Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise

Here’s an interactive map that enables users to see the sea-level rise associated with different scenarios.  Of course, such predictions contemplate the more distant future; it’s likely that only minor climate change-related damage will take place, due to rising oceans at least, over the next 50 years or so.

No one disputes that the Earth is losing its ice mass, and, though scientists tell us that there is a 95% chance that this is caused by anthropogenic global warming, it’s hard to know at exactly what rate this is all taking place.  I had a conversation with a gentleman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on this exact subject, in which he explained that although it’s easy to see that the area of ice is shrinking, the far more important aspect at play here is the volume.  That’s tricky because the ice is melting from the bottom up, meaning that we need advanced technology to measure its thickness. He leads a team that is launching a satellite for the precise purpose of measuring the relative densities of the water and ice that cover the Earth’s surface.