Hundreds of millions of people around the world would be affected as low low-lying coastal areas became inundated, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warnsGlobal sea levels could rise by up to 9m in the next few hundred years, even if the world manages to stabilise average temperatures to 2C above pre-industrial levels, according to a new study.In this scenario, hundreds of millions of people around the world would be affected as low low-lying coastal areas became inundated. New Orleans would be lost to the sea, much of southern Florida and Bangladesh and most of the
Netherlands.The 2C figure is significant because this is level of warming that is likely to be adopted as the threshold to be avoided by the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen – although small islands states and developing nations have argued that 1.5C would be a more appropriate target.Nine metres of sea level rise is higher than anything predicted so far because the new study takes into account the potential that the
Greenland and west
Antarctic ice sheets start to melt as the Earth warms. This did not factor into the most recent assessment of the state of climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. It forecast a sea-level rise of up to 59cm by 2100, and between 4-6m in the next few hundred years, if average global temperatures stabilised around 2C."Everybody's known that the IPCC's last numbers were underestimates because they didn't include all the factors that can accelerate ice sheet melting," said Robert Kopp of Princeton University, who led the latest study. "If the future models are limited, you want to look at other approaches to get at the question of sea-level rise one approach is to turn to the past record of sea-level rise."Kopp's team reconstructed the sea levels in the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago. At the time, polar temperatures were around 3-5C warmer and equatorial sea-surface temperatures were arou ...
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