1988: Warmist Revkin suggested that by 2050, CO2 could cause sea levels to "rise as much as six feet"

Special Report: Endless Summer—Living With the Greenhouse Effect | Environment | DISCOVER Magazine

Global warming has begun, and we had better start preparing for the dramatic changes to come.

by Andrew C. Revkin Until this year, despite dire warnings from clima­tologists, the greenhouse ef­fect has seemed somehow academic and far off. The idea behind it is simple: gases accumulating in the at­mosphere as by-products of human industry and agricul­ture—carbon dioxide, mostly, but also methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons—let in the sun's warming rays but don't let excess heat escape. As a result, mean global tem­perature has probably been rising for decades. But the rise has been so gradual that it has been masked by the much greater, and ordinary, year-to-year swings in world temperature....By the middle of the next cen­tury the resulting warming could boost global mean temperatures from three to nine degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn't sound like much, but it equals the tem­perature rise since the end of the last ice age, and the con­sequences could be devastat­ing. Weather patterns could shift, bringing drought to once fertile areas and heavy rains to fragile deserts that cannot handle them. As run­off from melting glaciers in­creases and warming seawa­ter expands, sea level could rise as much as six feet, in­undating low-lying coastal areas and islands. There would be dramatic disrup­tions of agriculture, water re­sources, fisheries, coastal ac­tivity, and energy use...."We're altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences," says Stephen Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Cen­ter for Atmospheric Re­search in Boulder, Colorado. "This is bound to lead to some surprises."... Since greenhouse gases are chiefly the result of human industry and agriculture, it is not an exaggeration to say that civilization itself is the ultimate cause of global warming....

Some parts of the world could actually benefit from climate change, while others could suffer tremendously...

While the greenhouse ef­fect threatens to make life on Earth miserable, it is also part of the reason life is livable in the first place. ...

Another problem is that modelers must estimate the influence of vegetation, ice and snow, soil moisture, ter­rain, and especially clouds, which reflect lots of sun­light back into space and also hold in surface heat. "Clouds are an important factor about which little is known," says Schneider. "When I first started looking at this in 1972, we didn't know much about the feed­back from clouds. We don't know any more now than we did then." ...

Even as cities become more vulnerable to moderate storms, the intensity of hur­ricanes may increase dra­matically, says Kerry Eman­uel, a meteorologist at MIT. Hurricane intensity is linked to the temperature of the sea surface, Emanuel explains. According to his models, if the sea warms to predicted levels, the most intense hurricanes will be 40 to 50 per­cent more severe than the most intense hurricanes of the past 50 years. ...

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute for Studies in De­velopment, Environment and Security, in Berkeley, California, has devised a widely praised model that predicts a dramatic disrup­tion of the state's water sup­ply in the event of global warming, even if total precipitation remains un­changed....Plants will suddenly be unable to propagate their seeds, and animals will have no place to go. Species in the Arctic, such as caribou, may lose vital migratory routes as ice bridges between islands melt....James Titus of the Environ­mental Protection Agency estimates that a five-foot rise in sea level—not even the worst-case scenario—would destroy between 50 and 90 percent of America's wet- lands....Schneider was one of more than 300 dele­gates from 48 countries who attended the International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, which took place in Toronto, coinciden­tally, just a week after Hansen's congressional testi­mony. It was, says Schnei­der, the "Woodstock of CO2"