The Meaning Of "Upper End"

If you were to look at these grey bars, where would you say the "upper end" is? Apparently the government think it's the red line.


The bars represent a variety of forecasts of sea level rise. Recently Climate Change Minister Greg Combet launched a report that modelled the effects of sea level rise up to 1.1m (claimed to be a worst-case scenario).

The "$226 billion dollars of coastal assets" vulnerable to a 1.1m sea level rise is (by my definition) well short of a worst-case scenario. I agree with the minister when he said this data is not trying to scare people. It seems to do exactly the opposite, by blissfully pretending that a mid-range prediction is as bad as it could ever get.

[info courtesy of David Spratt, author of Climate Code Red]