Sea-level is best way to predict impacts of climate change
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More thorough sea level monitoring is needed to protect one trillion dollars (0.98 trillion U.S. dollars) worth of the world's infrastructure threatened by climate change, an Australian leading ocean scientist said on Sunday
In the book Understanding Sea-level Rise and Variability, released on Sunday, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) oceanographer John Church said the best way to predict the impacts of climate change is to look at the sea.
"The oceans are absolutely central to climate change," Church told Australia Associated Press on Sunday.
"If we want to predict climate change accurately we've got to look at the oceans and for that matter the ice sheets."
Dr Church said there are around one trillion dollars (0.98 trillion U.S. dollars) worth of infrastructure, and 140 million people living a meter or less above sea-level, and therefore, the sea-level data is very important.
"These coastal areas - the infrastructure and the environment - are already affected by extreme events," Dr Church said.
"With no significant greenhouse gas mitigation to date, it's becoming increasingly clear that we need to adapt to rising sea levels."
"If we're going to do this cost effectively, we need to know what to adapt to."
According to Dr Church, there are gaps in the understanding of the rate the world's ice sheets were melting and how the water will be dispersed across the world's regions.
"Our current models are inadequate in some senses," he said.
"Unfortunately this means that our current uncertainties are one-sided. That is, the ice sheets could contribute substantially more (water) in the future but probably not substantially less."
Dr Church said this in turn would lead to more accurate predictions about sea level rises in coming years.
"Current projections are generally tracking beyond 80cm in the next century," Dr Church said.
"(They) are valuable, but there's a still wide uncertainty both about the global average amount of rise, significant uncertainty about the regional distribution."
Dr Church said greater knowledge of the world's oceans could lead to the development of warning systems against natural disasters.
"People will be affected not just by the rise in sea level but by the extreme events and how they change," he said.
"We need early warning systems, so if the ice sheets do respond more rapidly, we need to know about that.
"There's also natural disasters like cyclones. We should be able to improve our short term predictions of those events."
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