Two meters of sea level rise this century?

Leon Clifford in Reporting Climate Science: Sea levels could rise by up to two meters by the end of the century due to climate change and could put nearly 200 million people at risk of being displaced … This is much more than the 59cm maximum sea level rise forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007. This new projection is based on the assumption of a rise in average global surface temperatures of 4C by 2100.

“Based on our analysis, a pragmatic estimate of sea-level rise by 2100, for a temperature rise of 4C or more over the same time frame, is between 0.5m and 2m,” according to the authors of a paper published in the latest edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.The paper is called “Sea level rise and its possible impacts given a ‘beyond 4C world’ in the twenty-first century”.

The researchers, lead by Robert Nicholl's of Britain's University of Southampton, state that “the probability of rises at the high end is judged to be very low, but of unquantifiable probability.” They point out that a 2m rise would put up to 187 million people at real risk of forced displaced….

Seaweed growing on a rock jetty at Lido West park on Long Island, NY. Shot by Agiorgio, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported