Global Warming And The Rising Sea Level

In 2008, the effects of the rising sea level will be more obvious than ever, as global warming moves to the forefront of international concern. Especially, to the United States who has seen disaster.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the coastal city of New Orleans in 2005, the world watched with horror the devastation it created in an American city. As global warming continues, unforeseen levels of natural disaster will become increasingly common, while erratic weather patterns will plague our natural seasons. It is not a coincidence that one of the warmest years ever recorded all occurred between 1995 and 2006.

And scientists predict the rest of 2007 and 2008 will be even hotter. The extreme levels of carbon emissions released by human activities have reached all time high, a shocking 379 parts per million in 2005- the highest amount ever in the last 650,000 years! No wonder heat is getting trapped at incredible rates in our atmosphere.

So what does all this mean? As the earth's temperature continues to rise, our natural reserves of ice caps and glaciers continue to melt.

Scientists are already alarmed at the unprecedented rate at which the world's frozen bodies are melting, from Greenland and the Antarctic to the glaciers of the Himalayas.

As more ice sheets and glaciers melt, more water gets added to the seas and oceans around the world, increasing their level in general. But it is also natural for water to expand upon warming. So not only will the sea levels rise, its waters will in fact take up more space as it heats. The large ice sheets have also traditionally worked as reflectors of the sun's heat. But as the size of these sheets gets smaller, instead of reflecting the heat, it begins to observe it and melts ever faster.

Of course, this a disaster for the world's ecology, it has already forced Polar bears to become an endangered species, but just as devastating for humans too.

In India, scientists have already recorded an annual rise in sea levels at a rate of 3.14mm in Bay of Bengal, and as much as 10mm in the Khulna region of Bangladesh. It's the same case in coastal towns and cities across the world. Its evidences have become clear in the US too. While the edges of Mangroove forests are already dotted with submerged forests in the Bermuda, as much as one third of the marsh at Chesapeake Bay's Blackwater Natural National Wildlife Refuge is gone!

Major cities like San Francisco, Manhattan, to Mumbai are all at risk. Increasing sea levels will not just mean loss and erosion of land, but also more frequent occurrences of super hurricanes such as the one that drowned New Orleans or cause the Tsunamis of 2004.

Another humanitarian crisis that could be caused by the rising sea level is that they will also create an acute shortage of fresh water reserves on land. Scientists have confirmed that at this rate the Himalayan ecology in South Asia will now almost certainly face extreme floods followed by extreme droughts. And hundreds of millions of people in the region will experience water and food shortage.

When global warming was first discussed, it seemed like the consequences would be in many life times later. But today, within our own life time, the possibility of witnessing the havoc cause by global warming and the rising sea level has become distinctly clear.

Global Warming in the Antarctic

After 40 years of being away I returned to the Antarctic in 2005. Even with over 98 percent of Antarctica being ice, global warming has started to change the fifth largest contient. In the 1960s I had worked on the Antarctic Peninsula as a meteorologist, and I drove huskies. (Environmental concerns that the Antarctic-born huskies were an alien species meant that by 1994 all the huskies were removed from the Antarctic). A major change has been the increase from a few hundred tourists in the 1960s to the present number of over 30,000 Anatractic visitors annually. But the greatest change has been the effects of global warming. Comparing my meteorological records from forty years ago to those of the present has added to the evidence that changes have occurred in Antarctica.

The effects are not immediately obvious to Antarctic visitors even though the temperature has increased by 2.5 degrees C over the last few decades.

There are still masses of ice, glaciers, and frigid waters along the Antarctic Peninsula. I had spent a year at Adelaide Island in Marguerite Bay forty years ago with no fur seals, now they lazed around on the rocks of the closed down base. In the 1960s the seals lived 700 kilometers to the north. Now they are spread all along the Antarctic Peninsula. In some breeding areas there is concern that the huge numbers, now in the millions, will destroy other Antarctic flora and fauna habitats.

The increase in temperature means less sea ice. Less sea ice has meant less krill larvae, (krill are the shrimp-like creatures that most Antarctic marine life depend on for food). This affects the more southerly Adelie penguins' feeding habits. The more northerly gentoo penguins are surviving the increased temperatures, though some recent warm summers with temperatures over 8 degrees C has resulted in penguin heat exhaustion.

The only two flowering Antarctic plants, the hair grass and the pearlwort, have increased their range and area.

There are more plants growing, and they are now found as far south as 68 degrees latitude.

87% of the glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula region have retreated in the last fifty years. This rapid change has not been evident for thousands of years. Ice shelves have lost much of their ice; some have now disappeared. Antarctic ice drill cores have shown the fastest and highest jumps in temperature over the last 900,000 years has been in the last 200 years. Human activity has affected not only the temperate and tropical parts of the world, but also the polar areas. The edges of the north and south polar-regions are more vulnerable to change that the zones in between. Global warming is changing our world.

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