Miami Will Not Be There In 100 Years

The ice that will melt and submerge Miami is sitting in water that has gotten too warm for it to survive.

The great ice sheet on the western half of Antarctica sits mostly below sea level.

The vast majority of heating involved in global warming goes into the oceans.  It has been warming the oceans around Antarctica for decades.

That warm water has begun melting Antarctica.  The ice that sits below sea level is no longer stable.  The only physically possible way to stop it would be to cool the ocean.  There is no known way to do that.

So, in 40 or 50 or 60 years or something, we will lose Miami (and Venice, and the Portlands and . . .).

That is Miami with just over 3 ft (1 m) of sea level rise.  West Antarctica will cause about five times that.  Parts of East Antarctica will be lost too, as well as Greenland.

In the same amount of time since the creation of the United States of America, the coastal cities where so much founding history was made will be far under the waves.  Other nations have far more history that will be forever lost.

The first several feet will do the majority of the damage.  No city can withstand the level of lost infrastructure shown in the above map of Miami.  That will happen in decades to a century at the very extreme conservative edge, but it will happen.  And it won't stop there.  We've probably locked in something like 70 ft (about 25 m) of sea level rise.

The implication is that kids today will grow up and raise their own children in a world where coastal cities are being abandoned.

That is the heritage that has been made for them.