Environmental Leader

Miami would become an island city – and Miami Beach an underwater reef – if climate change projections of a one-meter rise in sea levels by century’s end hold true.

Clean Air-Cool Planet presented new climate change models to Senate staffers Nov. 19. The projections are predicated on a one-meter rise in sea level caused by accelerated melting of the ice caps and Greenland glaciers.

Clean Air-Cool Planet says its projection differs from the 2007 projection from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which predicted 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) of sea-level rise.

Clean Air-Cool Planet says the IPCC model did not include melting ice from Greenland or Antarctica.

Clean Air-Cool Planet shows projections for the following U.S. coastal cities:

- Philadelphia

- Portland

- Tampa

- Miami

- Wilmington, Del.

- Norfolk, Va.

- Hampton, N.H.

- Chesapeake Bay Region

Climate researchers now project the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if industrialized and developing countries meet their most ambitious climate commitments, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that worldwide carbon emissions must stop increasing by 2014 and greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 50 to 85 percent in about four decades or as many as 25 percent of the planet’s species would be killed from global warming.