Nov 22, 2016
Coastal sea level rise with warming above 2 °C
by
,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- 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