ABSTRACT
All serious environmental problems are routinely described as global, long-term, and indicative of a deep-seated contradiction between human activities and the natural world. In the case of sea level rise, the description is exact. The rising seas will touch every continent, and island countries which are part of no continent, and will go on doing so well into the lives of people not yet born. The problem arises because of natural long-term changes with timescales of thousands or millions of years, amplified by the worldwide effect of human releases to the atmosphere of gases which have no natural existence there, along with vast human-derived increases in concentrations of another gas, carbon dioxide, caused by consuming in a matter of centuries fossil fuels which have accumulated over hundreds of millions of years.
