Study: Seas Rising 60 Percent Faster than U.N. Forecast

Sea levels are rising 60-percent faster than the U.N.'s climate panel forecast in its most recent assessment, scientists reported on Wednesday.

At present, sea levels are increasing at an average 3.2 millimetres (0.125 inches) per year, a trio of specialists reported in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

This compares with a "best estimate" by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, which projected that by today, the rise would be 2 mm (0.078 inches) per year.

The new figure converges with a widely-shared opinion that the world is heading for sea-level rise of around a metre (3.25 feet) by century's end, co-author Grant Foster of U.S. firm Tempo Analytics told Agence France Presse.

"I would say that a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century is probably close to what you would find if you polled the people who know best," Foster said.

"In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts," he added.

"For major coastal cities like New York, probably the principal effect would be what we saw in Hurricane Sandy.

"Every time you get a major storm, you get a storm surge, and that causes a major risk of flooding. For New York and New Jersey, three more feet of water would be even more devastating, as you can imagine."

The investigation, led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), gauged the accuracy of computer simulations that the IPCC used in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

- AFP