There's a lot of bad news about ice melting and sea level rise going on recently. However, there may be some good news amid the worry. In a recently published study in the journal Geology, PhD students Matthew Winnick and Jeremy Caves at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences explored the middle Pliocene warm period, the last time in Earth's history, approximately 3 million years ago, when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were close to their present values (350-450 parts per million) and found that sea level might not have risen as much as previously thought - and thus may not rise as fast as predicted now. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/ssoe-ism090315.php Study: http://m.geology.gsapubs.org/content/43/10/879
Sea level data from that era is among the least reliable available, in a category of data famous for being unreliable - I remember a specifically relevant quote from a researcher published in Science a couple months ago, who said (from memory, but close): don't believe anyone who tells you they know what the sea levels were in the Pliocene. And of course getting from the total rise of the Pliocene warming to the rate of rise we are likely to see now is not a solid step. I don't even see the argument for that, in those papers - are they assuming slow and steady rise in sea level now, because they think they saw that in the Pliocene?
