Sea Levels Rising Faster Than Expected

A new sci­en­tific study warns that global sea lev­els are ris­ing faster than pre­vi­ously pre­dicted.

According to ear­lier pre­dic­tions elab­o­rated in a report pub­lished in 2013 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sea lev­els were expected to rise by between 20 inches and 39 inches by the year 2100.

But this recent study, pub­lished on May 20, 2019, in the sci­en­tific jour­nal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims the IPCC’s 2013 pre­dic­tion is inac­cu­rate and that the actual sea level rise will be much more – up to twice the level pre­dicted.

This struc­tured expert judge­ment study was con­ducted by a research team of 22 inter­na­tional sci­en­tists who exam­ined the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in Greenland, West Antarctica and East Antarctica. Based on their find­ings, they esti­mated the future global sea level rise accord­ing to low and high tem­per­a­ture rises.

In a best-case sce­nario where global tem­per­a­tures rise by only two degrees Celsius, sea lev­els are pre­dicted to rise by between 10 inches and 32 inches by 2100. This would be in line with the 2016 Paris Agreement’s aim is to keep the tem­per­a­ture rise below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

However, if tem­per­a­tures increase by nine degrees Fahrenheit due to grow­ing green­house gas emis­sions, the sci­en­tists esti­mate a sea level rise of between 20 inches and 70 inches. But when fac­tor­ing in ther­mal expan­sion and the con­tri­bu­tion played by the melt­ing ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, the sci­en­tists warn that the increase of sea lev­els could even exceed 6.5 feet.

“For 2100, the ice sheet con­tri­bu­tion is very likely in the range of seven to 178 cen­time­ters (2.5 to 70 inches), but once you add in glac­i­ers and ice caps out­side the ice sheets and ther­mal expan­sion of the seas, you tip well over two meters (6.5 feet),” Jonathan Bamber, the study’s lead author, said.

The study’s con­clu­sion starkly warns that a 6.5‑foot rise in the global sea level would have ​“pro­found con­se­quences for human­ity.”

“Such a rise in global sea level could result in land loss of 1.79 mil­lion square kilo­me­ters (691,000 square miles), includ­ing crit­i­cal regions of food pro­duc­tion, and poten­tial dis­place­ment of up to 187 mil­lion peo­ple,” said Bamber.

Among the areas that could be impacted most are North Africa and the Middle East, both of which account for about 21 per­cent of the world’s olive oil pro­duc­tion and 58 per­cent of the world’s table olive pro­duc­tion, accord­ing to the International Olive Council.

Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned that the impacts of cli­mate change are accel­er­at­ing and that the past four years have been the warmest on record.

Record lev­els of green­house gases com­bined with increas­ing ocean tem­per­a­tures and a record rise in sea lev­els are indi­ca­tors that cli­mate change is a per­sis­tent trend that threat­ens the goal set in the 2016 Paris Agreement to limit a rise in global tem­per­a­tures to below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2030.

• PNAS


• BBC


• USA Today