Time to Bail-out Models on Sea Level Rise

Time to Bail-out Models on Sea Level Rise

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As everyone along the northeastern US coast knows, sea level ain’t what it used to be. It’s getting higher and higher and made it a lot easier for storm surges to flood low-lying cities. This is not just something figured out in the last few days. Sea level has been getting higher at an accelerating rate that has totally exceeded what climate scientists had predicted in the last official IPCC report.

So what’s going on? Geologist Bill Hay of the University of Colorado thinks there are a bunch of vicious cycles at work that are not included in the climate models. The 2007 IPCC report projected 0.2 to 0.5 meters of sea level rise by the year 2100. But we are already at the high end of that trend, or ahead of it, Hay said in a recent interview. What we are seeing now is the possibility of a sea level rise of one meter or more by the end of the century.