Sea Levels

Climate change's wild card: sea levels


UN climate scientists said in a key report for policymakers on Saturday that they could no longer put an upper limit on the potential rise in sea levels over the next century.
Recent studies have implied that projections made earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) may badly underestimate the rate at which the oceans will rise — and thus the devastation they could wreak.In the first volume of a major report on global warming, published in February, the IPCC said sea levels would climb between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100.
Such an increase could already threaten several small island nations and severely disrupt hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying mega deltas, especially in Asia and Africa.
But these projections did not take into detailed account the impact of any significant loss of land ice in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the IPCC acknowledged on Saturday. It therefore scrapped the upper band.
"It became apparent that, concerning the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, we really don't know enough," IPCC Chairperson Rajendra Pachauri told AFP on Saturday in Valencia, Spain, where the body on Saturday published its keenly awaited report.
"There is a possibility, and a fair amount of literature, which suggests that it could be faster than what one has anticipated. Given the uncertainty, it was prudent, and scientifically correct, to remove the upper boundary," he said.
AFP