Sea Level   

• Sea level rise is 6cm a decade (Lovelock, 2007, photo opp p78). It is still far from clear whether the observed rise of sea level of the past fifty years is due mainly to the expansion of ocean water as it warms or mainly to the melting of glaciers (Lovelock, 2007, p82).

• A sea level rise of one metre could permanently flood 21 percent of Bangladesh, including its best agricultural land, pushing some fifteen million people out of their homes (Monbiot, p21).

• One fifth of the Netherlands is below sea level, as much as 22 feet below… "We began draining [the polders] one thousand years ago. Today, we still have to keep pumping out the water that gradually seeps in. In each polder there are lines of pumps, starting with those furthest from the sea, pumping the water in sequence until the last pump finally pumps it out into a river or the ocean… If global warming causes polar ice melting and a rise in sea level , the consequences will be more severe for the Netherlands than for any other country in the world, because so much of our land is already under sea level. That’s why we Dutch are so aware of our environment. We’ve learned through our history that we’re all living in the same polder, and that our survival depends on each other’s survival (Diamond, p519-520)." A rise of half a metre in sea level would require 18 million Dutch people to be rehoused.

• The New York Metropolitan area, home to nearly twenty million people, has 2,400 kilometres of coastline – most of it low lying and heavily built up with apartment blocks, roads and rail links… most rail, tunnel and airport entrances lie at elevations of only three metres or less (Lynas, p158).

In the last ice age… the sea level was 120 metres lower than now, and land equal in area to the continent of Africa which is now below water was then above it… Imagine there was a civilisation with cities on the coast… Who among them would have believed an early climate forecaster who claimed that soon they would be 120 metres beneath an ocean? (Lovelock, 2007, p68) Climatologists now think that we are perilously close to the threshold beyond which adverse change sets in; change that is, on a human timescale, irreversible. The earth does not catch fire, but it becomes hot enough to melt most of the Greenland ice and some of the West Antarctica ice; enough water will then be added to the world oceans to raise sea levels by fourteen metres. It is sobering to think that nearly all of the present great centres of population are currently below what could be the ocean surface in a mere blink of geological time (Lovelock, 2007, p59). Business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions, without any doubt, will commit the planet to global warming of a magnitude that will lead eventually to an ice-free planet.  An ice-free planet  means a sea level rise of  about 75 metres (Hansen, p250) Our house in Woking, Surrey is 49 metres above sea level