14 DAY TRIAL // New studies published in Nature Climate Change indicate that, by the year 2300, sea levels could go up by 1.5 – 4 meters, provided that nothing is done to counteract the effects of climate change and global warming.
This 1.5 – 4 meters increase in our sea levels could very easily be caused by a mere 2 degrees Celsius being added to our average temperatures, even if it might take a while for our oceans to respond to the new weather conditions.
Michiel Schaeffer, a renowned climatologist, explains that global warming caused by the ever-increasing level of greenhouse gas emissions will most probably take centuries to significantly alter global water masses, but that there is no doubt that sooner or later this will happen.
As ScienceDaily reports, his exact words were “Sea-level rise is a hard thing to quantify, yet a critical risk of climate change. Due to the long time it takes for the world's ice and water masses to react to global warming, our emissions today determine sea levels for centuries to come.”
The good news is that, given the fact that increasing sea levels are mainly caused by global warming, which in turn is a result of pollution, should we choose to act and do something about the latter as soon as possible, then odds are that the former will also be contained.
Apparently, Michiel Schaeffer also made it clear that, were we to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, our sea levels might eventually stabilize.
Thus, as he explains, “In our projections, a constant level of 2-degree warming will sustain rates of sea-level rise twice as high as observed today, until well after 2300, but much deeper emission reductions seem able to achieve a strong slow-down, or even a stabilization of sea level over that time frame.”
But for our diminishing current levels of pollution and finding ways to tackle climate change and global warming, it seems that certain parts of the world – coastal areas, in particular – will find themselves faced with severe floods once in every three years.