Warming in the Arctic occurring at twice the global average is on track to lift sea levels by up to 1.6 metres (5.3 feet) by 2100, a far steeper jump than predicted a few years ago, a consortium of scientists reported Tuesday.
Melting ice and snow has accounted for 40 percent of recent increases in ocean levels and are likely to play an even larger role in future, according to the Oslo-based Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Project (AMAP).
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Some of Antarctica’s ice sheet is formed by water re-freezing from below not just by snow falling on top as was traditionally thought, findings showed on Thursday that will help scientists project effects of climate change.
Experts are seeking to understand the frozen continent since even a small thaw could swamp low-lying coastal areas and cities. Antarctica contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by about 57 meters (187 ft) if it ever all melted.
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Extreme high tides have flooded parts of the low-lying Marshall Islands capital Majuro with a warning Sunday of worse to come because of rising sea levels.
Several areas of the city were flooded Saturday and forecasters predicted more to come on Sunday evening before the current high tide levels ease.
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Rising sea levels are likely to cause serious and regular flooding in Australian coastal cities by the end of the century, according to maps released by the Federal Government today.
The maps for low-lying areas in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Newcastle, the New South Wales’ central coast and south-east Queensland show significant levels of inundation by the year 2100.
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Cancun, Mexico. Cancun’s eroding white sand beaches are providing a note of urgency to the climate talks being held just south of this seaside resort famed for its postcard-perfect vistas.
Rising sea levels and a series of unusually powerful hurricanes have aggravated the folly of building a tourist destination atop shifting sand dunes on a narrow peninsula.
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The Maldives took a step on Wednesday towards a goal of becoming the first “carbon neutral” nation by 2020 with an audit showing its citizens emit the same amount of greenhouse gases as tourists flying to its islands.
The audit, of the emissions by 310,000 citizens living in the Indian Ocean archipelago, is a prelude to a plan next year to seek investments in solar, wind or wave power and limit fuel imports that cost 15 percent of gross domestic product.
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Tasiilaq, Greenland. From a helicopter hovering over the vast landscape of Greenland, oceanographer Fiammetta Straneo and her colleagues are attempting to answer one of the most urgent — and most widely debated — questions facing humanity: How fast is the world’s ice going to melt?
Dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape, the researchers’ helicopter is a red speck of machinery lost in a wilderness of rock and ice. To the right, a great fjord stretches toward the sea, choked with icebergs.
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The president of Kiribati has said the low-lying Pacific nation must begin planning to relocate its population in case global warming causes sea levels to rise and swamp the country.
Kiribati President Anote Tong will present his case at a climate change conference on the main island Tarawa this week attended by vulnerable countries in the region and major powers including China, the United States and Japan.
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Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed climbed onto the roof of his official residence and installed solar electricity panels Thursday as part of a nationwide green drive, his office said.
Nasheed, 43, known as a stunt man in the fight against climate change, clambered onto the roof in the capital Male to install the solar panels.
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The people of the Cartaret Islands in Papua New Guinea, who are facing inundation from rising sea levels, have appealed to the Australian government for help.
The Cartaret Islanders have developed a relocation plan to gradually move families to Bougainville, about 80 kilometres away.
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Sea levels are rising unevenly in the Indian Ocean, placing millions at risk along low-lying coastlines in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, scientists say in a study.
Researchers from the University of Colorado and the National Center for Atmospheric Research say the rising sea levels are caused in part by climate change and are triggered by warming seas and changes to atmospheric circulation patterns.
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Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters says more than 780,000 people were killed in nearly 4,000 disasters.
A United Nations report finds more people died from earthquakes in the past decade than from any other disaster. Data compiled by the Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters says earthquakes remain a serious threat for millions of people worldwide.
The report presents some staggering figures in terms of the number of deaths and economic losses caused by natural disasters during the past decade. Read More / Watch Video »
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WASHINGTON — Droughts from Australia to the U.S. Southwest, acidic ocean water and melting glaciers are signs that the pace of climate change is surpassing the worst-case scenarios scientists predicted in 2007, a U.N. report said Thursday.
Mountain glaciers in Asia are melting at a rate that could eventually threaten water supplies, irrigation or hydropower for 20% to 25% of the world’s population, the U.N. Environment Program report said. Read More / Watch Video »
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Floods, storms, drought and other climate-related natural disasters drove 20 million people from their homes last year, nearly four times as many as were displaced by conflicts, a new U.N. report said on Tuesday.
The study tried to quantify for the first time the number of people forced to flee their homes because of climate change.
Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of storms and otherwise altering weather patterns, so disasters are now “an extremely significant driver of forced displacement globally,” it said. Read More / Watch Video »
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As world leaders gather for key climate talks here, small island nations Monday warned they were running out of time with rising seas threatening to wipe them off the map.
Spread across the Earth’s oceans, the planet’s tiniest members grouped as part of the Alliance of Small Islands States (AOSIS) are hoping to make their voices heard 100 days before UN-hosted climate talks in Copenhagen.
Climate negotiators have spent the last two years working toward a make-or-break summit in Copenhagen this December, expected to ink new targets for global emissions beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. Read More / Watch Video »
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Five years ago, James Lovelock’s “The Revenge of Gaia” issued a terrifying warning: if humankind didn’t radically curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, there would, quite literally, be hell to pay.
His new book out this year, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia,” says it has now become bleakly apparent that we blew our chance.
Researchers from a broad swathe of disciplines are strangely ill at ease when asked about fellow scientist James Lovelock, whose improbable career has just entered its seventh decade.
Chemists, biologists, climatologists and physicists are all quick to reach for superlatives: “brilliant”, “ahead of his time”, a “renaissance scientist” in an age of ultra-specialisation. Read More / Watch Video »
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