Sea levels could continue rising for thousands of years even if humanity manages to limit greenhouse gases at current levels, the head of the U.N.'s panel on climate change said Wednesday, according to AP. «The inertia in the system is such that ... the impacts of climate change will continue for a long time,» said Rajendra Pachauri, who leads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won this year's Nobel Peace Prize along with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. «In the case of sea level rise it will continue for decades, for centuries or millennia,» he told reporters in Geneva at the launch of a new organization aimed at coordinating global humanitarian aid work. The IPCC's most recent series of reports on climate change, compiled by some 2,000 scientists, said it would take a long time for all the water in the oceans to catch up with temperatures on the surface, but that as it eventually heated up, the seas would expand and rise. Melting ice from the polar regions also would contribute. Pachauri said finding ways to adapt to the effects of climate change was «absolutely critical.» The Indian engineer was joined by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs and former U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, who stressed that the effects of climate change were already being felt by millions today. «Five times more people are affected by natural disasters and climate change than by war and conflict,» said Egeland, who now heads a Norwegian government think-tank on global affairs. He and Sachs cited the conflict in Darfur as an example that climate change can also increase the likelihood of conflict by heightening the competition for resources, in this case fertile land. More than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been chased from their homes by four years of fighting in the Western Sudanese region. Annan said the newly launched Global Humanitarian Forum would try to tackle the issues arising from climate change and focus on how to help the most vulnerable, who likely will suffer the most. The organization, replete with Nobel laureates and other dignitaries, will convene a meeting of policy makers in June in Geneva, the home of major humanitarian groups such as the U.N. refugee agency, international Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres.
