| Details1: | If Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea - or if half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, sea levels worldwide would increase by between 18 and 20 feet. - Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, p. 196.
After making this dramatic statement - which is indeed correct, because of the two important "ifs" it contains - Gore approvingly quotes the United Kingdom's Sir David King as saying "the maps of the world will have to be redrawn," as if the occurrence of this hypothetical scenario was something we may expect to witness sometime in the very near future. And to visually make his point more poignant, Gore goes on to illustrate what would happen to Florida, San Francisco Bay, the Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bangladesh and Manhattan, suggesting that we should begin preparing now for what he implies is a serious threat commensurate with other major present-day concerns. The perspective provided by real-world science, however, is something far, far different.
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