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Sunday, July 6, 2025

How melting ice will change the face of T&T

by

Ryan Bachoo
574 days ago
20231210

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Noth­ing puts cli­mate change in­to per­spec­tive quite like the melt­ing ice sheets in Green­land and Antarc­ti­ca. Though sit­ting on dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents, the melt­ing ice is di­rect­ly re­sult­ing in sea lev­el rise here in T&T.

At COP28 in Dubai, the op­por­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed it­self to speak to Pam Pear­son, Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor for the Sec­re­tari­at of Am­bi­tion on Melt­ing Ice, Sea Lev­el Rise and Moun­tain Wa­ter Re­sources. Few are bet­ter to talk to on this top­ic and she is deeply aware of the im­pact melt­ing ice is hav­ing and will have on Caribbean is­lands.

“The prob­lem is as we ap­proach 1.5 de­grees and es­pe­cial­ly as we go past it there will be more and more wa­ter com­ing off the ice sheets and very soon they are go­ing to eclipse all oth­er sources of sea lev­el rise,” she told Guardian Me­dia.

The 1.5 de­grees she is speak­ing of refers to the max­i­mum tem­per­a­ture of the earth (in­ter­na­tion­al­ly agreed up­on) that the world should not cross. Pear­son said the sci­ence shows if emis­sions con­tin­ue as they are at the cur­rent rate, the world could see three me­tres of sea lev­el rise by the end of the cen­tu­ry. Parts of T&T will be un­in­hab­it­able by that time.

T&T’s lead cli­mate ne­go­tia­tor, Kis­han Ku­mars­ingh, added his voice to the is­sue telling Guardian Me­dia, “More­over, once the ice melt is trig­gered, it would be ir­re­versible and even bring­ing tem­per­a­ture in­creas­es back on track, is un­like­ly to im­pact on the melt­ing. This means that the sea lev­el rise ex­pect­ed by the heat­ing of the oceans will be ex­ceed­ed by or­ders of mag­ni­tude by the sea lev­el rise from melt­ing ice.”

The out­look is far more con­cern­ing than sea lev­el rise, how­ev­er. Pear­son, who is a for­mer Unit­ed States diplo­mat with 20 years of ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing on glob­al is­sues in­clud­ing cli­mate change said warm­ing poles could have se­ri­ous con­se­quences for T&T and the Caribbean. While the rain­fall could be more vi­o­lent, there is a re­al chance of droughts and ex­treme heat. Fur­ther to that, sci­en­tists have found that ice is melt­ing at a far more alarm­ing speed than was thought to be.

At the cur­rent rate, she said a me­tre of sea lev­el rise can be ex­pect­ed by 2070, three me­tres of sea lev­el rise in the ear­ly 2100s, six me­tres in the ear­ly 2200s and 15 me­tres in the ear­ly 2300s. “These big ice sheets take a long time to re­spond but once they start re­spond­ing we can’t stop it,” Pear­son said.

She added, “Three me­tres is prob­a­bly in­evitable al­ready right now. We prob­a­bly can’t stop that. We’re prob­a­bly go­ing to lose a lot of the west Antarc­ti­ca sheet and Green­land even at 1.5 de­grees but it may take us a thou­sand years to get there and we can adapt to that as op­posed to three me­tres in the next 70 years.”

Such oc­cur­rences mean small is­land states like T&T will face the con­se­quences of the glob­al fail­ure of cli­mate change. How­ev­er, Pear­son ad­vised, “There are two things. One is to make a big noise about it by protest­ing and say­ing that this is about our ex­is­tence be­cause that has a lot of cur­ren­cy I think in set­tings like COP28. The sec­ond is for these coun­tries to show the way of car­bon-neu­tral de­vel­op­ment both to de­vel­op as much as pos­si­ble in a car­bon-neu­tral fash­ion but al­so to de­mand as­sis­tance that is sup­posed to be com­ing.”

A re­port ti­tled ‘State of the Cryos­phere’ pub­lished this year and re­viewed by 60 sci­en­tists showed that all of the earth’s frozen parts will ex­pe­ri­ence ir­re­versible dam­age at two de­grees of glob­al warm­ing, with “dis­as­trous con­se­quences for mil­lions of peo­ple, so­ci­eties, and na­ture.”

Ku­mars­ingh fur­ther said, “The im­pli­ca­tions for T&T and oth­er small is­land states un­der­score with sci­en­tif­ic cer­tain­ty that cli­mate change is in­deed an ex­is­ten­tial threat. If the world does not act de­ci­sive­ly and with ur­gency to con­strain tem­per­a­ture in­creas­es, our fu­ture would be at the mer­cy of the changes that the world would be un­able to con­trol.”


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