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Dramatic sea level rises could take a thousand years, so can we all relax now?

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Shanta Barley | 12:35 UK time, Friday, 3 April 2009

The science journal Nature has published research saying that sea levels will rise by 15 feet if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts due to climate change, but that this could take thousands of years.
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The research is yet another nail in the coffin of that the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland's ice sheets will trigger a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet 'in the near future'.

Gore's predictions were under attack yet again this week when arch-climate change debunker Christopher Booker wrote in the Telegraph that , according to the research of geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner. Catastrophic sea level rise by 2100 is 'nothing but a colossal scare story', so stop fretting he says.

Phew. What a relief. We can all chill out now about the threat of soggy feet, right? Not so fast, says Dr Philippe Huybrechts, professor of climatology at the Free University of Brussels. If we don't cut carbon immediately, our end-of-century emissions could guarantee the collapse of the West Antarctica ice sheet a millennium from now. Relax about sea level rise, 'probably the most serious long-term threat [to human societies] from unabated climate warming', at your peril, he concludes.

Speaking from the heart, perhaps: the area that is now Belgium is conspicuously absent from , when high sea levels meant that a large fraction of what is now low-lying coastal land was under water.

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