The Google hack is very nice. Here is another way to get such information, slower and more cumbersome, but probably more accurate (Google altimetry is <it>very</it> inaccurate): it's based on the NOAA altimetry/bathymetry database:
GEODAS  Design-a-Grid
You'll need to download a viewer to your machine to view the generated grids

I'll try and post some maps I generated with this tool, when I understand how to do uploads on EP. Interesting to note, France is one of the least affected portions of the world. Most affected, besides the obvious Bangladesh, Netherlands, islands, etc... are:

US East Coast and Florida (lots of property damage :-)

North of China (this spells big trouble)

The plains east of Ural

British East Coast (sorry, but it's not really a good idea to relocate to Perigord or Spain just now, see below)

The plain of the Po in Italy (bye bye Venice)

But you should also note that this won't happen in our lifetime !

Loss of floating ice has no impact on the sea level (well, a few centimeters due to salinity difference), because it's already lifted by Archimedes force, due to the displacement of its weight of water. So only continental ice counts, and that's:

70 cm for temperate glaciers (lesst than the planned 2m for thermal expansion of the upper layer of the oceans)

7 m for Greenland

70 m for Antarctic

BUT: if you calculate the thermal inerty plus latent head of fusion of all this ice, divide it by the total amount of sunlight power retained by anthropic greenhouse (I spare you the figures, but I really did it on a spreadsheet, can dig it out if someone is interested), you'll find out that it will takes something like a thousand year to melt, assuming 3x margin of error and all the sunlight power directed straight to the poles and zero ice albedo (which exactly the pessimistic opposite of reality).

So in short: even our grandchildren will never see a 5 m rise in the level of oceans. Some will argue that the ice could flow from the continent into the sea, which would raise sea level without the need for the ice to melt. And this is probably happening for Greenland ... But for the antarctic, the altitude of the bedrock below the ice just doesn't offer enough slope for this (actually, the bedrock is sunk into the crust by the weight of the ice, and a good part of the antarctic continent is hardly at sea level, there is a nice radar map which shows you that on Wikipedia).

In my view, the most worrying parts of Global Warming are the increase in the frequency of now-extraordinary storms, potential loss of the gulf stream, and relocation of nasty bugs and parasites (like malaria) to the temperate areas.


Pierre