<s>[INST] What is the effect of climate change on the polar ice caps and how is it impacting global sea levels? [/INST] The temperatures rise much faster in the polar regions than the average temperature on the planet. 
The temperature of the Arctic increased by 3.1 degrees between 1971 and 2019 while the global temperature only increased by 1.1 degrees with respect to the pre-industrial age. This results in accelerated ice melt and the Arctic sea will become free of ice during summers. The melting of the ice laying on the oceans has only small effects on global sea levels. However, melting land ice impacts global sea levels significantly. For example, the lost quantity of ice on the Greenland ice sheet between 1992 and 2020 already increased global sea levels about 13.5 millimeters. The complete defrosting of the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice would result in an increase of over 50 meters. However, this process would take hundreds of years even if the increase of the global temperature cannot be stopped. Nevertheless, the Antarctic ice is already impacted today. So the ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier is likely to collapse in the next decade resulting in an accelerated outflow of the glacier. This would lead to a faster melting process of the glacier contributing 5% of global sea level rise instead of 4% in the short term and even more in the long term.
Another contributing factor is the extension of the ocean water due to rising temperatures.
The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts overall an increase of the global sea levels of 1 meter until 2100 in pessimistic scenarios.</s>