Examining Climate Change’s Long-Term Effects

When we think about the ultimate consequences of climate change, we think immediately about the loss of farm land to desertification, but we also think of sea-level rise. As the major ice sheets melt, e.g., in Greenland, and the coastlines retreat accordingly, what will life be like?

The short answer is that no one knows, but part of the long answer is that there are some strange complexities, like the one here that suggests that “Warming May Not Swamp Islands,” due to the counter-intuitive notion that certain atolls will rise at the same rate as the sea-level rise.  Sadly, the same doesn’t apply to the low-lying cities on our continents.