Too Much Water!

If we are taking about the Planet-Earth, the title of this paper is absurd. In general, our planet has an almost fixed amount of water over any reasonably short period (say centuries to millennia). But what isn’t static is the water’s state. At any given time, it may be solid, liquid) or gas (water-vapor), and it has a habit of changing from one to the others at all times. This habit is obviously driven by temperature, but it’s also driven by many other causes. The deeper you delve into “the water-cycle,” the more complex this system becomes. Even though we’ve been studying this for decades to centuries, fully understanding this still challenges our best climatologists using huge simulation-suites running on our most powerful supercomputers. However we are making progress, and we’d better: a large percentage of people on our planets live in coastal areas and other regions beset by floods. All too soon an increasing percent of these people will get to experience the title of this paper firsthand.

This post will explore immediate threats, specifically how and when sea level will rise. Also, I’m not looking at coastal floods happening centuries in the future, but those ranging from a few decades hence to the end of this century. In other words, where we still have time to mitigate the severity.