How Soon Will the Seas Rise?

Posted 12 days ago under "Swiss Glaciers have shrunk..." and more previous to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503882

" The mass of ice on the earth's poles has also led to the shape of the planet via tectonics over thousands of millennia. As that mass melts and redistributes from a solid to a liquid spreading around the globe our spheroid will begin to rebound. We have sensors everywhere, even in space, so the resulting effects will not be a surprise to some when the 'mass'ive shift begins. As those tectonic events increase in frequency so too will volcanic activity so I ask if anyone else has been checking on such data? "

I like how you changed "less than .4 meters" into "between .5 and 1"

That was some smooth propagandizing you just did, I wonder if anybody else noticed. Between less than .4 (0) and 1 (1) is a much bigger window than the one you invented wholesale in your reply.

I think the grandparent might be right, and your willingness to bend the statistics when they are literally on the same page as your comment, along with others like you doing the same thing for decades, is the reason your side is losing and continues to lose the public's trust.

If the problem is really so obvious and so serious you should not feel it necessary to exaggerate. So quit it.

What should we base public policy on instead?

> It's virtually impossible to model something with an impossible amount of unknown inputs.

Nah. We have a pretty good idea of what the main unknowns in climate are, and they have an associated uncertainty range. Yes, it's a lot of work to model such systems with a useful level of accuracy, but "a lot of work" is very far from "virtually impossible". ?

If the climate was that unpredictable, then the Earth would be uninhabitable.

(FWIW, I do computational modeling for work - not in climate, though - and you would not believe how much misinformation there is about modeling from conservatives)

This is completely wrong and I'm frankly not sure how you came to this conclusion from the parent comment's data.

The uncertainty is "we do not know whether the amount of sea level rise due to human GHG emissions will be closer to 40cm, or closer to 100cm 75 years from now".

Science communication regarding this has generally always expressed uncertainty. Right wing entertainment masquerading as news frequently portrays it otherwise, but that's easy to do when unencumbered by a connection to reality.

Don't confuse what is most profitable to say, with what is most correct to say.

I suspect most islanders and coastal property dwellers will be wrecked by volatile weather first

I think the point was more that even if you're on a coast a lot of other problems are more likely to impact you first: higher energy and more frequent hurricanes, insurance, costs, etc.

Or say, a country bordering Bangladesh. Sea rise of 1 meter would inundate 10% of Bangladesh, a country of 170M in 150,000 sq miles. I suspect a refugee crisis in Bangladesh would end in genocide…

There's a sweet spot where i will eventually have coastal property.

You need to have extreme weather into account. Global sea rise is a slow process, it won't happen overnight, and even with an accelerated, but not catastrophic, melting of some of the fragile glaciers in Antarctica it will take years.

Extreme weather, in the other hand can affect big areas for extended amount of time, right now. In 2022 a third of Pakistan ended flooded, in 2024 there were big floods in parts of Europe and South America. Droughts, extended forest fires, tornadoes and similar has been changing in area patterns and strength in the last years. And things may get extremer in the coming years

Something like 2 billion people rely on glacier melt for their fresh water supply and these supplies will end abruptly before catastrophic sea level rise.

This is already happening along the internal Eastern Shore exposed to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland were I live and it is documented in recent publications by those accredited in such topics. The low lying wet forests that have lived just above the salt line are now all dying from the rising salt water intrusion. I have one of those low lying forests right behind my property and in the last 10 years I have witnessed all the trees within this area die. As an avid walker of these shores near daily in the last 15 years I have also witnessed unprecedented erosion of the shoreline of at least two vertical feet thus extending the beaches however these are not those types of beaches.

As a collector of things lost in time, such as Native American artifacts of which I have found thousands immediately around me in the last 15 years, I can say that erosion does have its benefits. Just as we are now reading from those exploring glaciers finding previous human tools and more. The word "benefit" here is clearly subjective.

We've been in an ice age for millions of years (standard definition of an ice age: there is persistent ice sheets at the poles; on Greenland and Antarctica).

Within ice ages, there are glacials and interglacials. Glacial periods are what normal people think of when they say "ice age"; like when the ice sheets covered Canada and extended down to Chicago/NYC areas.

Without manmade climate change, we'd be slowly sliding back to another glacial period. So in that sense, the warming is welcome, but we're overdoing it and shooting too hard in the opposite direction.