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.
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its