Rising Sea Levels Could Engulf Over 31 Million Americans

An interactive map shows just how much of the city will be under water in the next decades if carbon emissions are left unchecked. New Orleans and Miami are already past the point of no return.

Millions of Americans live in places where it’s too late to slow the threat of rising sea levels, a new study warns, and researchers are hoping those findings will serve as a call to action for cities that can still be saved by cutting carbon emissions.

A few scientists firmly believe that if the reliance upon fossil fuel is not reduced through the year 2100, sea levels will rise 14 to 32 feet around the globe.

“For unabated climate change, we find that land that is home to more than 20 million people is implicated and is widely distributed among different states and coasts”.

“Some cities appear to be already lost”, Strauss said. However, a few studies suggest that over timescales of several centuries or more, sensitivity could be as high as 4.5 or 6 °C.

Study’s lead author Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central said that of the 414 cities, New Orleans is at the top of the list. The difference between the two carbon levels is exceeded only by a handful of other low-lying cities including Miami, New York, and Virginia Beach.

After Florida, the next three most affected states are California, Louisiana and New York. Though we cannot estimate the exact time that how fast the sea-level rise could occur, we can assume that the estimate of 2.3 meters plays out over 2,000 years. The study posits that “aggressive carbon cuts”, in more than half of the threatened areas could forestall the decimating impact of coastal flooding, as long as the West Antarctic ice sheet, an important contributor to sea level rise, remains stable.

As a solution, authors of study stated that reducing carbon dioxide emission in the next years to come could mitigate the catastrophic effects of global warming, such as flash flood, drought and starvation. “It is the best estimates we can make with the understanding that we have today about the processes leading to sea-level rise”.

“Think of a pile of ice in a warm room”, Strauss said.

To hammer home the message in the United States, where a few politicians and voters remain skeptical about human-induced climate change, researchers built a map allowing residents to type in their postal code to see if their city is projected to be underwater by 2100. Strauss added that a global version might also be added next month. We know for sure that it will melt but we can not tell in how many minutes.

The city of Miami is based upon a porous limestone foundation and has a low elevation, the sea walls will not be able to stop the doomsday flooding, Strauss maintains.