Why are we lumbered with such gullible authors? Given the USA having just experienced one of its coldest winters in the past 100 years, is the author going to retract comments he made about rising USA winter temperatures, in his paper, "Report gives sobering view of warming's impact on US", July 8, 2009?

Now let me get this right.When I jump in the bathtub the water level no longer rises uniformly around the tub.Archimedes got it all wrong.The weight of my body was not equal to the displacement of water.Spirit levels will no longer work,and people will get dizzy because of the imbalances in their eustachion tubes.

I'd suggest that the non uniformity of sea level change is due to land changes due to tectonic plate movements.

Come on Arjay, even I know that during an El Nino warm water 'piles up' in the western Pacific comparative to the east. This was recognised well before debate on AGW. Given the size of your bath relative to the Pacific Ocean, can you prove it isn't a hairsbreadth deeper at one end?

Minor nit-pick:

' ... fresh water from Greenland’s shrinking ice cap dilutes the surrounding waters; since fresh water is less dense than salty water, there’s a further impediment to sinking.' [i.e. of the Gulf Stream waters]

Wouldn't 'fresh water from Greenland' be more or less at freezing point, and therefore lighter in two counts (fresh, and freezing) ? And wouldn't that keep the denser, saltier Gulf Stream waters down, i.e. an impediment to its RISING ?

It's so confusing. I'm sorry Mr Robert: why oh why didn't I pay attention more in Physics class ?

Also being a bit bewildered on the salt water-fresh water density front, I hied me off to Google and found this helpful article on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water - which about 1/3 of the way down explains the connection between salt water, ice formation, global warming and ocean currents. If I read it correctly, its the salt which precipitates out of freezing seawater which sinks and helps drive the current back towards the equator, so higher temperatures mean less freezing, less salt. This explains the concern over the shrinking north pole ice cover. Presumably fresh melt water from glaciers, ice sheets etc further dilutes the mix. Have a look, its very interesting, and more complex than my precis.

Candidate,water does not pile up in a few place on the globe for long.Eventually it finds an equilibrium.The tides vary widely on the planet due to the moons gravitional pull.
The earth is a slightly irregular sphere and gravity will make the water levels around the planet average out.All the noise about sea levels rising in the pacific were about coral atols which move with the tetonic plates.It had very little to do with sea level change due to ice melting.

The alarmists are clinging to dodgy science.