Global Warming: Carbon Emissions Sure to Prompt Rise of Sea Levels to Three Feet by 2100
Unless the governments of the world find immediate solutions to curb their respective fossil fuel consumptions and carbon emissions, the global populace might as well retire to an impending plausible scenario of rising sea levels by year 2100 to as much as three feet high.
A draft report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highly noted that such activities are highly controllable or avoidable because these are results of human decisions.
"It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010," the draft report said. "There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century."
From various assumptions posted over the years that the world's climate might have a mind of its own thus the resulting global changes, scientists are now more convinced at 95 per cent that the planet's decelerating environmental status was brought down by the humans themselves.
In the last report in 2007, the U.N. panel of experts said it presumed 90 per cent in the climate's variations was caused by human activity. It was 66 per cent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995.
Moreover, if the levels of carbon dioxide emissions continue and get to double, the earth's atmosphere will warm by 3.6 degrees.
The IPCC report comes after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2012 State of the Climate report in early August, where it noted that "major greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, continued to rise during 2012."
"Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate-carbon levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place," Kathryn D. Sullivan, acting NOAA Administrator, had said earlier.
"We have got quite a bit more certain that climate change ... is largely manmade," Reto Knutti, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, was quoted by Reuters. "We're less certain than many would hope about the local impacts."