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A new analysis of Antarctica’s vast ice sheet in a world heated by unabated greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning comes to a stark, if unsurprising, conclusion: Burn it all, lose it all.

The paper, published online this afternoon in the journal Science Advances, is titled, “Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

The modeling study is far more a thought experiment than a prediction, given that, even in China, there is every indication that the world’s coal, particularly, will not all be exploited.

But it is another reminder that energy choices made today will have repercussions for thousands of years to come, as David Archer laid out so well in “The Long Thaw” and as earlier research on Antarctic ice sheets has concluded.

The authors of the study — Ricarda Winkelmann and Anders Levermann from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol — find that the loss of the entire Antarctic ice sheet would take millenniums, but up to 100 feet of sea level rise could result within 1,000 years, with the rate of the rise beginning to increase a century or two from now. That finding meshes with the 2014 paper on the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Earlier today, I had a video chat about the study and its implications with three of the authors — Winkelmann, Levermann and Caldeira. You can watch it or read a few excerpts below:

Justin Gillis has written a news article putting the paper in context with other recent research on Antarctic dynamics and sea level, as well as with policy debates about the current value of fossil fuels against the momentous costs that could attend greatly expanded use:

In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today. “What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”

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Caldeira told me recently that he considered this study his most important work and hopes it will help convince world leaders and the public of the scope of what’s being sacrificed for the sake of cheap fossil energy now.

In our video chat, he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)

Here are a few snippets from our chat, but I encourage you to listen to the full exchange (and post other excerpts you find noteworthy):

Ken Caldeira on our bias to the immediate:

Last night, at dinner I ate more than I should have, maximizing my pleasure at the expense of my long-term wellbeing. So I have trouble with my own life, optimizing future value and present value. It’s that much more difficult when we talk about doing things for the benefit of people all around the world and for generations far into the future. So this question of how do we motivate people to sacrifice a tiny little bit in the here and now to help everybody for the long term it’s a really tough problem. I don’t have any quick answers but just because it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Ricarda Winkelmann on the planet-scale consequences of energy choices made in the next few decades:

It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Anders Levermann on the significance of carbon dioxide’s long lifetime once emitted:

Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.

(I failed to connect with the fourth author, Andy Ridgwell of the University of Bristol.)

Andrew Freedman at Mashable has posted a detailed piece on the science.

Here’s a Carnegie Institution news release and the paper summary: