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Summary: tral case). For the CE commitment, sea level
rises at about 25 cm/century (uncertainty range,
7 to more than 50 cm/century). The fractions
arising from unforced contributions to sea lev-
el rise are less than those in the CC case.
The CE results reinforce the common
knowledge that, in order to stabilize global-
mean temperatures, we eventually need to re-
duce emissions of greenhouse gases to well
below present levels (21). The CC results
are potentially more alarming, because they
are based on a future scenario that is clear-
ly impossible to achieve and so represent
an extreme lower bound to climate change
over the next few centuries. For temperature,
they show that the inertia of the climate sys-
tem alone will guarantee continued warming
and that this warming may eventually exceed
1-C. For sea level, a continued rise of about
10 cm/century for many centuries is the best
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