How rising sea levels will affect New Zealand

In the film The Day After Tomorrow you might remember that Denis Quaid, the hero, at one point talks about how we’ve reached a critical desalinisation point and that is what this fear, this theory which seems to coming true, is that when it happens the Gulf Stream gets diverted, all that heat, all that incredible amount of energy gets diverted away from Europe and suddenly Europe freezes over. So although we talk about global warming it’s a very serious consequence.

So we are talking about wide scale extinction of mammals. We are talking about huge temperature changes, and the thing that probably concerns you most here in New Zealand, is rises in sea levels as well. Some people are predicting as much as 20 feet, even the optimistic ones are talking about 10 feet, and if the water is an average of 10 feet higher and high tide is higher still, I’m using the very top of the screen here, then that’s going to change….I mean the surface area of the New Zealand is going to rapidly decrease, beachfront properties are probably not going to be beach front properties any more, they are going to be sub aquatic properties, and there is going to be devastation on a global scale. And all these things are happening, the evidence is right before our eyes.