Hussein Zhao, University of Tokyo, Japan.
In the past year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ocean Engineering and Engineering Design and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conducted the first high‐temperature experiments in the Northeast ocean and the Atlantic Ocean off the northern Canadian and western western Atlantic coast. In April 2011, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Atmospheric Physics and Meteorology and the National Oceanographic Administration’s Deep Ocean Heat Production Experiment made the first high‐temperature experiments in the Atlantic Ocean off the northern United States and in the eastern portion of the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern Caribbean.
Results and Discussion
On 22 April 2012, the first high‐temperature experiments were conducted off the northern U.S. and in the Atlantic Ocean, and approximately a year and a half later near the end of that same month in the eastern Pacific, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ocean Engineering and Engineering Design and NOAA released a joint press release stating the results of their experiments. Both China and the U.S. have published their published results in their peer‐reviewed scientific journals, and their findings have been widely shared on the internet. We used these results to evaluate the impacts of the climate policies set in Kyoto (2001) and in Copenhagen (2007).
What are the implications for the sea level rise for U.S. coasts? A first set of simulations on the basis of the Chinese and American research showed that a 1 mm rise (the rate of rise of 3 mm per year when the warming trend rate is a maximum) over a 20 years period would cause about 1.4–2 km of sea level rise in the USA and the Central Valley of California, and about 1.5–3.2 km of sea level rise in the Eastern United States and in parts of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
Our new results showed that a 1 mm rise, which would have a sea level rise of 3 mm per year over a 20 years period in 2100, would cause about 1.5–3.2 km of sea level rise due to the East Coast of the United States and parts of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. These results agree with the calculations based on a model. However, the combined global total sea level rise from the two sea level rise scenarios (1 millimeter per century and 2 mm per century) would be much less than the global estimate of 0–1 mm per century. If