When Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions during an underwater cabinet meeting, he conjured up a doomsday scenario to highlight the threat that rising sea levels posed to the low-lying nation.
Though not likely to be as spectacular as Nasheed’s stunt, a lecture to be delivered by oceanographer John Church today in Tainan and tomorrow in Taipei bears a similar message: Humans need to face up to the reality of global warming and rising sea levels before it’s too late.
Sea Level Rise: Understanding, Expectation and Migration will examine how governments and citizens can mitigate and adapt to the problem. The talk is part of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation’s
(龍應台文化基金會) MediaTek Lectures.
“About 140 million people live within a meter of the current highest tides and storm surges around the world. [The] rise at the upper end of the current projections will have a huge impact on these people and
the rest of society ... Planned adaptation is more cost effective [than] forced adaptation,” Church wrote in an e-mail to the Taipei Times.
According to 2007’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, global warming will, by the end of this century, lead to a rise of between 19cm and 58cm from current
sea levels.
However, more recent estimates in The Copenhagen Diagnosis 2009: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, forecast that sea levels could rise by as much as 2m within the same period.
Church will discuss the factors contributing to sea level rise and projections for the 21st century and beyond.
Church said that last year’s climate conference in Copenhagen was a good start to tackling the problem of global climate change. “But there is a long way to go and the need is urgent. People around the world need to convince their governments of the need for action and leadership and that all nations are in this together,” Church wrote.
Church is the 2007 Eureka Prize winner for Scientific Research and co-convening lead author for the chapter on sea level rise in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report. He is currently an oceanographer with the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.
Benjamin Chao (趙丰), Dean of National Central University’s College of Earth Sciences, will moderate the Tainan lecture, while Li Chia-wei (李家維), editor-in-chief of the Taiwanese edition of Scientific American (科學人), will preside over the Taipei lecture.
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