A new approach to assessing future sea level rise from ice sheets

Nature Climate Change has published an outstanding study that used structured expert elicitation (EE) on ice sheet melting, reports Eurasia Review. Should the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland melt, the global sea level would rise by 63 meters. Since it is difficult to predict their future with numerical modelling, scientists have been searching other methods.

Professor Jonathan Bamber, one of the authors of the study said: “This is the first study of its kind on ice sheet melting to use a formalized mathematical pooling of experts’ opinions. It demonstrates the value and potential of this approach for a wide range of similar problems in climate change research, where past data and current numerical modelling have significant limitations when it comes to forecasting future trends and patterns.”