A new study has found that sea levels are rising faster than expected, which would put 40% of the world’s population living in coastal regions at elevated risk. Published Feb. 2 in the European Geosciences Union journal Ocean Science, the study introduced a new method of quantifying sea level rise by comparing historical sea level data with the sea’s “sensitivity” to warming. What it ultimately found was that current estimates of sea level rise — including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) projection that sea levels will rise by about a meter (39 inches) by the end of the century — were conservative. The study also suggests that the world would need to emit 200 gigatons to 300 gigatons less of carbon dioxide, and cool the Earth by about 0.6° Celsius (1° Fahrenheit), for sea level rise to correlate with previous models, Grinsted said.
“It is crucial for our reliance on model-based climate predictions that they are able to reproduce the realised climate as realistically as possible,” Christensen, a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in a statement. “We hope this new comparison metric will be adopted to as large extent as is possible and can become a tool we can apply in comparing different models.”
Benjamin Horton, a professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, who was not involved in the study, said this new research is important since computer models are not always accurate at predicting the future.
Source: Mongabay
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