BAS Head - Antarctic Melt, Sea-Level Rise Moving Much Faster Than IPCC Study Anticipated - Reuters

[hatrack]

NY ALESUND, Norway - A thaw of Antarctic ice is outpacing predictions by the UN climate panel and could in the worst case drive up world sea levels by 2 metres (6 ft) by 2100, a leading expert said on Wednesday. Millions of people, from Bangladesh to Florida and some Pacific island states, live less than a metre above sea level. Most of the world's major cities, from Shanghai to Buenos Aires, are by the sea.

Chris Rapley, the outgoing head of the British Antarctic Survey, said there were worrying signs of accelerating flows of ice towards the ocean from both Antarctica and Greenland with little sign of more snow falling inland to compensate.

"The ice is moving faster both in Greenland and in the Antarctic than the glaciologists had believed would happen," Rapley told Reuters during a climate seminar in Ny Alesund on a Norwegian Arctic island 1,200 km from the North Pole. "I think the realistic view is that we will be nearer a metre than the 40 cm" in sea level rise by 2100. The UN climate panel in February gave a likely range of 18 to 59 cm this century, for an average around 40 cm.

Asked at the seminar what the upper limit for the rise might be at a probability of one percent or less, he said: "At this extremely unlikely level the maximum would be two metres."

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/43886/story.htm

[soothsayer]

1. They should have rented Gore's movie, then they wouldn't be so shocked.

[phantom power]

2. I bet most people considered this picture "extremely unlikely" in 2007: