Professors say sea levels sensitive to warmth

Conducted by a team of Princeton and Harvard scientists, the study, called “Probabilistic Assessment of Sea Level During the Last Interglacial Stage,” concludes that even moderate global warming could lead to a rapid rise in the global sea level, submerging New Orleans and areas along the East Coast of the United States.

Princeton contributors to the article included geosciences professors Frederik Simons and Adam Maloof, geosciences and Wilson School professor Michael Oppenheimer and Robert Kopp, a postdoctoral researcher in the Wilson School.

According to the paper, a two degree rise could raise the sea level between 20 and 30 feet, which would flood parts of Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Though that process would likely take several centuries to finish, the researchers claim that if greenhouse gas emissions remain constant, then the planet could be irrecoverably put down that path.

The researchers looked at the last time the sea was that high — the last interglacial state, some 125,000 years ago — and found that temperatures at the poles were just three to five degrees warmer than they were today. If temperatures rise another two or three degrees, the Earth could again plunge into that same type of watery state, according to their study.

“The last interglacial stage provides a historical analog for futures with a fairly moderate amount of warming; the high sea levels during the stage suggest that significant chunks of major ice sheets could disappear over a period of centuries in such futures,” Kopp said in a University statement. “Yet if the global economy continues to depend heavily on fossil fuels, we’re on track to have significantly more warming by the end of century than occurred during the last interglacial. I find this somewhat worrisome.”

According to the study, there was a 95 percent probability that the sea was more than 21 feet higher during the last interglacial state than it is today.

The last interglacial stage is particularly important to scientists studying climate change because it happened fairly recently in geological terms and marks the last time when global temperatures were higher than they are today.

“These findings should send a strong message to the governments negotiating in Copenhagen [at the international climate conference on global warming] that the time to avoid disastrous outcomes may run out sooner than expected,” Oppenheimer said in the statement.

Last week, University professors Robert Austin and William Happer GS ’64 called for a redaction of a statement by the American Physical Society claiming that evidence for global warming represents an immediate national emergency. They said the “Climategate” scandal, in which hacked e-mails reveal collusion among certain prominent climatologists in manipulating data led to an overstatement of the human influence on climate change.