Sea level could rise by 150cm

The Guardian newspaper, on the 16th of December 2008, has article about how sea levels rises are going to be higher than first predicted.

Sea level rise due to global warming will "substantially exceed" official UN projections and could top 150cm by the end of the century, according to a report from the US Geological Survey on the risks of abrupt climate change. Such a rise would be catastrophic, seeing hundreds of millions of people affected by flooding.

Many scientists now fear the warming world is on the verge of "tipping points", in which climate change and its effects accelerate rapidly.

On sea level, the report found models used by the IPCC in 2007 do not take into account recent information on how fast glaciers slide into the oceans, particularly from Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets.

But the risk of the ocean circulation in the Altantic shutting down – freezing the coasts of America and Europe, as in the film The Day After Tomorrow – is rated as low by the report. It predicts a slowdown of around 25% to 30%. The chance of a catastrophic release of methane from frozen sub-sea stores at high latitudes is also rated low.