CSTPR/IBS-ESP Noontime seminar
"Sea Level Rise as a Climate Change Metric"
by Ursula Rick
Center for Science & Technology Policy Research

November 2, 2009
12:00 pm
CIRES Auditorium
click here for directions

Ursula Rick, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, will give a talk "Climate Change Metrics and Their Uncertainty" on Monday, November 2, 2009. The talk will be from 12:00 - 1:00 pm in the CIRES Auditorium.

The talk is free and open to the public and will be held at the CIRES Auditorium. Click here for directions.

This will be a "brown bag seminar". Feel free to bring your lunches if you wish. This series is being co-sponsored by the CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and the Institute of Behavioral Science, Environment and Society Program.

Abstract: Projections of global sea level rise to the year 2100 have become a common metric used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists, policymakers and the media when discussing climate change impacts, and these projections are often given in support of arguments for action on climate change. Sea level rise can be caused by several physical processes including 1) thermal expansion due to increased water temperature, 2) water volume increase due to melting land ice or increased river runoff, and 3) reduction in the ocean basin size due to sediment loading or tectonics. Thermal expansion and water volume increase from melting land ice contribute roughly the same amount to the current global sea level rise, while changes in basin volume caused by sediment loading are particularly important for those living near river deltas. Despite the relative contributions of these mechanisms, almost all media coverage of sea level rise focuses on ice sheet melting or the global sea level rise projections given by the IPCC Assessment Reports. Several newspapers from the US and UK were searched for articles that report a global sea level rise projection for the year 2100. The reporting of projections has been very constant for the past 20 years with varying levels of uncertainty being reported. This reflects the relatively constant global sea level rise projections published in the first four IPCC Assessment Reports. A large majority of the sea level rise articles reported numbers from the most current IPCC report even if the article was primarily about a paper on only one source of sea level rise (e.g. Greenland melting). The heavy coverage of IPCC sea level rise projections may be a result of the paucity of scientific papers that are both published in a journal routinely covered by the media (e.g. Science) and specifically calculate global sea level rise 100 years in the future. There was no significant difference in the reported numbers between US and UK newspapers or between newspapers considered to be liberal, such as the New York Times, and newspapers considered to be conservative, such as the Financial Times. There was a significant trend in the number of sea level rise reports through the last 20 years. There has been an increase in the amount of sea level rise coverage in all the newspapers in this study with sharp increases in coverage during the years when an IPCC Assessment Report was released. This indicates that any growing awareness of sea level rise by the public is not due to an increase in the projected rise, but due to an increase in the coverage of sea level rise.

Biography: Ursula Rick is a Postdoctoral Researcher at both the Earth Science & Observation Center (ESOC) and the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR) at the University of Colorado. Her work at ESOC involves using remote sensing, in situ data and numerical modeling to better understand the seasonal timing and mechanisms of the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet. At CSTPR, she studies climate change metrics, such as CO2 concentration, mean global temperature and sea level rise, and their use in climate policy debates. In 2008, Ursula finished her PhD on the hydrology of meltwater in the Greenland Ice Sheet while at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at CU. She studied Antarctic ice cores for her MS at Dartmouth College and got a BS in Material Science and Metallurgical Engineering at Michigan Technological University.