I think it could be possible to make an interesting Prison-Break style story from the fight against rising seas in a specific city, for example Calcutta.
By making the story span many years – forty or fifty – we can possibly speed up the story enough to create plot, tension, suspense.
We can have a group or two or three fighting against the rising global warming, and the obstacles arrayed against them: political, scientific and so on, and how they overcome them at each stage, until slowly the waters start to recede, and people can move back into the, somewhat cleansed, city.
It sounds a like little sanjie haoren, a Chinese film about the rising waters in the 3 Gorges damn area, except that sanjie haoren doesn’t I feel really have much of a plot: there is not really suspense and then denouement. Sanjie haoren is more like a documentary showing the rising water level, and its effects on the human population.
Similarly the Day after Tomorrow depicts the possible effects of global warming, but I do not feel there is a plot. The participants do not seem to ever reverse the effects. It is not a ‘Next’-like film for example where the protagonist realizes what is going to happen and then avoids that.
And neither is my proposed story a Next-like film, just that, in the nature of films, stories and fantasies, the protagonists get sufficiently lucky to reverse the global warming trend, somewhat through their own efforts, and somewhat because they are perhaps courageous and sympathetic heros?