Rising Sea Levels Will Vary Across The Planet

The climate talks in Bonn aren't going that well.

After declaring that “climate change is an issue determining our destiny as mankind,” Ms. Merkel acknowledged that Germany was likely to miss the goals it had set itself for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 because of its continued reliance on coal power. While vowing to grapple with the issue, she said that phasing out coal use would require “tough discussions” with German policymakers in the weeks ahead.

The goal has been no more than a two degrees Celsius increase in atmospheric temperature.  But that goal may be unattainable.

To stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, global emissions would likely have to peak in the next few years and then be cut by half every decade all the way down to zero by midcentury.

But that's not likely to happen

The scale of that transition is staggering. Virtually every coal plant around the world would need to be phased out or outfitted with carbon capture technology within decades. Electric vehicles would need to be the primary mode of transportation, and the world’s power grids would need to be virtually emissions-free. Technology that barely exists today to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere may need to be deployed on a huge scale.

That presentation came on the heels of a news conference by a different set of scientists, who announced that current industrial emissions of greenhouse gases have not yet peaked — instead, they are likely to rise again in 2017, driven in part by a rebound in coal use in China.

As I've pointed out before the first real impact of global warming that will get people's attention will be the rising sea levels.  And it is becoming clear that we will not be able to prevent it from happening.  

But who has to worry the most?  It turns out that the further a city is from the melting ice, the more vulnerable.  This is because the melting ice, on Greenland, say, is going to cause the land underneath it to rise because of the loss of the weight of ice.  NASA has worked out where the vulnerabilities are.



Nasa forecast: Which cities will flood as ice melts?

Cities near Greenland have less to worry about than New York City.  

The current research does not take into account all aspects of sea level rise. Shifting ocean currents can redistribute the mass of the oceans and change sea level, for instance, and as global warming progresses, it causes seawater to expand, and thus a steady rise in seas. 

Overall, though, the new study underscores a common theme of recent climate developments: We are now altering the Earth on such a massive scale that it puts us at the mercy of fundamental laws of physics as they mete out the consequences.