5 May 2011 | News | Climate Justice and Energy
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A new study analyzing the effects of climate change says the global sea level could rise over a meter and a half by the year 2100, something that would have dramatic consequences for several coastal countries.
The report was conducted by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), an international organization whose aim is providing reliable and sufficient information on the status of, and threats to, the Arctic environment, and providing scientific advice on actions to be
taken to confront them.
The report was published on Tuesday and will be delivered to the foreign affairs ministers of eight Arctic nations. It says that since 2005, the Arctic temperatures have been warmer than ever if compared with all the five-year periods since they begin keeping record in 1880.
This could lead to the melting of the ice layers and the glaciers of the region, and the polar layer in Greenland. So the best possible scenario -which implies a 0.9 meter sea level rise – would have devastating consequences for countries like Bangladesh, China, the US and Vietnam.
In fact, the report says the sea level rise is far higher than the one forecasted three years ago by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which estimated a maximum increase of 59 cm in this century.
However, the IPCC study failed to foresee the melting of the poles, which AMAP points out contributed to almost half of the sea level rise between 2003 and 2008.
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