If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise this century, the sea level will rise no more than 160 centimeters. This is somewhat inferior to the worst-case scenario of the latest IPCC international climate panel report.
Little will change in the long term, because around the year 2300 the sea level could be more than 10 meters higher, says an international research team led by Utrecht University in a new report. she studies.
The researchers looked at all available literature and concluded that the upper limit for sea level predictions must be lowered slightly this century. According to the latest IPCC report, sea level rise could reach 2 meters at worst by 2100. That scenario is a sum of high emissions, severe warming and possibly accelerated melting of ice sheets.
Multiple test results only
The new research presents only figures that are covered under “multiple lines of evidence,” lead author Roderik van de Wal told NU.nl. Furthermore, the results must be “physically plausible”.
In practice, this means that some individual studies are abandoned because the researchers had too many doubts about it. As a result, the spread of sea level predictions is shrinking and the upper limit for the year 2100 is shrinking to 130-160 centimeters.
In 2300 to 10 meters of sea level rise
In the very long term, little will change. So it is not so much the rate of ice loss that is the big question, but the total mass loss of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
If the earth warms 3 or 4 degrees this century, most of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will eventually disappear into the sea. Around the year 2300, this means about 9 or 10 meters of sea level rise. According to the researchers, this very long-term sea level rise can be limited to 2.5 meters by 2300 if emissions are now drastically reduced, in line with the Paris Agreement.
For example, the common thread in the history of sea level remains the same, but one study is darker and the other more optimistic. So how do we know if the current research team isn’t underestimating things and if we need to rewrite them in a few months or years?
The dramatic collapse of a glacier
So wrote the American scientist On Monday that most vulnerable glacier in Antarctica, the Twaites Glacier, could disappear within ten years. This would lead to a global acceleration of sea level rise.
“No study ever provides the definitive answer,” says Van de Wal. “But that search is about a glacier. To reach a sea-level rise of more than 5 meters, not only that glacier has to disappear, but also the underside of the West Antarctic ice sheet. That cannot happen within this century, but if emissions continue to rise, perhaps soon after “.
The latest IPCC report also assumes that shortly after 2100 BC great acceleration it can occur in sea level rise, with an upper limit already set fifty years later 5 meters has been stated. Take a sloppy 3 meters from that, and Holland still has a lot big problemin the not too distant future.
