The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been drawing attention for years to one of the most obvious consequences of global warming that our planet is experiencing: rising sea levels . The different models built by the IPCC show that this could rise between 26 and 82 centimeters by the end of the century, and temperatures rise between 0.3 and 4.8 ºC.
Now, climatologist Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard, a researcher specializing in Earth Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, suggest in a paper published in the journal Nature that the IPCC estimates are they are very short . In fact, if your calculations are correct, in the next few decades the ocean may rise about five feet , which could partially flood some coastal cities.
To determine this, they have studied the changes that it has undergone in some phases of Earth’s history in which polar temperatures have been higher than today, such as the previous interglacial period , which occurred about 130,000 years ago, or some moments from the Pliocene , 3 million years ago. In both cases, there was a notable rise in sea level, and in both cases, according to DeConto and Pollard, the main factor was the thaw that occurred in large areas of Antarctica.
From the data collected, they have developed a forecasting model that takes into account the amount of ice that this region will lose throughout this century as a result of the current oceanic and atmospheric warming. Precisely, the latter is the one that will have the most impact on this phenomenon, they indicate. Thus, they have been able to find out that the Antarctic thaw could contribute by more than one meter to the rise in sea level by 2100, and by up to 15 meters by the year 2500.
All of this could be largely avoided if greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced. And it is that in this process the emissions caused by human activities seem to have a significant impact, a hypothesis that has been considering for a long time and that seems increasingly clear.
In fact, already in 2013, the Swiss climatologist Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group I group during the meeting that this organization held in Stockholm, assured that “the continuous greenhouse effect emissions will cause further warming” , and that “ limiting climate change will require a substantial and sustained reduction in emissions of these gases ”.
