New Study Determines Sea Level Rise Has Been Underestimated

In the Environmental Research Letter released this week in IOP Science, a new study concludes that recent projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underestimate actual sea level rise. The study concludes: ” the rise in CO2 concentration and global temperature has continued to closely match the projections over the past five years, while sea level continues to rise faster than anticipated. The latter suggests that the 21st Century sea-level projections of the last two IPCC reports may be systematically biased low. Further support for this concern is provided by the fact that the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are increasingly losing mass (Rignot et al 2011, Van den Broeke et al 2011), while those IPCC projections assumed that Antarctica will gain enough mass in future to largely compensate mass losses from Greenland (see figure 10.33 in Meehl et al (2007)).”