A. 3 to 5 feet — contributing to an increasingly likely total sea level rise of more than 5 feet by 2100, a rise that will be all but impossible to stop if we don’t sharply reverse CO2 emissions trends within a decade or so.

West Antarctica’s collapsing ice shelves are in the news today.  This post will survey what we now know about this unstable ice sheet and the threat it poses to humanity — or is that the threat humanity poses to it? — if we continue on our current suicidal emissions path.

UK Telegraph: "Antarctic ice bridge collapse hailed as new sign of global warming"

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined.  In 2001, the IPCC “consensus” said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.  As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

A 2007 study found “The current loss of mass from the Amundsen Sea embayment of the West Antarctic ice sheet [WAIS] is equivalent to that from the entire Greenland ice sheet” (see the new survey report Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment draft here).  And WAIS’s 2007′s ice loss was 75% higher than 2006′s (see “The Antarctic ice sheet hits the fan“).

On Saturday, Reuters reported on a major new study on Antarctic ice shelves, “Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Larsen Ice Shelf Area, Antarctica: 1940-2005“:

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“Republicans [sic] For Environmental Protection: ‘Conservatives, Of All People, Should Not Ignore Basic Principles Of Economics’ ” is the guest post today, from Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson.  I know what you’re thinking — there are Republicans For Environmental Protection?  But of course there are — at the state level.  Indeed, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a genuine leader in climate action.  But this is a national organization and given the number of national Republicans who honestly support climate action — as opposed to the number who, say, work 24/7 to dishonestly appease polluters (see “”MIT Professor tells GOP to stop ‘misrepresenting’ his work and “House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate “and “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies” — at the very least REP should consider dropping the ‘s’ from their name.

Why are so many Republicans in Congress lying about green economy legislation? Republicans for Environmental Protection have no idea. In a sharply worded press release, this organization of conservation-minded conservatives criticize the Hill Republicans’ $3100 light-switch-tax lie, which is based on a deliberate misinterpretation of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of carbon pricing. They describe the GOP pattern of lying about energy as “a disservice to American citizens” and “a dangerous unwillingness to learn the right lessons from the election debacles of 2006 and 2008″³:

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