Greenhouse gas emissions up to now have triggered an irreversible warming of Earth that will cause sea levels to rise for thousands of years to come, new research has shown.
The results come from a study, published today (Oct. 2) in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, which sought to model sea-level changes over millennial timescales, taking into account all of Earth's land ice and the warming of the oceans -- something which has not been done before.
The research showed that we have already committed ourselves to a sea-level rise of 1.1 metres by the year 3000 as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions up to now. This irreversible damage could be worse, depending on the route we take to mitigating our emissions.
If we were to follow the high A2 emissions scenario adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a sea-level rise of 6.8 metres could be expected in the next thousand years. The two other IPCC scenarios analysed by the researchers, the B1 and A1B scenarios, yielded sea-level rises of 2.1 and 4.1 metres respectively.
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