There are many climate change concerns that should be on the radar screen of Americans, but perhaps the two most troubling are related to the sea level rise and drought. The former will be a growing issue for coastal areas, whereas the latter already is an issue for much of the U.S. West, particularly the southern half of the region. The paleoclimatic record highlights that future change could be substantially more challenging than commonly believed. There appears to be good evidence that warming in the 21^st century will be enough to commit the globe to substantial polar ice cap and sheet melting on top of the continued retreat of glaciers and the thermal expansion of the oceans.  Meters of sea level rise are likely, possibly at a rate in excess of 1m/century. In the West, crippling droughts could result from continued warming and mean cold season precipitation decline, combined with the possibility of decades-long megadrought. Neither time-dependent ice sheet behavior nor megadrought are well represented in models, and this means that there is an urgent need – especially in the case of drought - to work on programs that reduce societal vulnerability, while at the same time trying to work out the Earth-system dynamics needed for reliable simulations of future sea level and drought.