Climate change - the impact
The talk of a warmer world may seem inviting to some, especially those of us in the UK who yearn Mediterranean-style summers.
But the impact of climate change isn’t something that helps you top up your tan. In fact forget the image of reclining on a British beach enjoying summer on the sands. Chances are the beaches you know and love will end up under water and UK temperatures will plummet.
The current warmer climate is seeing ice caps melting, which will lead to massive disruption.
Argentina’s Upsala Glacier was once the biggest in South America, but it is now disappearing at a rate of 200 metres a year. And all that extra water has to go somewhere. So it ends up deluging coastal areas around the globe – and it will also cool the oceans.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of several thousand independent scientists, predicts sea levels could rise by between nine and 88cm in the next century due to melting land ice and expanding oceans.