Waterworld: how life on Earth will look 1,000 years from now

[sasha031]

AN APOCALYPTIC vision of life 1,000 years from now has been painted by a team of scientists studying the effect of global warming.If mankind does not put its house in order, temperatures could have risen by 15C (27F) by the year 3000 and sea levels by more than 11 metres (36ft), flooding much of London, the team, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says in a report for the Environment Agency. Abrupt changes could make Britain much hotter, or even — such is the uncertainty of the predictions — first colder and then hotter.Climate Change on the Millennial Timescale is the first study to examine comprehensively the impacts of global warming beyond the end of this century. It calls for continued efforts to cut the emission of global-warming gases to prevent the changes from getting out of control.

By the year 3000, the report says,Global warming could have more than quadrupled, with temperature rises of as much as 15C, if we continue burning fossil fuels, Sea levels will still be rising at the end of this millennium and the total increase could reach 11.4 metres. This dwarfs estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that sea levels will rise by between 16cm and 69cm by the 2080s, Anything more than a two-metre rise would flood large areas of Bangladesh, Florida and many low-lying cities, and displace hundreds of millions of people, The acidity of the oceans will fall significantly, posing a threat to marine organisms such as corals and plankton. That, in turn, would affect the whole marine ecosystem ,

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2044465,00.html

[RC]

1. Yeah, but haven't these "fortune tellers" taken any

Psychics classes? Somewhere along the line all that water will get warm enough to form a cloud cover and reflect most of the solar energy back into space. And things will kind of stabilize there. Things will be warm and humid and overcast.
But all that energy has to do something. Think of the storms that can be generated. Katrina will have just been a breezy day.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. what, like Venus?

[stevietheman]

2. Yes, assuming...

1) we burn fossil fuels for that much longer, which is next to impossible, given we've passed peak oil production and there's also only so much coal we would be willing to extract without destroying preserved lands.

2) we don't develop technologies that sequester carbon dioxide from the air, sometime in the next 1,000 years. Given technology development in the past century, I have no doubt humankind will come up with such technology.

Articles like this prove one thing: People are really, really bad at predicting the future. All we need do is look at past future predictions as proof.

[megatherium]

3. Reminds me of a classic 1960s science fiction novel, The Drowned World,

by J. G. Ballard, his first novel. In this novel, the characters explore a submerged London; other parts of England are a torrid swamp where the wildlife is reverting to Permian forms (e.g., they find a large lizard with a large frill on its back, like a Dimetrodon). The expedition needs airconditioning to survive the heat, and the remnants of humanity live in far northern latitudes. The climate change in the novel was due to the Sun increasing in output.

[Odin2005]

4. The priblem with this is that...

...it assumes we will continue to use fossil fuels for the next 1000 years, which is an absolute impossibility. once we stop using, or run out of FFs, the climate should stabilize.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. maybe not 1000 years, but

there's a shitload of coal to burn....