Hothouse Earth : An Inhabitants Guide (9781785789212) by McGuire Bill

Author:McGuire, Bill [McGuire, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785789212
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The seas rise up

In 2005, residents of Tegua, a tiny island in the South Pacific’s Vanuatu archipelago, were forced by rising seas to abandon their coastal villages and move inland to a safer area. Still only a couple of metres above sea level, the new location was unlikely to provide a long-term solution, but it would do for the time being. Although disputed by some, the villagers of Tegua were recognised by the UN as the world’s first climate change refugees, uprooted as a direct consequence of mankind’s impact on the environment. If true, they certainly won’t be the last.

For the inhabitants of Tegua and other low-lying Pacific islands, climate breakdown is a reality right now. Already, several islands – albeit uninhabited – have been permanently submerged, and many others, including the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu, face a dismal future as the ocean continues to transgress ever further onto their limited land area. In the Indian Ocean, the Maldives is at particular risk, the average height of the land across its 1,100 islands just touching 1.2 metres above sea level. So too is Bangladesh, where a projected 65-centimetre sea level rise by the 2080s would see nearly half of all productive land in the south of the country vanish beneath the waves.

The bad news is that sea level ultimately increases by 2.3 metres for every 1°C rise in global average temperature. This means that even if we could limit this rise to 1.5ºC, sea level would still end up – in due course – more than 3 metres higher. Outlandish and scary as this sounds, it fits with conditions during the previous interglacial period when the climate was comparable or a little warmer than today and the sea level several metres higher.

The only outstanding question is how long a multi-metre rise would take. In its sixth assessment report, the IPCC forecast that, by 2100, sea level will most likely be around a metre higher than it is today, which is sufficient to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. But the true picture could easily be far worse. As the IPCC acknowledges, and a number of other studies support, it is perfectly possible that the rise in sea level by the century’s end could be double this, maybe even more.

Observations of what sea level is actually doing also suggest that the IPCC is underplaying the threat. Between 1900 and 1990, global average sea level rose by 1.4 millimetres per year, hardly sufficient to be concerned about. But look at what’s been happening over the past 50 years or so. For the period between 1970 and 2015, the figure was 2.1 millimetres per year and between 2006 and 2015, it was 3.6 millimetres per year. Between 2015 and 2019, the annual rate of global average sea level rise reached 5 millimetres, and it is unlikely to stop there. Bear in mind that for every centimetre rise in sea level an additional 6 million people come under threat from coastal flooding, and the urgency of the situation becomes pretty clear.

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