Melting Ice – Rising Seas: Saving Earth’s Refrigerator

Zero Carbon Guildford are thrilled to welcome Colin Summerhayes, Emeritus Associate at Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, to ZERO for the first time to give this important and fascinating talk.

The world’s icy regions (Arctic, Antarctic, and high mountains) are largely out of sight and out of mind for most people on the planet. But all that ice plays a vital role in keeping our climate cool: it is Earth’s refrigeration system, reflecting solar energy back into space. 

With global warming, which has accelerated along with the rise in our emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels, we have begun losing ice. As a result the polar regions (especially the Arctic and high mountains, and to a lesser extent parts of Antarctica) have begun losing ice, which is now driving sea level rise. 

By analogy with what happened in the last warm interglacial period 120,000 years ago, we can expect sea level to rise by between 9m and 14m over, the next few hundred years. The rates of change may appear low but they are insidious. Given that most of the world’s major cities lie in the coastal zone we can anticipate major impacts if nothing is done to turn the tide and bring back the ice.