Earlier,I had blogged about a Research Report by Ambit Capital which discussed the possibility of Mumbai realty prices crashing by 50%
Now comes a study on climate change which discussed the possibility of Mumbai and other coastal cities going underwater in the next few decades:
In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels.
The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields—concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates. In a conference call with reporters, he said he hoped the new findings would be “substantially more persuasive than anything previously published.” I certainly find them to be.
To come to their findings, the authors used a mixture of paleoclimate records, computer models, and observations of current rates of sea level rise, but “the real world is moving somewhat faster than the model,” Hansen says.
Hansen’s study does not attempt to predict the precise timing of the feedback loop, only that it is “likely” to occur this century. The implications are mindboggling: In the study’s likely scenario, New York City—and every other coastal city on the planet—may only have a few more decades of habitability left. That dire prediction, in Hansen’s view, requires “emergency cooperation among nations.”- from Slate
As an aside,I always wondered why our ancestors did not build any coastal cities.Minor ports aside, all the major capitals (Delhi, Pune, Mysore, Hyderabad, Lahore, Murshidabad etc) were miles away from the sea. All our major coastal cities such as Mumbai,Chennai,Kolkata,Karachi etc were built by the British.
Is it possible that our ancestors learnt from the experience of ancient India where cities like Dwarka, Lothal etc perished under the waves?
