Catastrophic sea level rise imminent ! (its too late now)
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Last updated at 15:23pm on 19th June 2007
rising sea levels
A mariner on Tepuka Islet on Funafuti Atoll protests about rising sea
levels already inundating many of his country's low islands
A group of US scientists may have given the clearest warning yet that
global warming is presenting an imminent threat to civilisation.
The six experts described the Earth as being in "imminent peril" and
warned that a UN panel on climate change grossly underestimated the
scale of sea-level increases this century.
In an article published in the journal the "Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society A.", the group led by James Hansen, the director
of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote:
"Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to
dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great
dangers for humans and other creatures."
The paper predicts that sea levels may rise by several metres by 2100,
compared with a forecast from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change published in February that predicts sea levels
increasing between 18 and 59 centimetres.
The group has called for extensive efforts to reduce CO2 emissions and
other greenhouse gases to help keep the climate within the range of
the past one million years.
The scientists say there are 10 years to avert a dangerous rise in
global temperatures - if not, climate change will trigger rapid
melting of polar ice sheets
Dr Hansen estimates that we have 10 years to avert a dangerous rise in
global temperatures. Otherwise, climate change will trigger rapid
meltingof polar ice sheets, worsened by the "albedo flip" when
sunlight which is currently affected by the ice caps' white surface is
absorbed by the darker surface of water.
The study, which analysed more than 400,000 years of climate records
through deep ice cores, found that although dramatic changes in the
climate have occurred in the past, the mean temperature during the era
of human civilisation had been stable.
The scientists warn: "Civilisation developed and constructed extensive
infrastructure during a period of unusual climate stability, the
Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to
end."
The other scientists involved in the paper were Makiko Sato, Pushker
Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of
the University of California at Santa Barbara and Mark Siddall of
Columbia University in New York.