A warmer Maryland will be wetter

By 2100, Baltimore's Harborplace could be under water at high tide. Ocean City might be frequently evacuated because of Atlantic storms. Hooper and Smith islands in the Chesapeake Bay could join 13 others that have been submerged in the estuary.

Across Maryland, almost 1,000 square miles of coastal land are threatened by rising sea levels, scientists warn.

These are a few of the local effects of global warming that researchers are discussing in the wake of a new report by a United Nations panel. More than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that sea levels will rise by up to two feet over the next century.

This figure is lower than a 2001 estimate of as much as a three-foot rise.

But scientists in the Chesapeake region took little comfort in that, in part because land in this area is also sinking at a rate of about seven inches a century - making it a particularly vulnerable area.

Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the most recent U.N. summary of the state of scientific consensus probably underestimates the rate of sea level rise. He said it doesn't take into account more studies over the past few months that suggest that the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica might be melting faster than previously thought.

from the Baltimore Sun