go far enough to save the world’s ice sheets, according to a study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Research led by Durham University, UK, suggests the target should instead be closer to 1°C to avoid significant losses from the polar ice sheets and prevent a further acceleration in sea level rise.
The team reviewed a wealth of evidence to examine the effect that the 1.5°C target would have on the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which together store enough ice to raise global sea levels by almost 65 meters.
The mass of ice lost from these ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s and they are currently losing around 370 billion metric tons of ice per year, with current warming levels of around 1.2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
The authors argue that further warming to 1.5°C would likely generate several meters of sea level rise over the coming centuries as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt in response to both warming air and ocean temperatures.
This would make it very difficult and far more expensive to adapt to rising sea levels, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal and island populations and leading to widespread displacement of hundreds of millions of people.
Policymakers and governments need to be more aware of the effects a 1.5°C rise in temperatures could have on ice sheets and sea levels, the researchers say.
Currently, around 230 million people live within one meter of sea level and melting ice represents an existential threat to those communities, including several low-lying nations.
Avoiding this scenario would require a global average temperature cooler than that of today, which the researchers hypothesize is probably closer to 1°C above pre-industrial levels or possibly even lower.
However, the researchers add that further work is urgently needed to more precisely determine a “safe” temperature target to avoid rapid sea level rise from melting ice sheets.
The research team also included experts from the universities of Bristol, UK, and Wisconsin-Madison and Massachusetts Amherst, both U.S..
Study co-author Jonathan Bamber, Professor of Glaciology and Earth Observation at the University of Bristol, has been measuring changes in ice sheets for several decades.
He said: “Recent satellite-based observations of ice sheet mass loss have been a huge wake-up call for the whole scientific and policy community working on sea level rise and its impacts. The models have just not shown the kind of responses that we have witnessed in the observations over the last three decades.”
Currently, around 230 million people live within one metre of sea level and melting ice represents an existential threat to those communities, including several low-lying nations.
Dr. Gilbz’s comments about the value of slowing down the amount of heating is the same request at the beginning of the pandemic to “flatten the curve” so we’d have time to adapt (producing protective gear, developing vaccine, etc.).
We need to get communicators to emphasize that “global mean sea level rise” is just an abstraction that marks a certain amount of cumulative heat (melting), because all sea level is local. There are current- and wind-driven bulges, land masses shifting up or down, gravitational shifts around the major ice sheets, and instability around river deltas. Some places will get much more than GMSR, others will get less.
All sea level is local.
If you make realistic targets, you need everyone to understand the need and to work towards it, that is certainly not happening right now and we are moving to a higher target, whether we like it or not, just the time periods of nature and physics are not aligned with peoples sense of urgency and danger.
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“So, is it too late to save the climate? No. The technologies we need are finally cheap enough. The sooner we stop climate change from worsening, the more disasters, famine and death we avert. We might not manage 1.5°C or even 2°C, but every tenth of a degree counts. The faster we make the shift, the better our climate future.”
https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2025/05/earth-is-heading-for-2.7c-warming-this-century-we-may-avoid-the-worst-climate-scenarios-but-the-outlook-is-still-dire
“Locking the barn door after the horse has bolted”
The WMO report forecasts that the annually averaged global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2025 and 2029 is predicted to be between 1.2°C and 1.9°C higher than the average over the years 1850-1900.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/global-climate-predictions-show-temperatures-expected-remain-or-near-record-levels-coming-5-years