It’s time to start honing your kayaking and snorkelling skills.
Hong Kong will one day be underwater if the world burns all its fossil fuel reserves, a new report has warned.
The research, published in the Science Advances journal last week, claims sea levels will rise by 60 metres, forcing a billion people out of their homes worldwide if the whole Antarctic Ice Sheet melts due to global warming.
Previous studies have tended to focus on the melting of the west of the ice sheet where the effects of climate change are most advanced. This is the first research to look at the entire sheet in relation to the impact of fossil fuel burning.
“The West Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have tipped into a state of unstoppable ice loss … But if we want to pass on cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg and New York as our future heritage, we need to avoid tipping in east Antarctica,” Professor Anders Levermann, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the Independent.
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science added, “If we do not want to melt Antarctica, we can’t keep taking fossil fuel carbon out and just dumping it into the atmosphere as CO2 … If we don’t stop dumping our waste CO2 into the sky, land that is now home to more than a billion people will one day be under water.”
The group predicts that the world’s fossil fuel reserves will be used up in 150 years if we keep consuming them at the current rate.
While increased ice loss is not predicted for this century, sea levels could rise up to three centimetres a year in the next 1,000 years, the study claims.
Photo: Marc Oh! via Flickr
