This photograph of the Arctic shows the smallest  footprint of Arctic Sea  ice in 2012 in comparison to the average minimum over the preceding 30 years (thus, beginning in 1982.)   I found the photograph when I looked up Dr. James Hansen, who had appeared earlier today on CNN’s FAREED ZACHARIA GPS  which aired today.

  This photo is from 2012. by itself, melting of the Arctic ice that is over water does not raise sea level, because the denser melt water simply replaces the melted less dense ice.

However the melting is probably a symptom of warmer water, as well as increasingly warm air.  Warming water WILL decrease its density, and make the same weight of water take up a larger volume.  With this happening all over the world, the increase in volume simply from warming the water is a known way that sea level can change.

Sea level rise is especially relevant to coastal residents, because it raises the base sea level, which then make the effect of additional surges from storms that much more impactful.

And, as James Hansen said today on CNN’s FAREED Zacharia,  80% of the world’s population lives near the coast.Please see the below quote from CNN’s FAREED ZACHARIA GPS, which aired today.  Here is his solution, which we need to implement right now.

Hansen’s idea to curb climate change:  “…As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, people are going to keep burning them and going to find them, to dig them up wherever they can find them. …what we need to do is add a gradually rising fee to the fossil fuels, which you would collect from the fossil fuel companies at the source… And that money should be distributed to – all legal residents of the country. That way the person who does better than average in limiting his carbon footprint will make money, and it will be a big incentive for them to pay attention to their carbon footprint. It will be a big incentive for entrepreneurs to develop no carbon and low carbon energy sources and products. And the economic studies that have been done show that this actually stimulates the economy. So it doesn’t cost anything.”

It is very urgent to attend to this problem.  The only trouble with the below quote is that many people have a very democratic idea about the meaning of the  word hypothesis.  They do not realize the weightof the science behind it.  There are many careful observations of fact that go into the making of a hypothesis.

Hansen’s hypothesis on sea levels rising as much as 10 feet within 50 years:“Not only would it be 10 feet, but it would imply that in the next decades after that it would be even more. Because where this water is coming from is the west Antarctic ice sheet, and then there’s another part of the east Antarctic ice sheet which also has several meters of sea level rise in its ice. So what that would mean is coastal cities would become dysfunctional. Parts of the city would still be above water, but it wouldn’t make sense to try to rebuild them partially because they know the water is going to keep rising. So we can’t let it go unstable. We would lose all the coastal cities in the world, and that’s enormous a cost, which would affect everybody, whether they’re living on the coast or not.”

We need to elect politicians who will help us implement Hansen’s climate change solution, NOW.