Map showing how global warming will influence sea level in your city

By Aleks Buczkowski



This year, similarly to the previous one, will be the warmest year ever recorded. We may argue about the measurement methodology and accuracy but today no one doubts that climate change and global warming are facts rather than crazy theories of Al Gore. Ongoing 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris only confirms it.

We don’t know how this change will influence natural disasters, we can however quite precisely estimate how the rising sea level will affect places and cities we live in. Climate Central, an independent US-based environmental awareness organisation, used the latest PNAS data and created a really cool Google Maps mash-up which answers this question.

The project is called Mapping Choices and it lets you choose any city in the world to see what rising seas will do to it based on a range of projections about how high sea levels could increase. In addition the app lets you configure your view to compare side-by-side how different responses to curb pollution will impact the environment differently, resulting in a range of potential sea-level scenarios.

Click here for the Mapping Choices project.

In addition Climate Central created cool videos with visualizations of how the rising sea level will affect the landscape of cities around the world.

Scientists are not yet sure what will be the exact characteristics of the rising sea level. The estimations say about the level of between 4.2 meters and 10 meters until 2100. In theory it’s a lot of time. In practice our children or grandchildren may still witness it. Multiple countries including China and the US are critical about introducing policies to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions due to economic reasons but as Climate Central explains on its website that “the sea level rise we map may take centuries to play out, but we set it in motion today.” And we are obligated to future generations to do something about it.

Source: Geoawesomeness