(Newswire.net — August 28, 2019) — According to the UN International Organization for Migration, between 20 million and 1 billion people will be forced to flee their homes by 2050 due to the effects of drought, floods, fires and climate change that will cause worldwide hunger.
Everyone who will have to migrate to avoid the extreme climate will have to live somewhere, scientists at the science magazine warn, arguing that around 200 million people will be displaced from their current homes.
A group of international environmental advocates believe the only way to avoid the first scenario is to start planning for the inevitable “withdrawal” from coastal cities.
Scientists say that people should already start retreating from coastal areas and believe that this could be an opportunity to revitalize communities and redistribute wealth in a more sustainable way.
It could also be an opportunity to subsidize new schools, hospitals and provide more affordable accommodation in safer inland regions, rather than taking steps to delay the inevitable in risky areas, such as building expensive firewalls near the sea to protect communities whose cities have previously suffered from extreme weather, scientists say.
“There is enough ice in Greenland to raise the sea levels by 7.5 meters, that’s about 25 feet, an enormous volume of ice, and that would be devastating to coastlines all around the planet,” NASA oceanographer Josh Willis told CNN. “We should be retreating already from the coastline if we are looking at many meters [lost] in the next century or two,” he added.
NASA may have a plan to land on the moon again, but more and more attention is being paid to exploring the planet and preparing for what comes next. This is not so unusual, given the fact that as much as 12.5 billion tons of ice melt in Greenland in a single day.
This year on August 2nd loss of ice was at a historic high, and this was due to a great heat wave that hit the United States and Europe.
In the small Greenland village of Kulusuni, NASA has set up a base for its science program to investigate how much air temperature affects the glacier’s melting, but also how it affects the warmer ocean that melts the ice from below.
Changes in Greenland are affecting the entire planet as billions of tons of ice that dissolve there raise sea levels in Australia, Asia, Europe and the US.
An additional problem is the fact that scientists found out that one of the largest Greenland glaciers “Helheim” is surrounded by warm water, which was never recorded before, which, of course, will accelerate its dissolution.
Helheim has attracted a lot of attention in recent years precisely because it has lost tons of ice.
In 2017 alone, it lost an area of three kilometers, and last year a large part was detached from the main glacier.