Britain will spend billions to defend against rising tides over the coming decades, but experts are sharply divided as to how far and fast the waters will rise, reveals Roger Highfield An apocalyptic vision of a deluged Britain is one of the most potent, chilling and seductive images to emerge from the debate about climate change. The power of such pictures helps account for the success of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth; its warnings over rising sea levels helped win the former US Vice-President a Nobel Prize. But just before Gore shared the prize for raising global awareness of climate change, a High Court judge ruled that the film contained errors, not least an ‘alarmist’ assertion that the sea would rise up to 20ft ‘in the near future’ as the ice in Greenland or Western Antarctica melts. He pointed out that scientists believed that the ice would take millennia to melt: ‘The Armageddon scenario [Mr Gore] predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.’ But as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which […]