Report says sea level rise worse than feared

by Rich Bowden - Apr 15 2008, 23:27

The rise in global sea levels could be as much as one-and-a-half metres by the end of the century a new report has claimed, three times as much as that proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in last year's climate assessment.

Pic: Gerlache Strait on the Antarctic Peninsula Credit: David Mobley, Jet Propulsion Lab/NOAA

Based on computer model which links temperatures to sea levels for the last two millennia, the data was outlined by a UK/Finnish team at the recent European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna."For the past 2,000 years, the [global average] sea level was very stable, it only varied by about 20cm," said Svetlana Jevrejeva from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL), near Liverpool, UK."But by the end of the century, we predict it will rise by between 0.8m and 1.5m. The rapid rise in the coming years is associated with the rapid melting of ice sheets."With ramifications for tens of millions of people living in low-lying countries, sea-level rise in the next century remains one of climate change science's most controversial topics. Addressed by the IPCC in last year's assessment, the Nobel Prize-winning body found the possibility of a rise of between 18 cm and 59 cm.However Simon Holgate, also of the Proudman Laboratory, told Reuters, "The IPCC numbers are underestimates," with researchers stating the IPCC had not taken into account ice dynamics -- the speeding up of the movement of ice sheets due to melt water which would increase their disappearance and increase sea levels.Other researchers working in the same field have found similar evidence of large sea rises. During 2007, German researcher Stefan Rahmstorf reached a similar conclusion to Dr Jevrejeva's team, projecting a sea level rise of between 0.5m and 1.4m by 2100.Sea level rises of around one metre would have a disastrous effect on large segments of the world's population said Jevrejeva."If (the sea level) rises by one metre, 72 million Chinese people will be displaced, and 10 percent of the Vietnamese population," she said.

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Report says sea level rise worse than feared

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