Sea Level Rise from MESL (SLR - Permanent) Scenarios
Based on Hansen & Sato 2011 (forthcoming draft, known as "Milankovic" paper found 1/18/2011 at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf, p.20 and p. 13 - 17, especially noting Fig. 7 on p. 14).
7' - consensus minimum SLR by 2100, a passing benchmark, not a stable level
Approximated by 10' H-GAC contour
19' - likely minimum SLR by 2100 with alt. scenario, a stable level recorded in rocks offshore in Florida.
Approximated by 20' H-GAC contour
82' or 25 m +-10 m - full SLR (2317*) with alt. scenario, a peak level recorded at the Holocene maximum 8250 +- 25 years before present
Approximated by 80' H-GAC contour
246' or 75 m - full SLR (2817*) with BAU scenario, sea level at Cenozoic maximum 55.8 million ybp (PETM - most recent case of no large ice sheets on Earth)
Approximated by 250' H-GAC contour
This science changes everything! If the correlation of 25 meter (~82') SLR (the shoreline at peak Holocene - edge melting around Antarctica and partial collapse of West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets) with the soils bands bounding inside the "Katy Prairie" holds, and the correlation of 75 meter (~252') SLR (the shoreline at peak Cenozoic - no large ice sheets on planet) with the soils bands bounding outside the "Katy Prairie" holds, then we already have a ready-made marker on the ground around the Gulf of Mexico for where to expect the extremes of climate change to take the sea level, and some (though less certain) idea of when to expect them.
Of concern to emergency management team members would be the strength of storm surge on top of these permanent rises. If global warming can be kept manageable by drastically decreasing anthropogenic GHG emissions, then only greater numbers of catastrophic (Saphir-Simpson Category 3+) storms should be expected. However, with business as usual scenarios, and the deep cold just short of freezing at the poles with increasing heat concentrated equatorially, the mid latitudes (Houston, New York, Los Angeles) risk seeing bark-stripping hurricanes on the scale of the world's worst, that Great Hurricane of 1780 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hurricane_of_1780, see section "Impact"), "also known as Hurricane San Calixto, the Great Hurricane of the Antilles, and the 1780 Disaster," and
one of several deadly blows in October of that year. A run of bad seasons 1780-1788 established a pattern similar to spates around 1933-38, and 1961-1969, and 2004-2007, though bark-stripping winds well over 200 mph at landfall have never yet been repeated since that singular case in 1780.
Quotations pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hurricane_of_1780>.
- Asterisked years are assisted by Hansen and Sato's Figure 7 (2011, p.14) as follows: 1st meter SLR follows exponential curve on graph to year 2077, years thereafter following a slope limited to 1 meter per decade to assumes best case weather stability during temperature increase. Likely duration of glacial meltdown is almost certainly shorter with increased weather variability, possibly contributing multi-meter rise within this century if weather becomes really turbulent.
