Page 16: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (October 2016)

OPINION: SEA LEVEL RISE

An Update & Analysis of

Climate Change & Rising Seas

DUNCAN MELLOR he maritime Industry offers by charged topic of climate change, to take havior when transformed into real world degrees of uncertainty, especially when far the most ef? cient means of a closer look at observed sea level rise structures. dealing with the deep oceans and polar

Ttransport, yet does get more than relative to the projections, or forecasts, In contrast, man-made climate change regions. its share of attention for contributing to that have been made by climate change science is a new ? eld, academic in na- “climate change.” The reality is that scientists. ture, most closely linked to the Inter- So where do we stand on sea level rise, the Maritime Industry faces a dispro- As an engineer, I work with materials governmental Panel on Climate Change and its projected acceleration? portionally high risk of damages if the and design concepts that have evolved (IPCC) formed in 1988. At the center The trends in observations of global projections for accelerating sea level rise over hundreds or thousands of years. of this study of global climate is an ex- sea level vary, but in comparing the ob- associated with climate change are real. These engineering concepts are well tremely complex system, not well un- servations to the forecast sea level rise

Here, we are bypassing the politically understood and provide predictable be- derstood, with many data gaps and large acceleration projections, the observa-

Figure 1 16 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • OCTOBER 2016

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