The New Zealand Herald’s environment reporter Eloise Gibson reports on a climate science update given by senior New Zealand climate scientists in Wellington yesterday.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“Because sea level rise will not be uniform around the globe, Dr Tim Naish, the director of the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University, said New Zealand could experience more sea level rise than Northern Hemisphere nations.
“Dr Naish said satellite pictures showed land ice at the poles was melting twice as fast as five years ago. If the Greenland ice sheet melted quicker than Antarctica, as it was expected to, sea levels would rise higher in the Southern Hemisphere than in the north.
“That was because gravitational changes and shifts in the earth’s spin axis would raise seas by a larger amount in whichever hemisphere experienced the least melting at its pole.”