Oh no! Our shoes and socks will get wet!

From a surprisingly even-handed article in The Guardian:

… recent studies have suggested part of the West Antarctic ice sheet is indeed unstable, triggered by warm water flowing onto the continental shelf for at least a few decades. We don’t yet know if humans have made this more likely, and until now we also haven’t had confidence in predictions of how much sea level rise could result from this region and others that could become unstable from climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decided in 2013 there was insufficient evidence to make an assessment any more precise than “it would not exceed several tenths of a metre” this century. We predict Antarctic ice sheet instability will most likely contribute 10cm sea level rise by the end of the century but is extremely unlikely to contribute more than 30 cm. So ‘several’, for us, is ‘about three’.

The author goes on to say “Does this mean climate sceptics should be dancing in the aisles, because our study rules out these very high contributions? Not at all.”

If we are dancing, some of us will be dancing barefoot, obviously, because that extra 10cm of water will have made their shoes and socks wet.