Photo credit: 8zil

During a climate change summit in Copenhagen last week, with more than 2,000 researchers from 80 countries attending, scientists warned that global sea levels could rise with more than a metre, or more, by 2100. The rising sea levels, they warn, will displace 10% of the world’s population, around 600 million people who live in low-lying countries.

Just last week I told you that scientists are warning that the pace of climate change “have largely outpaced” the models and estimates from the IPCC 2007 report. And now this report shows that the rise in global sea levels is up to three times worse than previously predicted by the conservative estimates from IPCC .

“I would predict sea level rise by 2100 in the order of 1m,” Prof Konrad Steffen, of the University of Colorado, said. “It could be 1.2m or 0.9m, but it is 1m or more seeing the current change, which is up to three times more than the average predicted by the IPCC. It is a major change and it actually calls for action.”

(more…)

Professor Will Steffen, head of the climate change unit at the Australian National University and science adviser to the Federal Government in Australia, says that sea levels around the world could rise by 4 meters this century. He also claims that the scientific community underestimates how fast our climate is changing.

“The evidence over the past 12 to 18 months suggests that we have underestimated how fast this aspect of the earth’s system can change,” he said.

“We see things happening much faster than we thought.”

Professor Steffen raised this concern at the Coast to Coast Collaboration Conference in Darwin where he said “a four-metre rise could have devastating effects.”

Last week the ice at the North Pole melted at an “unprecedented rate.” And that has some scientists worrying that the Arctic could become ice-free during the summers as early as 2013, the Guardian reports.

The storms over the Alaska’s Beaufort Sea last week brought with them not just bad weather but also streams of hot air into the Arctic. Satellite images that were taken shortly after could show that the ice caps had started to “disintegrate dramatically.” And because of that the scientists believes that the melting could exceed last year’s record loss of ice.

(more…)