Thanks for the link Wayne. It was worth reading teh full Press Release from the science body that did the research
To be clear my original quote was from the News Media source. I added The Guardian link because it expanded on the story.
I think this a fundamentally revolutionary piece of research. Ok the Western Antarctic ice shelf won't melt in a 10 years or 50 or 70. The time line starts at 100 years. But there will be ongoing and probably rapidly escalating melt (particularly if temperatures continue to rise on a business as usual basis) and in conjunction with other ice melting sea level rises for this century will most likely be on the high side of a metre
But in the long term it seems to be "gone" with all the implications of a sea level rise of at least 4 metres (this doesn't include any further contribution from the Greenland ice cap)
Implications
1) Completely destroys climate skeptics assertions about relatively small effects of climate change.
2) Puts the world on notice that for all intents and purposes major population centres on coastal fringes will be unlivable in a century or so.
3) Creates fundamental uncertainty about the future extent of sea level rises. So exactly how far up the hill do we build ?
4) Raises the issues of how do we deal with this seemingly certain but long time line catastrophe. ? For example how much more infrastructure development do we put into current cities versus planning and building the cities for tomorrow ?
I would be interested Wayne in hearing the skeptics view of the strength of the Antarctic ice shelf research. In fact I would be even more interested to hear how all other relevant scientists assess the work.
Read a bit more into it, basilio. The 'expert' alarmists on this one aren't saying anything noticeable is going to be happening for hundreds of years, and it could be over a thousand years before the sea levels rise dramatically. They say it will be at least 200 years, probably about 600 years. Apparently it will very slowly rise as the ice slowly melts, then suddenly (probably about 600 years from now) it will rise quickly. That's far enough into the future for no one to care about it today in terms of economics, and even if it was certain fact, anyone who wanted to could dismiss it as unimportant and we'd forget about it for generations.
Big predictions like this come from science all the time, and usually they turn out to be wrong. In this case it will be generations before we can be certain.
It's worth considering that over the next thousand years or so all sorts of other things could happen. Maybe somewhere else something will happen to counter this melting (if it is as certain and dramatic as they say). Either way, I'm guessing that in 500 years we'll have the means to reverse it artificially if need be.
I really don't think that saying "We convinced that we can extrapolate things and say that this is going to be a big problem hundreds of years from now" immediately destroys anyone's idea about anything.
Even if we absolutely knew this to be fact and we all agreed, it wouldn't change the value of waterfront properties for a few generations. Look at the slums in Detroit which were the wealthy areas just decades ago. Look at the wealthy areas today which were slums just decades ago. These things come and go within much smaller timeframes, we have hundreds of years to plan for it, if it is even going to happen. Look at the buildings we are putting up today. For the most part we really don't expect them to still be in use in 500 years. We don't generally put skyscrapers built to last right next to the ocean, and hey, even they are disposable in that sort of timeframe. How many massive buildings were there 500 years ago?
Even so, people acting like sea level changes are unnatural and catastrophic is a bit silly. Within recent history (tens of thousands of years) sea levels have risen and fallen hugely. Multiple times over recent history we have had land bridges form and vanish between places like Australia and PNG, and with those events came massive changes on what still is land in Australia (and of course all over the rest of the world). None of that had anything to do with human activity, and of course that sort of thing was going on hundreds of thousands of years too (before humans even existed) and millions of years before that. We even had continents drifting apart, smacking into each other, etc. It's not like any of that is going to stop regardless of what we do or don't pump into the atmosphere. Everyone seems to think that if we reduce our CO2 emissions or had never produced any, the climate never would have changed, but that's just a modern myth. If we want a constant climate and sea level we'll only achieve it through artificial manipulation, and it will very much be an unnatural thing - the climate has never before sat still. Among other myths is that despite the fact that the climate has been warmer and cooler than at present before, the rate of change has never been greater. Even that's not true, climate scientists aren't even sure that the current rate of change is the greatest in the last thousand years, and it's certainly not the greatest ever, it has been greater many times before.
Interestingly, since we know that the climate has been warmer than at present many times before, including not all that long ago, this ice melting must have occurred then too. Presumably the rate of warming isn't relevant to the ice - it isn't alive, it doesn't evolve, it'll melt whenever it's warm. So this is just a normal cycling thing too.
We'll probably develop the means to keep the climate constant within the next few hundred years, though we may or may not choose to do that.
As usual, the alarmists are making a big deal out of something which isn't unnatural (the timing may be, but it has happened before and would have happened again with or without us) and may not be happening at all, and even the scientists are predicting it to be in at least 200 years, probably three times that.