(credit: Alyx Dellamonica)
Some of the impacts of climate change are conceptually complex, such as weather extremes, storm tracks, and ecosystem shifts. But one impact that's easy to imagine is sea level rise. When the ocean comes up, stuff ends up underwater. So one way to project the future consequences is to simply calculate how many people and buildings are below a given height above the current sea level.
But sea level isn’t the only thing changing—so are the people and buildings. A new study led by the University of Georgia’s Mathew Hauer looks at population trends around the coastal US for a better estimate of how many people would be affected by rising ocean waters by the end of this century.
The researchers took census data from 1940 to 2010 for coastal counties, and they extrapolated the trends through 2100. Then they ran the results through two scenarios of future sea level rise: one in which it rises 0.9 meters by 2100 and one in which it increases fully 1.8 meters. Those numbers correspond to reasonable estimates if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow unabated and show the upper end of the potential range of sea level rise.
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