Sea levels are likely to rise at least three feet across the globe in the next 90 years, which is a lot more than previous estimates -- and Maine will probably get the worst of it. That was the message delivered by two climate change experts who just returned from the Arctic Circle and are on a tour of the East Coast to highlight their research and discuss possible policy solutions.
The so-called "Hip-Boot Tour" arrived at Becky's Diner on the Portland waterfront. Standing in the parking lot of Becky's Diner, Bill Burtis of the non-profit "Clean Air Cool Planet" donned a pair of hip boots, or waders as they're sometimes called, and using some blue tape, marked the point on the boots where he expects the sea level to be by the end of the century, if things carry on as they are.
This parking lot, he predicts will be under 18 inches of water -- knee deep. And that's based at the lower end of the latest estimates being touted this week by acclaimed climate scientists from the University of Maine and University of New Hampshire.
"So that's what sea level rise from melting in the Arctic thermal expansion, and Antarctica would look like on Commercial Street in Portland," Burtis said.
Gordon Hamilton from UMaine, and Mark Fahnstock of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire, have been surveying the diminishing glaciers of Greenland regularly since the mid-90s. But in the last few years, says Hamilton, they've noticed an even more worrying trend.
"When I did some of the first part of this project back in 2005, we'd actually used some satellite images we'd collected in the fall of 2004 to plan where we were going to make our measurements, and we flew there by helicopter, and the pilot said, 'OK, we're there,' and we looked below us and there was no glacier there any more," Hamilton says. "We were flying over the open ocean and the glacier was several kilometers back up the fjords."
Hamilton says he first thought it was down to a map-reading error, but then realized that something significant and disturbing was happening on several glaciers he visited that summer. "And everytime I've gone back, and I've been back -- I can't think how many times I've been back since 2005 -- but everytime we go, there's a new surprise, everything looks different from the previous visit. So there's no shortage of rapid changes taking place there."
"Glaciers are retreating dramatically, they are showing us very large increases in speed," says UNH's Mark Fahnstock. He says his findings were similar to Hamilton's. "Glaciers in Greenland in the last decade are putting substantially more ice in the ocean than they did in the previous several decades at least."
Fahnstock and Hamilton's studies vary greatly with the commonly-accepted findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC had predicted that sea levels would rise by no more than 59 centimeters -- just under two feet -- by the end of the century, and that's in a worst case scenario.
But the most recent data, collected by Fahnstock, Hamilton and other scientists, point to a rise of at least a meter by 2100. The northeastern United States, says Hamilton, will be particularly badly hit, due to the impact of glacial water on the Gulf Stream.
The cold glacial water, he says, will affect currents and prevent the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream from flowing away, thereby causing sea levels to rise further..
Maine and New Hampshire, he says, could be in for a tough time in years to come. "We have very low lying flat parts of our coast with a lot of property and infrastructure built up there," Hamilton says. "Eventually it will be inundated. Before it gets inundated we're going to see it get battered by storm surges building on an already increased tidal height."
"This is not just Maine, this is not just the East Coast, this is the entire globe, and there are nations that will submerged as a result of these trends. There are millions of people in the world who will have to move," said Rafe Pomerance, President of Clean Air Cool Planet Action Group, which hopes to use the data to effect political change, and particularly to apply pressure in the Senate on the Cap and Trade Bill, which aims to limit carbon emissions.
"The United States Senate is engaged in an absolutely critical moment," Pomerance said. "This is the first time in 30 years of this stuff being around that the Senate is actually taking up the issue seriously."
Pomerance predicts the Senate will debate this within the next six months -- sufficient time, he hopes, to garner enough Republican support to secure the 60 votes required for passage.