Which cities are in the greatest danger from rising sea levels?

We know the basic idea: global warming melts polar ice, sending swells of ocean water toward our shores – and after becoming engulfed in an entirely blue world, people grow gills and are somehow turning pee into drinking water.

Sounds crazy? Of course it does – thank you, Kevin Costner. But the basic idea of entire cities across the world becoming well beyond waterlogged is, in fact, a reality. And a scary one at that.

According to measurements by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), rising sea levels will be a huge threat to even the most advanced cities -  not to mention small, island nations – with predicted levels twice as high as originally thought.

If global temperatures continue to increase at the current rate, by the year 2100 island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific would be entirely engulfed by ocean waters, while rising levels will devastate coastal cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka.

Modern-day metropolises New York, Shanghai and London would need to literally spend billions in order to even attempt to hold off flood waters from rushing onto city streets.

A threat beyond measure

Back in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a rise of merely .59 meters toward the end of the century. This was bad on its own, but now the SCAR panel of 35 leading climate research institutions has reported an expected rise of 1.4 meters – almost double the original report.

So, why such a discrepancy? SCAR scientists suggest that the IPCC underestimated how much the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (ice on land, NOT in the ocean) would contribute to total sea-level rises.

While the IPCC originally thought melted ice sheets would contribute around 20% to rising sea levels, the new study by SCAR suggests the ice sheets’ contribution at over 50%. SCAR is using more up-to-date climate observation technology to deliver these new results.

In time for this month’s COP15 conference, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC and one of the world’s leading experts on climate science, has called for the world to intensify efforts to control global warming.

Discrepancies damage credibility

With all the drama surrounding the “climate chanhe hoax” claims, skeptics did not wait long to jump on the new SCAR report.

“It’s 50cm, 60cm, 100cm — 60m if you ask James Hansen from Nasa,” said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “The predictions come in thick and fast, but we take them all with a pinch of salt.”

Obviously, such large contradictions can hurt the overall believability of the individual reports as well as others like them.

“We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming,” continued Peiser. “We’re very concerned that 100-year policies are being made on the basis of these predictions”