Let's don't get into the ocean fisheries thing in this thread. I could foam at the mouth for hours about how that rape has messed things up so much. I worked in the early days of the Coastal Zone Management Program, back in '75-'77. Learned more than I wanted to, I guess...
Any ocean rise, I'm guessing, will cause more erosion of coastal wetlands than creation of new and viable wetland habitat . Short term-ish, anyway. The sort of thing that's happening around the greater New Orleans area, although different basic causes.
Any ocean rise would mean wave heights would be higher. (Ain't that obvious?) So, until structures are abandoned, it only needs smaller storms to have greater wave damage than in the past. Major storms would reach farther inland, where previously-safe structures could be at risk.
It seems to me that a major problem is not the warming as warming. It's not gonna get that much hotter. What could occur, but nobody knows, is what might happen insofar as changes in weather patterns. That is, will some areas become subject to desertification, such as has been ongoing in the Sahel for several decades? Should this happen in the midwest of the US, food grain production would decline dramatically. Or, possibly, my happy little chunk of desert might for some reason become a rainforest. Quien sabe?
Nobody knows if any changes in such weather patterns will be slow, requiring decades to notice; or quick, due to the concept of "tipping points". Think of a tipping point this way: You pull a board across a table. It overhangs but doesn't fall. You keep pulling a little bit at a time, until you finally reach the midpoint. The next 1/1000th of an inch, and it tips and falls. Tippping point. Or, balance point.
Could well be that the southern hemisphere is the place to go. Temperature records there show no rise in the last hundred years.
Art
