67 metres in ten years!

Ian Wishart blogs on how Al Gore recently remarked that we could have a 6 to 7 metre sea level rise within 10 years.

I think politicians like Al Gore actually damage the very cause they purport to support, with their hysterical claims.

This would be an increase of 67 cms a year.

Now the latest IPCC projections deal with six scenarios. The best case scenario has an increase of 18 cm to 38 cm. The worst case scenario is 26 cm to 59 cm. And these are over 110 years.

So the IPCC says the sea level rise will probably range from 0.16 cm/year to 0.54 cm/year. And that is undesirable, hence it is sensible to have in place a price on carbon and incentives to reduce emissions.

But what a difference – 0.16 to 0.54 cm a year, compared to Al Gore’s hysteria of a possible 67 cm a year.

Now some will say that the Gore scenario is not impossible. Of course it isn’t. Few things are impossible. It is possible in the next 24 hours a meteor will hit the Earth also. But is such hysteria a useful contributor to the debate?

UPDATE: The original news story refers to 6-7 metres, not 67 metres. I should check original sources more often, but good thing on the Internet is people pick up errors quickly. I would point out that is still a prediction of an average 670 mm a year, compared to the 0.54 mm from the IPCC. It means Gore is out by only three magnitudes, instead of four.

UPDATE2: Have rewritten article to reflect timeframe and also correct mms to cms for IPCC. Wow this is a dogs breakfast of a post. My bad. Commenters have also usefully pointed out the 10 year timeframe applies to the North Pole ice cap disappearing in winter months within 5 – 10 years, and not the Greenland melting which would be the 6-7 metre rise. Again I welcome people picking me up on this, and this is why links to sources are so important.

But let’s not lose sight of the big issue over whether sea level increases this century will be measured in metres or millimetres.

I was going to post some odds for sea level rises and challenge people to take them up. But that may get me in trouble with DIA gambling laws.

So let me try it this way. If you think the sea levels will increase by more than the 4th IPCC assessment report, then tell me what you think the average global increase will be by 2015 and 2020? And maybe we can have a private wager on that occuring. Or just have the honour of seeing who is right.

Now again I am not saying there will be no increase. I am disputing how large it may be.