Yahoo News 23 May 11;
SYDNEY (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 -- with the last decade the hottest on record.
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.
Commissioner Professor Will Steffen said while the report had been reviewed by climate scientists from the 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 Canberra.
"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."
The report said a sea-level rise of 0.5m would lead to surprisingly large impacts, with the risk of extreme events such as inundations in coastal areas around Australia's largest cities of Sydney and Melbourne hugely increased.
Steffen said in some instances, a one-in-a-hundred year event could happen every year.
The report found that Australia, prone to bushfires, drought and cyclones, had also likely felt the impact of rising temperatures in recent years.
In the last five decades the number of record hot days in Australia had more than doubled, increasing the risk of heatwaves and bush fire weather, it said.
Australia Climate Commission says warming risk is real
BBC News 23 May 11;
The Australian Climate Commission has warned that the world's sea levels could rise by one metre by the end of the century, much more than thought.
In its first report, the commission says the evidence that the planet is warming is stronger than ever.
It said that climate science is being attacked in the media by people with no credentials in the field.
The Australian government has welcomed the report as it seeks public support for its proposed carbon tax.
The BBC's correspondent in Sydney, Nick Bryant, says the commission's report delivers a strong rebuke to those who question that human emissions is causing global warming.
It warned that the window to take action to limit global warming is closing fast.
Climate politicised
The report claims that climate science was ''being attacked in the media by many with no credentials in the field" and also that attempts to "intimidate climate scientists have added to the confusion in the public".
One member of the commission criticised the "fruitless phoney debate", and said that Australia "no longer had the luxury anymore of climate denialism", as he called it.
Polls suggest that support for forceful action on climate change has declined in Australia since the Copenhagen summit in 2009.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that she and the government accepted the commission's peer-reviewed report.
"We don't have time ... for false claims in this debate," she said.
"The science is in, climate change is real. The science is clear - man-made carbon pollution is making a difference to our planet and our climate.
"We've got to get on with the job of cutting carbon pollution and having a rational debate about it."
Liberal MP Dennis Jensen, a climate change sceptic, told reporters in Canberra that all the evidence pointed to global temperatures stabilising.
He argues that a carbon tax would not achieve anything.
The Australian government had put plans for a flagship emissions trading scheme on hold until 2013 at the earliest after the Senate rejected it twice during the previous Kevin Rudd administration.
Australia is one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world.
