Michael D. Lemonick at Climate Central lets us in on the bad news; climate change will probably cause sea rising to be higher than we thought. So get your snorkel and swim fins ready.
A new analysis released Thursday in the journal Science implies that the seas could rise dramatically higher over the next few centuries than scientists previously thought — somewhere between 18-to-29 feet above current levels, rather than the 13-to-20 feet they were talking about just a few years ago.
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Twenty-nine feet of sea-level rise, by contrast, or even 18, would put hundreds coastal cities around the globe entirely under water, displacing many hundreds of millions of people and destroying untold trillions in property. It would, in short, be a disaster of unimaginable proportions.
There are now two new studies which confirm this current trajectory. This one and the 2009 paper from Nature.. The only silver lining in the studies is that this does not happen over night. It will take some time but probably less time than we need to prepare. See Surging Seas for your personal area of concern.
The key question then becomes how long temperatures will remain high, and how the world’s ice sheets will respond — especially the ice in West Antarctica, which could add 20 feet to the world’s oceans all by itself if it melted. Several recent studies suggest that could already be starting to happen.
We are heading to unchartered waters and very rough seas indeed.