More evidence of one metre sea rise this century

New Scientist quotes Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, UK, who says a new, more accurate reconstruction of sea levels over the past 2000 years suggests that the prediction of a an 18-59 centimetre rise by 2100 made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is wildly inaccurate.

New predictions of sea level rises that for the first time takes into account ice dynamics predict that seas will be from 0.8-1.5 metres higher by next century.

At a European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna, Austria, this week, researchers including Jevrejeva said in a statement that the pace at which sea levels are rising is accelerating.

"For the past 2,000 years, the sea level was very stable," Jevrejeva said, explaining that they rose just 2 cm in the 18th century, 6 cm in the 19th century and a greater 19 cm last century.

"It seems that rapid rise in the 20th century is from melting ice sheets," she adds.

"If [the sea level] rises by one metre, 72 million Chinese people will be displaced, and 10 percent of the Vietnamese population," she concluded.

And climate change expert Nicholas Stern says he under-estimated the threat from global warming in a major report 18 months ago when he compared the economic risk to the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to The Age.

Latest climate science showed global emissions of planet-heating gases were rising faster and upsetting the climate more than previously thought, Stern said in a Reuters interview.

For example, evidence was growing that the planet's oceans - an important "sink" - were increasingly saturated and couldn't absorb as much as previously of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), Stern told reporters.