Maybe Earth Won't Completely Become Waterworld, After All?

Good news, maybe, about our challenging situation here on the only available habitable planet: Today’s climate change study (from Norway) says maybe the 1990s were worse for global warming than the 2000s, which means …. we can go back to five steaks a day, and McMansions, and Hummers?

New estimates from a Norwegian research project show meeting targets for minimizing global warming may be more achievable than previously thought. After the planet’s average surface temperature rose through the 1990s, the increase has almost leveled off at the level of 2000, while ocean water temperature has also stabilized, the Research Council of Norway said in a statement on its website.

Having not really done much about global warming since it really picked up in the second half of the 20th Century, world governments and the fossil-fuel corporations that manage those governments have bravely decided temperatures shouldn’t rise more than 2 degrees Celsius, even though 3 degrees has been predicted by scientists. According to this new Norwegian study, “the results showed temperatures may rise 1.9 degrees Celsius if Co2 levels double by 2050, below the 3 degrees predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Sadly for people and other living things in coastal regions, the rise in sea level for an additional 2 degrees Celsius is somewhere between a meter and “4–8 meters,” the latter being European for “a sea level rise of up to 26 feet,” which would mean a lot of Brooklyn and most of coastal New Jersey will be underwater, beginning in 2051.