Researchers Predict What The World Will Look Like In 2050 If The Temperature Rises By 3°C (50 Pics)

On their website, Climate Central writes: “Climate and energy choices this decade will influence how high sea levels rise for hundreds of years. Which future will we choose?” Their main goal is to research the effects of climate change on our world. If we continue the way we are now, the future will be quite grim.

The science research website Iopscience wrote about this issue in more depth: “A portion of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions will stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, rising temperatures and sea levels globally. Most nations’ emissions-reduction policies and actions do not seem to reflect this long-term threat, as collectively they point toward widespread permanent inundation of many developed areas. Using state-of-the-art new global elevation and population data, we show here that, under high emissions scenarios leading to 4○C warming and a median projected 8.9 m of global mean sea level rise within a roughly 200- to 2000-year envelope, 50 major cities, mostly in Asia, would need to defend against globally unprecedented levels of exposure, if feasible, or face partial to near-total extent area losses.”

“Nationally, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, global leaders in recent coal plant construction, have the largest contemporary populations occupying land below projected high tide lines, alongside Bangladesh. We employ this population-based metric as a rough index for the potential exposure of the largely immovable built environment embodying cultures and economies as they exist today. Based on median sea-level projections, at least one large nation on every continent but Australia and Antarctica would face exceptionally high exposure: land home to at least one-tenth and up to two-thirds of the current population falling below the tideline. Many small island nations are threatened with near-total loss. The high tide line could encroach above land occupied by as much as 15 percent of the current global population (about one billion people). By contrast, meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement will likely reduce exposure by roughly half and may avoid globally unprecedented defense requirements for any coastal megacity exceeding a contemporary population of 10 million.”

Climate Center based their project on this research and created the images you see. On their website, you can even see a map of all the risk zones and choose the temperature you want. Then you can check out the country, region, or city you live in and see just how much it would get affected by the rising sea levels.