Independent support for sea-level rise projections

A new model based on past sea-level changes suggests that sea level will rise between 7 and 82 cm by the end of the twenty-first century in response to rising temperatures. This estimate, published online in Nature Geoscience, is in line with projections from the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Mark Siddall and colleagues developed a sea-level model that is based on the sea-level response to global average temperature changes that occurred over the past 22,000 years. This approach is very different from the more complex models used for the IPCC reports, but both converge on similar values of sea-level rise ― the IPCC's latest report gave values between 18 and 59 cm ― in response to the projected 1 to 6?C warming. This independent modelling effort therefore increases confidence in the IPCC estimates.