Miami would be a memory, Bangkok a soggy shadow of its former self and the Maldive Islands would vanish if melting polar ice keeps fueling a faster-than-expected rise in sea levels, scientists reported on Thursday.If it's going to happen, it's going to happen and all the Kyoto agreements in the world aren't going to change it.
In an issue of the journal Science focusing on global warming, climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona reported that if global trends continue, Earth could ultimately see sea levels 20 feet higher than they are now.
By the end of this century, Earth would be at least 4 degrees F (2.3 degrees C) warmer than now, or about as hot as it was nearly 130,000 years ago.
Back then, significant portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melted, pushing the global sea levels to about 20 feet higher than current levels.
A similarly dramatic, and in some cases catastrophic, rise in ocean levels could happen by the year 2500, Overpeck said in a telephone interview, but he noted it could come sooner.
"We know when the sea level was that high in the past, and we know how much warming is necessary to get that amount of sea level rise from both Greenland and Antarctica," Overpeck said.
The Earth will get that hot sometime early in the second half of this century, he said, and once it does, the big ice sheets will start melting "in a more dramatic manner" than they currently are.
A conservative estimate would call for sea level rises of 3 feet (1 meter) per century, he said.
He cautioned, however, that this estimate assumes the Earth will get only as hot as it did 130,000 years ago when the ice sheets melted.
"If we decide to keep on the track we're on now and just keep on warming, because of greenhouse gas pollution, then we could easily cook those ice sheets more rapidly," Overpeck said.
Excuse me while I get my beach chair out.
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