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In a recent article for the Environmental News Service, Lester R. Brown spelled out the global vulnerability to sea level rise:
"While deserts are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future given the concentration of the world’s population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas.
During the twentieth century, sea level rose by six inches (15 centimeters). In its 2001 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that during this century seas would rise by four to 35 inches. Since 2001, record-high temperatures have accelerated ice melting making it likely that the future rise in sea level will be even greater.
The Earth’s rising temperature is raising sea level both through thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. Scientists are particularly concerned by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which has accelerated sharply in recent years. If this ice sheet, a mile thick in some places, were to melt entirely it would raise sea level by 23 feet, or seven meters.
Even a one-meter (39 inch) rise would inundate vast areas of low-lying coastal land, including many of the rice-growing river deltas and floodplains of India, Thailand, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and China.
A World Bank map shows a one-meter rise in sea level inundating half of Bangladesh’s riceland. Some 30 million Bangladeshis would be forced to migrate, either internally or to other countries.
Hundreds of cities, including some of the world’s largest, would be at least partly inundated by a one-meter, rise in sea level, including London, Alexandria, and Bangkok. More than a third of Shanghai, a city of 15 million people, would be under water.
A one-meter rise combined with a 50 year storm surge would leave large portions of Lower Manhattan and the National Mall in Washington, DC flooded with seawater.
If the Greenland ice sheet should melt, the resulting 23-foot rise in sea level would force the abandonment of thousands of coastal cities and communities. Hundreds of millions of coastal residents would be forced to migrate inland or to other countries, spawning conflicts over land and living space."

You can read the whole press release here:

INSIGHTS: The Earth Is Shrinking

More on Lester Brown here:

Lester R. Brown