"I would bet that the rate at which Greenland contributes to the rising sea is going to increase in the near future," he told ABC News.
He and his glaciologist colleagues have never seen anything like what's been happening in Greenland.
"We've seen widespread glacier acceleration in many parts of the ice sheet," he told us. "It doesn't take that much to have significant impact on coastal regions. They're flat and low."
It's not just a future threat.
Even without an accelerating collapse of Greenland's ice sheet, there is already a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe bearing down on coasts and island nations worldwide.
Inhabitants in exotic and beautiful low-lying atolls and reef-based islands -- many millions of people all told -- are expected to become refugees, with no homes to go back to, in the next few decades.
At the United Nations, experts in humanitarian aid and assistance are focusing on this imminent upheaval that most people in the world have given little attention -- but which is all to real too those eyeing the fast creeping waterlines.
Indonesia's environment minister has now announced that scientific studies estimate about 2,000 of the country's lush tropical islands could disappear by 2030 -- just over 20 years from now.
And that's just based on the sea level rise scientists can calculate.
Even as scientists and engineers around the globe scramble to figure out ways to mitigate global warming (to stop it from reaching much above the additional two degrees Fahrenheit scientists say Earth will experience by about 2050) they are also trying to get the word out to people everywhere that humanity must at the same time learn to adapt to the irreversible changes it is now too late to prevent.
"Everybody is going to have to learn to adjust and adapt to climate change because it's going to be warmer no matter what," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer told ABC News.
