Sea Level Rise Outpacing Key Predictions

Predictions of how much sea-levels would rise due to climate change, made by a key UN report in 2001, were conservative, say researchers on the eve of the release of the new update of the report.

Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and colleagues, compared the predictions made in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the actual subsequent data. The factors they compared were temperature, sea-level rise and concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The researchers found that changes in CO2 concentrations between 1990 and 2005 followed the 2001 predictions of the computer models "almost exactly"