Sea level rise during the next several centuries may inundate the world's largest cities, cultural treasures from New York to London to Shanghai. The eventual course of sea level rise will greatly depend on decisions made now, including at the upcoming Paris Climate Summit in early December, when world leaders will attempt to adopt a new climate treaty to go into effect in the year 2020.

Because the giant ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica respond to climate change relatively slowly, a business-as-usual path of global warming pollution could doom future generations to centuries of ever-increasing sea levels, to the point where many cities will become uninhabitable.

See also: Rising seas could submerge land home to more than half a billion people

A new report from Climate Central, a research and journalism organization, illustrates the effects of "sea level rise lock-in," which makes emissions today reverberate far into the future.

These image comparisons show how different amounts of global warming might affect some of the world's greatest cities.

The first image in each pair shows projections of post-2100 sea level rise if global warming emissions propel the climate to warm by 4 degrees Celsius, or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit, relative to preindustrial levels. This is known as the "business as usual" scenario, since it involves governments taking little to no action to rein in emissions.

The second image shows the same location, but under a 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, warming scenario, which corresponds to the temperature target world leaders agreed to in 2010.

The images were created by visual artist Nickolay Lamm, using Climate Central's sea level rise data.

The Climate Central report noted that its sea level rise projections are likely conservative, since they do not take into account recent studies showing more rapid melting taking place in parts of Greenland and Antarctica.