Is Sea Level Rise Really a Big Deal?

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It’s happening now

Low-lying islands are already seeing damage, like the Pacific nation of Kiribati.

For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee…

As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders’ staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.

Another place the rising waters are already causing damage: Australia’s Torres Straights Islands. Here, too, it’s the extremes. Most days there’s nothing to worry about – but every so often king tides create dangerously high surges that sweep over shoreline houses, docks and buildings.

The ocean is life to these islanders, most of whom make a living by fishing. But now they’re being forced to move to higher ground – if they can find some. A few of the islands are just low-lying stretches of mud that barely project above sea level. Seriously high tides can swamp them.

Places like the Torres Straights Islands are the canaries in our global coal mine. The problem can only get worse. Imagine if every coastal road had to relocated inland, every coastal railroad and pipeline… every city! We’re not that different from the islanders – the vast majority of our population lives near the coast. While the displaced islanders only number in the thousands, in low-lying places like Bangladesh or Florida, the numbers will be in the tens of millions.

We’re still learning just how bad things could get.

Now for the next piece of bad news: When the IPCC made its estimate (the one at the top of the article), it was ONLY based on the expansion of seawater due to warming, plus melting from Himalayan and Andean glaciers. Three years ago, there wasn’t enough data to make any estimates on how much water was flowing into the oceans from melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

Thanks to satellite images and ground-based research, scientists now think they’re beginning to understand what’s happening in those huge ice-fields, and it’s not good. They now think we could be looking at 1.5 meters (4.5 feet) or higher. And again, that’s on average – some places will be much higher. And it’s just an estimate – meaning it could go lower, or much higher. Taken together, that’s a recipe for disastrous flooding for coastal cities like London, Miami, Amsterdam, New Orleans… and the potential for even more trillions of dollars in damage.

And that’s still a preliminary estimate. We know how bad the Greenland melt-off appears to be at the moment, and it’s much worse than we thought it was just three years ago – we have no idea how bad it will get in reality. For instance, the National Center for Atmospheric Research thinks the Northeastern US in particular could be hit by sea level rises a foot or two higher than the global average because of ocean circulation patterns.

Keep that in mind when you see headlines like “Sea Level Could Rise By 1 Meter By 2100, Experts Say”. That does NOT mean that 1 meter is the worst case situation; in science-speak, that figure is the MOST LIKELY situation, based on our current knowledge.

The actual situation could be much, much worse.

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