Rising sea levels may prove a threat to millions of more people than previously thought as new research, based on a more accurate way of calculating land elevation, now reveals that earlier reports were far too optimistic in their projections. The danger of seas rising because of uncontrolled carbon emissions in environmental degradation caused by mankind predicts that large swaths of lands in coastal cities like Mumbai and Chennai in India and many more around the world, especially in Asia, will lie far below the high tide line by 2050. And this is not a scary scenario thought up by Hollywood writers creating scripts for a movie based in a dystopian future. Recall what happened to New Orleans in 2005 as the result of an extreme climate event and it might just tell the story of the kind of danger the world is facing.
The new report is, however, unlikely to scare the likes of Donald Trump and others of his ilk still convinced that climate science is a spoof. But the world knows that melting glaciers and rising seas are getting to be the new normal on a planet being pummelled in quick succession by extreme climate events like storms and exceptional rainfall patterns, all of them linked in away to the natural equilibrium of the oceans and seas that occupy more than five-eighths of the globe. The social and political instability and likelihood of armed conflicts render this as such a frightening scenario that climate change and the consequent rising seas cannot be considered just an environmental problem. The point is even as the warnings are getting more dire, we seem incapable of listening and acting in time. Can we just procrastinate, because this seems like a problem for the next generation? Can we afford to sit back and do nothing while our very inaction threatens to destroy our planet?
