As Sandy made clear, it's not just persistent rises in sea level, but the frequency and extent of intermittent rises as a consequence of cyclonic storms or inland flooding and watershed drainage which are likely to have significant impacts.
My understanding of carbon and warming predictions is that we've trended toward the highest (most extreme and dangerous) ends of forecast ranges, which suggests that the higher seawater rises might be more appropriately used in disaster planning. And adding a few feet to storm surge, and increasing frequency of high-surge events, would be disruptive enough if not quite so much as a persistent 5-10 foot rise in sea levels.
As a Dutchman I can't help but see this as a sizable but not even truly problematic engineering challenge.
Our entire country was basically a piece of sea / swampland nobody else wanted, which we proceeded to turn into our own little kingdom through a massive cooperative effort.
Since large parts of our country are already below sea-level and we've already built massive flood barriers after severe floodings [1] half a century ago; it just means we'll have a bit more demand than usual for our engineering skills and we'll all be fine.
From what I heard we're already talking with New York ;)
Yet another bit of Dutch heritage in New Amsterdam.
I was thinking of the North Sea floods. As the linked Wikipedia article notes, this also struck England significantly, and was among the key impetuses behind the Thames Barrier. Noting the closure frequency of this structure (and the increasing frequency with time), and the projected replacement dates (it's actually moved back a bit, I'd recalled 2030, current estimates are 2050-2060) is interesting. Also with recent rain-triggered floods in the UK, London and southeastern England now face a double threat: rising sea levels from the oceans, and increased runoff from land. Absent active pumping to clear rainwater flows down the Thames, a Barrier itself is not a complete solution.
Possibly the biggest misstep in climate change's acceptance was calling it "global warming". People don't feel the warmer temperatures but rather feel its non-intuitive effects and crack jokes along the lines of "it's so cold right now ... whatever happened to global warming?"
Marketing's everything, and the crowd climate change has to be marketed to is scientifically illiterate and commonly anti-intellectual in nature. Perhaps it should have been called something more dire, alarming, and readily perceivable by the general population so as to be a more tangible phenomenon. I'm terrible at coming up with names though so I'll have to defer to others for ideas!
> If you have to "market" it, especially with a lot of ad hominem namecalling...maybe it's not science.
I'll note that you will never be wheeled into a nuclear-magnetic resonance machine for imaging, because "OMG it's nuclear!"
They were rebranded from NMR to MRI simply because of resistance to the word "nuclear". [If you don't think that NMR/MRI is "science", then perhaps you can take it up with the Nobel physics committee.]
The question is: Do you want to wait around for the state of science education to change (the US still is not metric, despite my 3rd grade teacher's assurances in 1974 that change was imminent) or do you want to choose your words carefully enough that even idiots can get past their religious programming?
For better or worse, humans are driven primarily by emotion, not rational decision-making. Much of life requires marketing, and just because something is promoted in a way that works with human nature doesn't necessarily undermine its scientific nature.
I'd love to know how naming it something emotive in order to build consensus destroys the underlying science.
Sadly, one has to combat the paid shills that dominate the punditry. Good science has to be put into soundbite form and propagated. How else would it be explained to your average citizen?
I've seen denials on several counts. That climate change is occurring, that it's anthropogenic, and that the mechanism is CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses released on account of human activities). Much of that confusion being sown by direct and deliberate disinformation campaigns by carbon-aligned interests.
The evidence to my mind is rather incontrovertible in favor of significant anthropogenic climate change.
"climate change" here is a shorthand for "climate change caused by human emissions of CO2". I don't think the OP meant that people deny that the climate changes over time due to natural causes (actually, I think it's incredibly obvious).
I have learned, though, that in a politically charged atmosphere, it is important to be very exact in choosing your words, because people are looking for opportunities to attack.
I'm still surprised by how few people have declared themselves climate change agnosts. That might be because of that course in modeling dynamic systems I took in university though.
As far as I'm concerned we have no way at all of knowing whether we can easily produce orders of magnitude more CO2 without having any significant effect, or whether we're already well beyond the point of no return for life on earth.
My understanding of carbon and warming predictions is that we've trended toward the highest (most extreme and dangerous) ends of forecast ranges, which suggests that the higher seawater rises might be more appropriately used in disaster planning. And adding a few feet to storm surge, and increasing frequency of high-surge events, would be disruptive enough if not quite so much as a persistent 5-10 foot rise in sea levels.