[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by ericthered

The premise of flooding out states to create an interesting crisis is good, but 6 meters isn't going to swamp out any states in the US. 6 Meters won't cover the whole of Manhattan. Many Coastal states rise from the sea moderately quickly, like Delaware. Florida will probably suffer the most, with Louisiana giving it a run for its money, but Tallahassee will remain high and dry, as will the northern 80% of Louisiana

15 meters does a better job of what you want, but if you want to wipe out multiple states, you're looking at 60 meters or more. 60 meters actually still eleminates a fairly short list: Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, and maybe Rhode island, Main, and Maryland. South Carolina, Connecticut, and Massachusetts are hit hard, but they have a fair amount of land left, even their biggest cities are gone. New York, Texas, and the west coast are large states and won't be insolvent even with the higher sea levels, and can at least justify statehood based on land. Most of the South has its population centers pretty far inland.

That's 10 states at most, which is a bit, not enough to really form too effective of a voting block in a single house of congress.

Oh well. A realistic( for a given value of realistic) jump in sea level from the collapse of Western Antarctica still creates worldwide crisis. Half the population of Eygpt and nine tenths of Bangladesh are flooded out. Huge Chinese populations are on the move too. The floods of refugees within Europe and coming to Europe from nearby (it is easier for tens of millions of refugees to get to Europe than for even a million to get to the USA) would create the worst crisis since the late 1940s.