Predictions Sea Level Rise

The Dutch coastal defense system is supposed to protect the country against a sea level rise of up to +2 meter. A system of up to +4 m seems doable (see a report by the Delta Committee of 2008), but beyond that the effort and expenditure for the maintenance of dunes and dikes along the coast, the thousands of kilometers of riverdikes and the rising groundwater level will become next to impossible.

PawPlot - P.Duinker

Source: "Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide, Hansen et al., 2013 . The text inside the graph and the title itself is clickable and leads to additional information. For sea level measurements since 1880 click here and for the video presentation by J. Mitrovica "The Fingerprints of Sea Level Change" click here.

  The prediction for 2100 of the IPCC stays well below the +2 m level, however the predictions by Hansen and the WBGU for 2100 and 2300 respectively come well above it. A simple variant of the suggestion of Hansen is the following reasoning: Assume that of the present (2007) sea level rise of 3 mm per year 0.3 mm is caused by the beginning of the exponential disintegration process of the Greenland and Antarctic iceplates. A doubling of this component every ten years leads after 14 doublings to a sea level rise of at least 2 m.
The phenomenological description of the sea level rise by Vermeer and Rahmstorf with a simple dependance between temperature and sea level change over the twentieth century as input leads to a prediction for 2100 of a rise between +0.8 m and +1.8 m.
  At the Royal Dutch Metereological Institute (KNMI) one did not believe until recently in dynamical melting processes with instabilities leading to rapid disintegration of the large icesheets and a sea level rise for 2300 between the +1 m and +2,5 m was predicted. Since a year (spring 2017) they foresee however an upper limit of 2.5 to 3 meter sea level rise for the 21st century "if everything goes against us". On the next webpage the area above 14.0 °C will be enlarged.