Interactive map showing the hypothetical effects of climate change and related sea level rise. Click image for full function at ClimateChange.org.
Every article on climate change must be prefaced and preconditioned on the tired old refrain: All things in science are tentative, individual weather events are unpredictable and cannot be conclusively tied to a single cause, etc. But it's admittedly early on in our new, warmer climate paradigm, and if anything the scientists' warnings have turned out in retrospect to
underestimate the environmental impact:
"For every one degree Celsius of warming, the scientists estimate that we should expect 2.3 meters of long-term, eventual sea-level rise, playing out over millennia. That calculation is based on much research and represents the “state of the art,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute, who was not involved in the study but has published previously with Levermann. “It is the best estimates we can make with the understanding that we have today about the processes leading to sea-level rise.” ... The authors do not say how fast the sea-level rise could occur — the basic assumption is that the estimate of 2.3 meters plays out over 2,000 years, as the planet’s huge masses of ice slowly adjust to a change in its temperature. But much of the sea-level rise could happen a lot faster than that. Its precise timing is a key question for scientific inquiry right now ...