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Writing in Spiegel Online International, Franziska Badenschier reports on new models developed in Germany that challenge the IPCC model on sea level rise.

"The United Nations panel IPCC assumes that the average global temperature will increase by up to 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, and that the sea level will rise by up to 43 centimeters as a result of the water's thermal expansion alone. Moreover, the incipient melting of Greenland's pack ice could significantly increase that number, according to the upcoming IPCC report, which is due to be released in February 2007.
Nine, 43, or 140 centimeters by the end of the century: 'The fact that we get such varying results with different methods emphasizes just how uncertain our current sea level predictions still are,' says [Stefan] Rahmstorf. But that's also why other experts consider Rahmstorf's numbers to be dubious. 'His report is a valuable contribution to the discussion, but we still have to give more consideration to whether the data is good enough,' says Hans von Storch, director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, told SPIEGEL ONLINE....

A special report prepared earlier this year by the German Federal Scientific Advisory Committee on Global Climate Change (WBGU), found that "a sea level rise is part of the inescapable physical consequences of global warming." Some of the key points made in the report include:

• At the peak of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago, the sea level was roughly 120 meters lower than it is today; the global climate was colder by four to seven degrees Celsius.

• During the last warm period, the Eemian interglacial era of 120,000 years ago, the world was roughly one degree warmer than it is today; the sea level was approximately two to six meters higher.

• Three million years ago in the Pliocene era, when the earth was two to three degrees warmer than it is today, sea levels were 25 to 30 meters higher.

We are still far away from anything close to a 30-meter increase in the water line. But on the flipside, there is a considerably greater danger of storms and floods in London, New York and other cities in the coastal regions of the North Atlantic. Some coastal cities could even sink completely this century, a study found early in March this year."

You can read the whole December 15, 2006 report and links to more climate change information here:

Is the Sea Level Rise Doubling Its Speed?