GrahanY, what exactly did Gore say that was incorrect? I saw the film twice and the second time I took some notes because people had claimed that he was wrong. In all the points I checked it turned out that they were wrong, ie. that they had incorrectly quoted him.

I thought a few of his statements were a bit misleading, but I can't say that it was his intention to mislead.

On sea level rise, the article I linked to was a news story about a report entitled "Australia Responds: Helping Our Neighbours Fight Climate Change" prepared by the CSIRO for a roundtable of NGOs. Distribution is the responsibility of the roundtable and I have not been able to find it, or even where it is available.

I doubt whether it would have any original research in it about sea levels. The security analysis done by Alan Dupont and Graeme Pearman "Heating up the Planet: Climate Change and Security" (http://www.lowyinstitute.org/Publication.asp?pid=391) gives the range as 15cm to 95cm by 2100. The lower figure is an extrapolation of current rates from the last century. The higher figure is based on "plausible forecasts" and they give several citations.

I started to worry about sea level after reading this article by James Hansen (pdf):

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2003/2003_Hansen.pdf

The IPCC report assumed that Greenland and Antarctica would be pretty stable and that the sea would rise a bit from other glacial melting and thermal expansion. The NASA GISS mob started to worry about the effect of moulins (see page 8 of this paper - http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2004/2004_Hansen1.pdf) in ice-sheet beak-down and other aspects that my brain is too tired to recall at the moment. No-one has observed a major ice-sheet decay and disintegrate. Hansen talks about the time scales in various places including here (pdf):

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansen_slippery.pdf

It will be interesting what the next IPCC report says about it. I thought the Gore film explained very well the latest thinking on ice-sheet decay.

Recent information about Greenland from gravitational mass measurements seem to bear out the concerns. I posted about this at Larvatus Prodeo where you will find a some further links:

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/08/23/greenland-%e2%80%93-will-it-become-a-green-land/

There are some very interesting images in Hansen’s recent NAS lecture (large pdf):

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/nas_24april2006.pdf

Antarctica is interesting because snow was meant to increase, taking water out of the sea. This hasn’t happened yet but possibly it is still to come which would slow down the rising waters, for a time at least.