Climate panel forecast: Higher seas, temperatures
STOCKHOLM—Top scientists have a better idea of how global warming will shape the 21st century: In a new report, they predict sea levels will be much higher than previously thought and pinpoint how dangerously hot it’s likely to get.
In its most strongly worded report yet, an international climate panel said it was more confident than ever that global warming is a man-made problem and likely to get worse. The report was welcomed by the Obama administration and environmental advocates who said it made a strong and urgent case for government action, while skeptics scoffed at it.
“There is something in this report to worry everyone,” said Chris Field, a Carnegie Institution scientist who is a leader of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but wasn’t involved in the report released Friday.
Without any substantial changes, he said the world is now on track for summers at the end of the century that are hotter than current records, sea levels that are much higher, deluges that are stronger and more severe droughts.
The Nobel Prize-winning panel’s report called the warming of the planet since 1950 “unequivocal” and “unprecedented” and blamed increases in heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The United Nations created the panel of climate researchers in 1990 to tell world leaders what science is saying about global warming and how bad it will get. This is the group’s fifth major state-of-thescience report, approved by nearly 200 nations at the end of a weeklong meeting in Stockholm.
In its last massive report in 2007, the panel said it was “very likely”—or 90 percent certain—that global warming was due to human activity, particularly carbon dioxide from things like coal-burning power plants and car exhaust. The new report moves that to 95 percent or “extremely likely.”
The panel also fine-tuned its predictions for temperature changes and sea levels by the end of this century. Their worst case scenario previously put sea levels increase at just shy of 2 feet by 2100; now they put it at slightly more than 3 feet. They cite better understanding of how much glaciers and ice sheets are melting and how water expands as it warms.