Well, I’m clearly not an oceanographer, but given my recent interest in assertions by Michael Crichton (there is more to come on that subject), I thought this might be interesting for occasional readers.

Meehl et.al in Science show, using a pair of climate models, that even if Greenhouse gases were to be stabilised to 2000 levels, the thermal inertia of the climate system would result in a further roughly half a degree (K) rise in global mean temperature (compared with about the same over the last hundred years). A bunch of more realistic scenarios with increasing greenhouse gases result (obviously) in much larger global mean temperature increases.

This paper also addresses what sea level rises might be expected. They assert that the sea level rise over the last one hundred years was about 15-20 cm. While their models do a good job at producing hindcast predictions of the last hundred years of temperature increase, they significantly underestimate the increase in observed sea level (not least perhaps because they dont include melt water from glaciers etc). Their predictions for the next hundred years or so are probably therefore also underestimates, but if we take the ratio of increase, they predict a three-fold increase over what has already occurred - even in the best case of stabilising at 2000 levels.

I’ve not really been following the sea-level rise increase issues (there is only so much I can keep track of), but these are suggestive figures …