Comments 1 to 9:

1. nigelj at 07:09 AM on 25 February, 2018

   The threat of sea level rise is very serious and insidious, ihho. However some people out there probaly rationalise the issue by saying to themselves "its a slow process, we will adapt, buildings get rebuilt anyway".

   It may be worth doing an article explaining why this a simplistic and deluded view in numerous ways. It could amass all the relevant research links. 

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2. One Planet Only Forever at 09:51 AM on 25 February, 2018

   nigelj,

   I agree with your comment.

   My only comment is to encourage you to say "its a slow process, we future generations will adapt, buildings get rebuilt anyway".

   It is important to be clear that Others will be suffering the consequences of the way a portion of the current day population pursue personal benefit.

   This ties into the ethics/acceptability of Private Interests. Everyone's actions are their Private Interest. What is important that they ethically limit their Private Interest pursuits to actions that do not cause any harm or increased risk of harm to Others - As The Other's See It.

   And the future genrations are the largest pool of Others. And as bluntly stated in the 1987 UN Report "Our Common Future" many people do not properly consider the future generation's perspective because none of the future genrations can vote, sue, or otherwise get even.

   Climate science has unintentionally exposed the insideous ways that competition to Win Private Interest pursuits leads many people to behave/argue less ethically (less acceptably).

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3. Riduna at 11:38 AM on 25 February, 2018

   Sea level rise is serious and damaging by itself but made infinately worse by storm surges - and there are likely to be some very destructive storm surges in the latter part of this century, particularly if there is an increase imn the polar-tropical thermal gradient.

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4. jef12506 at 02:46 AM on 26 February, 2018

   Sea level rise has obvious consequences and destructive storm surges will be devastating for many in the not too distant future.
   What will be way more destructive and will happen sooner than most understand is the destruction of our ability to produce enough food to support the population. It is happening right now but for now where there is destruction in one region there has been production in another. We can not rely on such good luck for much longer.

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5. One Planet Only Forever at 03:19 AM on 26 February, 2018

   jef,

   I agree. The increased uncertainty regarding the potential upcoming 'regional growing season weather' due to the rapid rate of change of global climate conditions makes it harder for farmers to choose appropriate crops to plant.

   And the increased probability of regional weather events that damage crops, like the recent flooding of fields in India by massive rain events, and to the food production challenge.

   Of course the massive food producing region in Bangladesh is seriously threatened by sea level rise combined with increased amounts of rain in rain events.

   However, a related food production problem continues to be the inequity of distribution of produced food to the global (and regional) population. Even without the new challenges of global warming climate change the 'more than adequate global (and regional) production of food' has failed to result in adequate nutrition for every human.

   Solving those problems today will help future generations sustainably live better. All that is needed is for the most fortunate today to be willing to change their minds and charitably help advance all of humanity to a sustainable better future.

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6. Gingerbaker at 04:42 AM on 26 February, 2018

   Why only 300 years? Will the ice sheets be gone by then? Will thermal expansion stop by then?

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7. nigelj at 05:11 AM on 26 February, 2018

   One third of the worlds food is wasted, just thrown out.

   www.businessinsider.com/food-world-wastes-most-2016-10/?r=AU&IR=T

   However I suggest changing this behaviour will be difficult, especially in affluent societies. So any climate impacts on crop productivity etcetera will still be huge concerns.

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8. sparker at 05:30 AM on 27 February, 2018

   Gingerbaker - sea level will not necessarily stop rising in 300 years; what the study shows is that the greenhouse gas emissions we project to have occurred by the year 2100, even under the most optimistic scenarios, commit us to rising sea levels through the year 2300. The year 2300 is essentially arbitrary. Once we curtail anthropogenic emissions, the planet will eventually return to steady state, but some of the processes involved operate on timescales of thousands of years so it will take a while. Extra heat in the Earth system in 2300 will still go partially into melting ice, partially into warming the oceans, partially into warming the land and atmosphere, so there will still be melting and thermal expansion going on. The study also shows that the sooner we act to curtail our emissions, the less sea level rise we commit ourselves to by 2300 to a substantial degree - the study indicates that every 5 years we delay peaking our emissions commits us to a further 20cm sea level rise by 2300, and that right now we're looking at about a meter rise by 2300 if we sustain zero net greenhouse gas emissions until then, which is a really tough goal to hit. The study also shows that even if we manage to curtail emissions so as to hit our 2C warming cap, depending on our emissions pathways there's still a chance that sea level rise in 2300 could be much greater than a meter - up to 4+ meters under some scenarios.

   The ice sheets will not be gone by 2300 but meltwater from them will certainly be a large contributing factor to sea level rise. If the ice sheets did somehow manage to completely melt, we'd be looking at nearly 70 meters of sea level rise from the added water alone, discounting thermal expansion.

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9. nigelj at 06:11 AM on 27 February, 2018

   "What would happen if we burned through all of the fossil-fuel resources known to exist? In a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, a quartet of German, American, and British researchers take on this question. The answer, not surprisingly, is grim. If mankind managed to combust the world’s known conventional deposits of coal, gas, and oil, and then went on to consume all of its “unconventional” ones, like tar-sands oil and shale gas, the result would be emissions on the order of ten trillion tons of carbon. Average global temperatures would soar, and the world would remain steamy for millennia. After ten thousand years, the planet would still be something like fourteen degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it is today. All of the world’s mountain glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet would melt away; Antarctica, too, would eventually become pretty much ice free. Sea levels would rise by hundreds of feet."

   www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/if-we-burned-all-the-fossil-fuel-in-the-world

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