Low coastal regions will be flooded by 2100: Scientists

Times of India , Friday, March 13, 2009
Correspondent : IANS
COPENHAGEN: Even in the best case global warming scenario, low lying countries and coastal regions will be regularly flooded by 2100, when the sea is expected to rise by at least 50 cm.

This implies that if emissions of greenhouse gases is not cut down quickly and substantially, low lying coastal areas will be flooded, hitting 10 percent of the global population really hard. The emissions are leading to climate change.

John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Tasmania, told the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change here Tuesday: "The most recent satellite and ground based observations show that sea-level is continuing to rise at three mm or more every year since 1993, a rate well above the 20th century average.

"The oceans are continuing to warm and expand, the melting of mountain glaciers has increased and the (melting) ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are also contributing to sea level rise."

New insights reported include the loss of ice from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. "The ice loss in Greenland has accelerated over the last decade.

"The upper range of sea level rise by 2100 might be above one metre or more on a global average, with large regional differences depending where the source of ice loss occurs," said Konrad Steffen, director of Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado, Boulder and co-chair of the congress session on sea level rise.

The last assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2007 projected a sea level rise of 18-59 cm. However the report also clearly stated that not all factors contributing to sea level rise could be calculated at that time.

The uncertainty was centred on the ice sheets, how they react to the effects of a warmer climate and how they interact with the oceans, explained Eric Rignot, professor of Earth System Science at the University of California Irvine and senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"The numbers from the last IPCC are a lower bound because it was recognised at the time that there was a lot of uncertainty about ice sheets. The numerical models used at the time did not have a complete representation of outlet glaciers and their interactions with the ocean," said Rignot.

"Unless we undertake urgent and significant mitigation actions, the climate could cross a threshold during the 21st century committing the world to a sea level rise of metres", said John Church, according to a CIRES release.

 
SOURCE : Friday, March 13, 2009
 


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