Sea level is best way to predict impacts of climate change

Xinhua: More thorough sea level monitoring is needed to protect one trillion dollars (0.98 trillion U.S. dollars) worth of the world's infrastructure threatened by climate change, an Australian leading ocean scientist said on Sunday. In the book Understanding Sea-level Rise and Variability, released on Sunday, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) oceanographer John Church said the best way to predict the impacts of climate change is to look at the sea.

"The oceans are absolutely central to climate change," Church told Australia Associated Press on Sunday. "If we want to predict climate change accurately we've got to look at the oceans and for that matter the ice sheets."

Dr Church said there are around one trillion dollars (0.98 trillion U.S. dollars) worth of infrastructure, and 140 million people living a meter or less above sea-level, and therefore, the sea-level data is very important. "These coastal areas - the infrastructure and the environment - are already affected by extreme events," Dr Church said….

Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," shot by Soren.harward, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license