The IPCC high estimate of sea level rise by 2100 is about 0.6m over 80 years. It's not good, but it's hardly a catastrophe. I take predictions like this about as seriously as the narrative that global warming is a hoax.
1. Go to a beach at high tide. Look at where the water is and add two feet. For sandy beaches that probably gets you through the dunes.
2. Look at the beaches at low tide. How much further out is it? Measure the distance between low and high tide points and see how far inland you get to see where the ocean gets to.
3. Go to marshlands - add 2ft to low tide and see if they’re still marshlands or if they converted to shallow ocean. Similarly check high tide, what surrounding land would be submerged if you added 2 feet of water.
4. Consider places near the coast that are lower than the high point of the beach. Now “spring tides” could get over that point and essentially turn that land into a swamp.
Finally of course, consider what happens if/when the ocean reaches farm land. The reason “salting the earth” is a phrase is because high salt content (as you might get from even short term flooding) kills most plants unless they’ve specifically evolved for high salt concentrations. Most grains for instance have not.
This of course ignores special cases like the Netherlands, Venice, etc that are already having to engineer solutions to a few inches of sea level increases.
1. There will be new dunes, again above where the water reaches.
2. The beach will be the same size.
3. There will be marshlands. They will be in new locations. We might even get more.
4. Yep, lose some swamp and gain other swamp.
It all moves.
We can get more than a 2ft rise just from drawing out groundwater, causing the land to sink. We can get way more with an earthquake, going either direction. The land goes up (and the water relatively goes down) if the weight of a glacier is removed.
A 2ft rise is catastrophic if it happens in a day but not if it happens over 80 years. The IPCC report shows about a 1ft rise from 1900-2000 which no one seemed to notice (other than the engineers whose job it is to deal with). I would expect a 2ft rise this century to be about twice as bad, so not that bad. The Netherlands is proof that this type of thing can be handled with time and engineering.
Edit: And the .6m (if that is correct) is just the baseline. Even if that is the level 364 days a year, one storm surge on one day with all that additional volume can put the entire city out of business.
There is a German saying for your kind of approach: "Nach mir die Sintflut", means "After me the deluge".
https://fi.intms.nl/fi_43a1c02c/files/downloads/201808-jerem...
I recommend Eric Rignot's presentations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ivlofypzE
IPCC is conservative.
Totally reasonable, and rare to see people not jumping up and down with literal "The sky is falling! Implement this tax plan now!".