Say researchers
Rising seas will severely test humanity's resilience in the second half of the 21st century and beyond, even if nations defy the odds and cap global warming at the ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius target, researchers said yesterday.
The pace at which global oceans are rising has doubled in three decades, and on current trends will double again by 2100 to about one centimetre per year, they reported in a study.
"Limiting global warming to 1.5C would be a major achievement" and avoid many dire climate impacts, lead author Chris Stokes, a professor at Durham University in England, told AFP.
"But even if this target is met," he added, "sea level rise is likely to accelerate to rates that are very difficult to adapt to."
Absent protective measures such as sea walls, an additional 20 centimetres (7.8 inches) of sea level rise -- the width of a letter-size sheet of paper -- by 2050 would cause some $1 trillion in flood damage annually in the world's 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown.
Some 230 million people live on land within one metre (3.2 feet) of sea level, and more than a billion reside within 10 metres.
Sea level rise is driven in roughly equal measure by the disintegration of ice sheets and mountain glaciers, as well as the expansion of warming oceans, which absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat due to climate change.
Averaged across 20 years, Earth's surface temperature is currently 1.2C above pre-industrial levels, already enough to lift the ocean watermark by several metres over the coming centuries, Stokes and colleagues noted in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
The world is on track to see temperatures rise 2.7C above that benchmark by the end of the century.
In a review of scientific literature since the last major climate assessment by the UN-mandated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Stokes and his team focused on the growing contribution of ice sheets to rising seas.
In 2021, the IPCC projected "likely" sea level rise of 40 to 80 centimetres by 2100, depending on how quickly humanity draws down greenhouse gas emissions, but left ice sheets out of their calculations due to uncertainty.
The picture has become alarmingly more clear since then.
"We are probably heading for the higher numbers within that range, possibly higher," said Stokes.
The scientist and his team looked at three baskets of evidence, starting with what has been observed and measured to date.
Satellite data has revealed that ice sheets with enough frozen water to lift oceans some 65 metres are far more sensitive to climate change than previously suspected.
