Sea levels set to rise by up to a metre

SYDNEY, May 23 (AFP): Sea levels are set to rise by up to a metre within a century due to global warming, a new Australian report said Monday as it warned this could make "once-a-century" coastal flooding much more common. The government's first Climate Commission report said the evidence that the Earth's surface was warming rapidly was beyond doubt. Drawn from the most up-to-date climate science from around the world, the report said greenhouse gas emissions created by human industry was the likely culprit behind rising temperatures, warming oceans, and rising sea levels. Its author Will Steffen said while the report had been reviewed by climate scientists from Australian science body the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and academics, some judgments, including on sea levels, were his own. "I expect the magnitude of global average sea-level rise in 2100 compared to 1990 to be in the range of 0.5 to 1.0 metre," Steffen said in his preface to "The Critical Decade". He said while this assessment was higher than that of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 2007, which was under 0.8m, it was not inconsistent with the UN body which had said higher values were possible. "We're five years down the track now, we know more about how those big ice sheets are behaving," Steffen told reporters. "In part we have some very good information about the Greenland icesheet. We know it's losing mass and we know it's losing mass at an increasing rate. "So that's telling us that we need to extend that upper range a bit towards a metre. Now there are commentators who say it should be even higher than that."