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The Post's article outlines the state of scientific research on polar ice and sea level rise. It's worth a read. You can read the entire article here: Clues to Rising Seas Are Hidden in Polar Ice Below are some excerpts:

Clues to Rising Seas Are Hidden in Polar Ice
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 16, 2007; Page A06

"Few consequences of global warming pose as severe a threat to human society as sea-level rise. But scientists have yet to figure out how to predict it.

And not knowing what to expect, policymakers and others are hamstrung in considering how to try to prevent it or prepare for it.
To calculate sea-level rise, the key thing researchers need to understand is the behavior of the major ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica. The disintegration of one would dramatically raise the ocean. But while computer models now yield an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how a warming atmosphere would behave, such models have yet to fully encapsulate the complex processes that regulate ice sheet behavior.

'The question is: Can we predict sea level? And the answer is no,' said David Holland, who directs New York University's Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science. Holland, an oceanographer, added that this may mean researchers will just have to watch the oceans to see what happens: 'We may observe the change much more than we ever predict it.'
...
Because so much is at stake -- a three-foot increase in sea level could turn at least 60 million people into refugees, the World Bank estimates -- ice sheet modelers are working furiously to try to unravel the mystery of how these sheets accumulate and lose mass.

Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University professor of geosciences and international affairs, does make a prediction: He figures that if the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, sea level would rise about 23 feet. If the West Antarctic sheet melts, as well, it would add an additional 17 feet or so.

'If either of these ice sheets were to disintegrate, it would destroy coastal civilization as we know it,' Oppenheimer said.

One of the biggest challenges facing researchers is that ice sheets are under 'attack from the edges,' in the words of Richard B. Alley, a Pennsylvania State University geosciences professor. Each sheet amounts to a pile of snow compressed over time into a two-mile thick, continent-spanning sheet of ice, which spreads out under its own weight, Alley said."