Climate scientists are painting a bleak picture for future sea level rise, regardless of current efforts to control the globe's carbon dioxide emissions.
According to Climate Central, authors of a study published in the journal Science projected sea levels to rise to as much as 20 feet, even if global warming is contained. The new study comes ahead of the United Nations' climate summit in Paris scheduled for this Dec.
The researchers examined the last time the globe experienced such a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide and how ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica reacted.
"Present climate is warming to a level associated with significant polar ice-sheet loss in the past" study co-author Benjamin Horton, an oceanographer at the Rutgers University School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, said in a press release.
Climate Central noted the upcoming climate change talks will focus on a target of two degrees Celsius, which is what the U.N. hopes to limit the Earth's temperature rise to.
However, the researchers claim their observations state such a goal will not affect the sea level rise they projected. Their findings suggest the ice sheet loss could be highly problematic for coastal cities around the world over the next century.
"We are beginning to understand the magnitude that sea level rose in the past and which ice sheets may be responsible," Horton said in the release. "Scenarios of future rise are dependent upon understanding the response of sea level to climate changes. Accurate estimates of past sea-level variability provide a context for such projections."
