Flooding fears rising fast

9:00am Tuesday 18th December 2007

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GLOBAL WARMING may cause the world's seas to rise to more than TWICE the level currently predicted, latest research by Southampton scientists reveals.

Seas could rise dramatically - submerging coastal communities in the process and bringing devastation on a catastrophic scale.

“If we are right we’ll all be in trouble, for sure. It’s an enormous global sea level rise. For places like Bangladesh and the Nile Delta you will have really big problems because you cannot protect coastal flatlands."

Report author

The new research involved analysis of past sea levels which showed they rose by an average of 1.6 metres every 100 years the last time the Earth was as warm as it could become later this century.

Worryingly, these levels suggest current predictions of sea-level rises need to be more than doubled.

The study by a consortium of scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and research centres in Tübingen (Germany), Cambridge and New York, is published this week in the new journal, Nature Geoscience.

It indicates that current beliefs about rising sea levels, based on the recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, are far too low.

Lead author, Professor Eelco Rohling of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, based at the National Oceanography Centre, said: "We're not predicting the future but we're looking at what the past is telling us in terms of how quick things can go. All the projections into the future are hanging on theoretical models and what we want is to put hard data behind it.

"What we're finding is rates of change are more than twice as high as the IPCC is predicting.

"The main reason for this is the IPCC is overlooking the large ice sheet and our research shows that's a very large component of rising sea levels.

"This would basically mean sea levels might rise up to two and a half times faster than the IPCC suggests. That has massive implications for any coastal infrastructure, especially in developing countries.

"If we are right we'll all be in trouble, for sure. It's an enormous global sea level rise. For places like Bangladesh and the Nile Delta you will have really big problems because you cannot protect coastal flatlands.

"In the UK anywhere lower than a man's height above sea level is going to be in trouble.

"What you have to take into account is also the increase in storminess that is being predicted - the storm surges that you may get. So it's the base line that you have to bring up. The margin of caution needs to be much wider than it would be on the basis of the IPCC report.

"The matter of potential climate change needs to be taken even more seriously. We need to really start looking at protecting certain areas and maybe we need to start giving up on others in a strategic way.

"My personal conviction is that we are going to be looking at quite a substantial level of sea level rise before any solutions to the problem may be put in place."

The new research involved looking at the last interglacial' - a snapshot of time some 124 to 119,000 years ago - when sea levels reached about six metres (20 feet) above the present, due to melt-back of ice sheets.