The report, which appears in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, implies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has underestimated the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.
Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise may be as great as several metres by 2100, the report said.
The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The report adds that increased concentrations of greenhouses gases may spark a "flip" in the climate, leading to cataclysmic consequences.
