Svetlana Jevrejeva, Luke P. Jackson, Riccardo E. M. Riva, Aslak Grinsted, John C. Moore

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Published date November 22, 2016

Coastal sea level rise with warming above 2 °C

  • States that two degrees of global warming above the preindustrial level is widely suggested as an appropriate threshold beyond which climate change risks become unacceptably high
  • States that this “2 °C” threshold is likely to be reached between 2040 and 2050 for both Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 and 4.5
  • Asserts that resulting sea level rises will not be globally uniform, due to ocean dynamical processes and changes in gravity associated with water mass redistribution
  • Provides probabilistic sea level rise projections for the global coastline with warming above the 2 °C goal
  • Finds that by that by 2040, with a 2 °C warming under the RCP8.5 scenario, more than 90% of coastal areas will experience sea level rise exceeding the global estimate of 0.2 m
  • Finds that with a 5 °C rise by 2100, sea level will rise rapidly and 80% of the coastline will exceed the global sea level rise at the 95th percentile upper limit of 1.8 m
  • Concludes that the coastal communities of rapidly expanding cities in the developing world will have a very limited time after midcentury to adapt to sea level rises unprecedented since the dawn of the Bronze Age