A new report by a team of British, Danish and Chinese scientists joins the latest wave of studies and projections that warn about the consequences of global warming . Published in the journal Enviromental Research Letters , it puts a number on the dimensions of the potential disaster: in the worst case scenario, the level of the Earth's oceans will rise 1.8 meters at the end of this century.
The main cause of this increase is the melting of the large icy regions in Antarctica and Greenland, but glaciers and overexploitation of aquifers also contribute, preventing more water from seeping underground. The experts thus fill the gap in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which did not venture any forecast in this regard.
In any case, the authors of the new study believe that the currently most likely hypothesis is that the rise in sea level remains at 80 centimeters. The possibility that this increase exceeds two meters, according to their estimates, is practically nil. Although, they also remember, the process will continue beyond the year 2100.
