The rise in sea levels in the past 80 years has been grossly underestimated and therefore greater action needs to be taken to combat global warming, the dean of National Central University's College of Earth Science Benjamin Chao (
Last year, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a Nobel-prize winning report warning that rising sea levels, caused mostly by global warming, could flood parts of the world if not slowed, Chao said.
"Scientific findings previously supported the estimate that sea levels rose 10cm over the past 80 years, but the actual number may be 13cm," said Chao, a former NASA scientist, citing his study which was published in Science magazine on March 13.
Chao's idea for the study came from his observation that the slope of sea level increase was curiously slower from the 1960s to the 1990s relative to pre-1960s and post-1990s periods, "which coincided with a time when the world was rapidly building artificial reservoirs," Chao said.
The observation led him to believe that while rising sea levels were partially brought about by natural causes like the thermal expansion of sea water and the melting of icebergs and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, human factors should also be considered.
Following four months of data compilation with doctoral student Henry Wu (
From his study, Chao postulated that reservoirs may be the largest human factor affecting sea levels.
"The implication is two-fold -- first, the speed at which the sea level is increasing is faster than we had previously calculated," he said.
Before the study it was thought the global sea level increased at 0.18mm per year. However, the new finding showed that the actual annual rise is 0.25cm, Chao said.
"The second implication is that `the more we know, the more we know we don't know,'" he said.
"So far we can account for 0.12cm of the annual rise in sea levels -- while previously that comprised 70 percent of the annual amount. Now it means we don't know more than half the causes of the increase," he said.
Fifty-five percent of the causes are unknown, he said.
Chao said instead of building more dams, humans need to reduce carbon emissions and halt global warming.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS