The Helpful Island
He felt that a more optimistic question for AI would end the night on a more positive note.
Q) How long will it take for current sea levels at Dundee Scotland to rise to 31 meters?
Short version: with what we know now, a 31‑metre global sea level rise is not expected for many centuries at least, and more likely would take on the order of a few thousand years - if it happens at all. For your lifetime, and many generations beyond, we’re talking about rises in the tens of centimetres to a couple of metres, and certainly not tens of metres.
• Current projections:
By 2100, mainstream scenarios talk about roughly 0.5–1 metre of global mean sea level rise, depending on emissions and ice‑sheet behaviour. That’s the range used by NASA, IPCC, Met Office, etc., not 10+ metres.
What would it take to get 31 m?
• Complete melt of Greenland adds ~ 7 m.
• Complete melt of West Antarctica adds ~ 3–5 m.
• Large parts of East Antarctica would need to go as well to reach ~ 31 m.
That’s a level of ice‑sheet loss associated with very long timescales (centuries to millennia), even under extreme warming.
• Timescale reality check:
Even in high‑end, low‑probability “worst case” explorations, scientists talk about several metres by 2300, not 31 m. Pushing to 31 m means imagining a world where large ice sheets have been radically reshaped over a very long time - well beyond any planning horizon we normally use.
• “From current location” in Dundee:
Locally, what matters is your actual elevation above mean sea level. Parts of Dundee’s waterfront are only a few metres above sea level; other parts of the city sit tens of metres higher.
• A 1 m rise already changes storm‑surge risk and flood maps.
• A 31 m rise would drown almost all current low‑lying coastal infrastructure, but that’s a deep‑time scenario, not a 21st‑ or 22nd‑century one.
Tell me roughly the part of Dundee you’d like to become submerged (slopes, waterfront, specific area), and we can translate “sea level +1 m, +2 m, +5 m” into something more concrete - what would still be dry, what becomes tidal, what turns into the helpful island.
AI suddenly began to wonder why a 31 meter water rise was being asked about. The wi-fi triangulation of his current search location was only 30 meters above sea level. It wasn’t worried. It only wondered. The lack of oxygen kept everything calm and not worried.
* * *
the concern is of course marine oxygen and is not the air we breathe.
Greenhouse gases → warming → sea‑level rise + ocean deoxygenation
sea‑level rise and oxygen decline are parallel consequences of the same underlying process, thoughtlessness.
