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New Study measures sea level rise at 3.2 millimeters a year for 2 decades for a total rise of 6.4 centimeters
From
New Scientist – One of the two new studies shows that last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007, underestimated actual sea level rise. That's because the IPCC's fourth assessment report (AR4) did not include contributions from the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
So, for the years 1993-2011, the IPCC estimated that sea level would rise by about 2 millimetres a year. But the satellite data from that period now tell a different story.
Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and colleagues compared IPCC AR4 projections with actual measurements and found the projections lagging behind what was happening in the real world. Global sea level has been rising at about 3.2 millimetres a year over the past two decades
Environmental Research Letters – Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011
We analyse global temperature and sea-level data for the past few decades and compare them to projections published in the third and fourth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The results show that global temperature continues to increase in good agreement with the best estimates of the IPCC, especially if we account for the effects of short-term variability due to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, volcanic activity and solar variability. The rate of sea-level rise of the past few decades, on the other hand, is greater than projected by the IPCC models. This suggests that IPCC sea-level projections for the future may also be biased low.
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2012-12-01 13:02:27 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/12/new-study-measures-sea-level-rise-at-32.html
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