Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thepasswordis 1792 days ago
Do you think the ocean is going to rise SEVEN FEET?
3 comments

Maybe!

> A number of later studies have concluded that a global sea level rise of 200 to 270 cm (6.6 to 8.9 ft) this century is "physically plausible".[8][2][9]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

Yes. Much more, even by very conservative estimates.

Just probably not in our lifetimes. The maximum sea level rise will be hundreds, even thousands of years from now. In the absolute worst case scenario where all the ice melted, sea level would rise 230 feet. If we did nothing at all about climate change and kept burning fossil fuels until we ran out, that's actually a likely outcome. It has happened in the past when the earth was much warmer. It won't happen to us, because we're taking action. The final sea level rise would depend how we do with actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere, as it will keep rising long after we stop using fossil fuels.

7 feet by the end of this century is not impossible, but not in the conservative estimate. So far we've been tracking the aggressive estimates, not conservative ones.

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1732/