It is difficult to know what the future might hold when we are faced with a situation that has never happened before. Still, many scientists agree on some things.
Temperature
Scientists expect that the world will be between 1oC to 7oC warmer by the end of the century. Some places will warm up much more than this and some not so much. The North and South poles are expected to warm more than than this. This map shows expected temperature increase around the world if the world heats up by only 3oC.
Arctic Ice
The arctic is the area near the North Pole. It also includes the very Northern parts of America, Canada, Russia, Greenland and Scandinavia.
Much of the arctic ice is expected to melt. This already seems to be happening much faster than anyone thought possible. This will probably kill off the polar bears for a start.
This picture on the left shows that arctic ice has shrunk in the last 25 years by as much as 20%. The red line is where ice used to be in 1979 on top of a photo of where it is now.
The picture on the right show a rushing river from melting ice in Greenland. The Greenland ice is starting to melt more and more.
The pictures below show a glacier in Alaska. Alaska is partially in the Arctic region of North America. A glacier is a frozen river — a river of ice. The picture on the left was taken in 1941 and the picture on the right in 2004 from the same spot. The ice has nearly disappeared.
Sea Level Rising
One of the big problems with arctic and Greenland ice melting is that this puts more water into the ocean. This makes the sea level rise higher up the land. Also as the Earth warms up so do the oceans. As the oceans warm up they get bigger which also makes the sea level rise. Because of these things the sea level has already risen by about 17 cm in the last 100 years.
How much will it rise in the future? It is impossible to say. If all the ice in Greenland melts the sea level will rise about 7 meters.
Even a small rise of 1 meter will cause major flooding for low lying areas around the world. Island countries like the Maldives in the Indian ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific ocean will be very badly affected. Most of Tuvalu is less than 1 meter above sea level now. The photo to the right shows Tuvalu kids keeping out of the water during a very high tide.
Countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh and cities like Bangkok in Thailand will also be badly affected.
Many beaches around the world will be washed away in high tides.
The absolute doomsday scenario would be all the antarctic ice melting which would make the sea level rise by 60 meters! Nobody expects this to happen though because the temperature is usually -38oC there which is well below freezing.
More Extreme Weather
As the world warms, we expect the weather to become more extreme. This will mean stronger cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons. We can also expect more of them.
We can expect more severe droughts in Africa and Australia. Farming in Australia will become much more difficult. There are enough problems with water shortages now.
There will probably be lots of other unexpected changes that we can only guess at now.