“Almost Inevitably” World Sea Level Rises on the Up and Up

The world’s peak climate-change scientific body will ”almost inevitably” make a large increase in its predictions of world sea-level rises due to global warming when it releases its next landmark report in, says the vice-chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Dr Jean–Pascal van Ypersele.

Tom Arup for Sydney Morning Herald (30 June 2010):

The world’s peak climate-change scientific body will ”almost inevitably” make a large increase in its predictions of world sea-level rises due to global warming when it releases its next landmark report in four years, says the vice-chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In an interview with the Herald, Dr Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the IPCC’s vice-chairman, said recent satellite observations showed extensive melting in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

That will have to be considered in the next IPCC assessment report on climate-change science – regarded by governments and scientific organisations as the world’s pre-eminent scientific document on climate change – when it is released in 2014 and should lead to the increase in predictions of sea-level rises, he said.

Dr van Ypersele said the sea-level rises estimated in the panel’s last assessment report in 2007 were now known to be on the low side.

The fourth assessment report estimates sea-level rises of 18 to 59 centimetres on 1990 levels by the end of century.

Panel members, including Dr van Ypersele, met in Kuala Lumpur last week to discuss the consideration of the new Greenland and Antarctic data for the next report. Analysis of the reduction of the two major ice sheets will be a main focus of the next report.

”The reason there was a workshop in KL is that the IPCC knows very well this is an area that needs particular attention and where a lot of progress has been made,” Dr van Ypersele said.

”There are a lot of satellite data that was not available for the fourth assessment report that will be available for [report] five … which are starting to show, but are quite convincing I must say, that both the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet are losing net mass, not on the margins, but as an ice sheet [as a whole].”

Dr van Ypersele is visiting Australia for the world’s first climate-change adaptation conference, being held on the Gold Coast.

Source: www.theage.com.au