These maps show what melting Antarctica will do to New York and cities across the U.S.
Good news: The chances of your home becoming beachfront property in the next 80 years may have just gone up 200%! That's also the bad news.
A renowned team of climatologists just published a new study about sea level rise in the science journal Nature. By factoring in the frightening increase in the rate of melting ice from Antarctica and Greenland, they calculated a global sea level rise of more than six feet by the end of the century — more than twice as much as previously predicted.
'Cause that's not concerning. Nope, not at all. Photo by Philippe Huguen/Getty Images.
Basically, that awful thing that we already knew was coming? It's probably going to be even worse than we thought.
We're already feeling the undeniable effects of climate change. At this point, it's still mild enough for most of us (in the U.S., anyway) that we're willing to chalk it up to random weird weather flukes, rather than the warning signs of an impending disaster.
And based on earlier climate models, it looked like we were still two generations away from the "real damage." But according to this latest study, children who are living today will live to see some pretty catastrophic changes.
Not to get all "think of the children!" but, well, think of the children!
Oh! Look! A father and son having fun in the water! ... Because rising sea levels destroyed their home! Hooray! Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.
If you're a climate scientist — or a writer who pays attention to these things — you're probably freaking out right now.
But if you're having trouble trying to fathom what six feet of sea level rise actually means for your life, or the lives of your children and grandchildren, please allow me demonstrate what six feet of water by the year 2100 means for some major American regions.
In Seattle, for example, it won't just be the rain that makes it wet...
All GIFs via National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
And the Bay Area will be a lot more "Bay" than "Area."
"Los Angeles 2100" both sounds and looks like a big budget disaster movie.
On the plus side, coastal Texas will be too busy fighting floods to worry about oil spills in the Gulf.
And if you thought the hurricanes and floods that have been ravaging southern Louisiana were bad before, just wait.
Do you think the phrase "climate change" will still be banned when Miami looks like this?
Of course, the coast of North Carolina won't look so pretty either.
As for the New York metro area? It'll be less "Empire State of Mind" and more "Waterworld."
Boston's going back to the bay, and taking MIT and Harvard with it.
As for those of you who live inland? Your hometown might not look so bad in 80 years. But that doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory either.
Think about what happens to our national economy when all of the coastal land has been destroyed and people start to flock en masse to landlocked states. After all, that's basically what happened in Syria.
So while you lovely Nebraskans might be safe from flooding for the time being, it won't protect you from rising temperatures, agricultural bedlam, ravenous mosquito hordes, vicious winds, or the general calamity caused by mass migration.
As for why the prediction changed, the simple truth is there are a lot of factors involved in ecological disaster — all of which work together like a "Mad Max"-style domino chain.
Even if some of these climate models have changed over time — and if the predictions haven't been 100% accurate — it's not because climate change isn't real. It's because it's hard to figure out every detail of how it'll affect the world.
But hopefully, the thought that our children — not some distant future generation, but our actual children — are almost certainly going to suffer from our environmental hubris will be enough to motivate more people into taking action to cut our carbon emissions and stop this post-apocalyptic future before it happens.
Which, again, is much sooner than you think.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.