There’s a web based app called Flood Maps developed on top of Google Maps’ API that does the same job. Here’s how a 7m sea-level rise in Mumbai looks on it.

“This massive a rise in sea level is at the extreme end of the climate change and sea level rise scenarios possible [...] May happen but unlikely for the next couple of centuries.”

I’d say don’t discount the possibility. It seems to me that the severity of scientific predictions of melting in the polar regions (and other climate change effects for that matter) is only limited by our knowledge about those events. That is, more we know about what’s going on, the worse the predictions get.

The extent of melting in the Arctic is a great case in point. IPCC said it’s not going to melt away completely in summers before the end of the century. Now we know it has two, maybe three years at most. A good 80-90 years ahead of schedule.

Just three days ago, news comes in, courtesy the European Space Agency, that a big ice shelf in west Antarctica is “hanging by a thread,” new images show. Only a few months ago we heard that Antarctica is melting at a much slower pace.

So, my point is, we clearly do not know those regions well enough to predict with any degree of certainty when these events are going to occur. After the embarrassment of being completely wrong about the Arctic in its Feb 2007 report… the IPCC in its synthesis report which was released in November (after the record 2007 Arctic melting) refused to give any time line for Greenland melting.

It said we just don’t know enough.