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Fact Check: Sea Levels Are Not Accelerating

The mainstream media love a good sea level climate scare story. The latest claims the seas will rise by 1.2m by 2030. The actual data, however, show no acceleration at all in the past 150 years, says Paul Homewood.

3 min read

The Daily Mail is still promoting the perennial sea level scare story. In its latest article, it writes:

Global sea levels could rise as much as 1.2 metres (four feet) by 2300 even if we meet the 2015 Paris climate goals, scientists have warned.

The long-term change will be driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that is set to re-draw global coastlines.

Sea level rise threatens cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swathes of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives.

It is vital that we curb emissions as soon as possible to avoid an even greater rise, a German-led team of researchers said in a new report.

By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 metres, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Targets set by the accords include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century.

Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said.

In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F).

Every five years of delay beyond 2020 in peaking global emissions would mean an extra eight inches (20 centimetres) of sea level rise by 2300.

None of the nearly 200 governments to sign the Paris Accords are on track to meet its

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28 Comments
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Sparrowhawk
Sparrowhawk
5 months ago

I lived in the Brighton-Worthing area for 40 years, 20 of which I was a dedicated windsurfer. Windsurfers keep a close watch on two things – the wind ( speed & direction ) and tide times.

I liked to launch at high tide, since in Worthing especially low tide means carrying your board & rig a damn long way over a rocky sea bed, so I had a good idea where the high tide mark was on the beach. IT NEVER CHANGED IN 20 YEARS. No rise whatsoever.

If it didn’t change on the Channel coast, the principle of “water finds its own level” means it never changed on the French coast either, and by extension at any coastline around the world.

In fact I’d go so far as to say it never changed in the whole 40 years, and I’d expect anyone who lives on a coast for some decades will have the same story.

RW
RW
5 months ago

Taking this at face value immediately yields two questions:

1) Why should we be worrying about what sea levels might be 274 years from now? 274 years ago, Friedrich II. ruled in Prussia and a usable steam engine hadn’t been invented yet. 274 years from now, our own time will look just as distant and technically primitive.

2) What’s going to stop people living in coastal regions from building dikes, something people who do actually live in coastal regions, as opposed to those who only phantasize about that, have been doing for centuries? Large parts of Belgium and the Netherlands are already below sea level and large parts of north-western Germany would be uninhabitable without dikes, although not strictly below sea level.

soundofreason
soundofreason
5 months ago
Reply to  RW

Your point 2 is what mankind has done and does using past and current technology. Wind driven pumps in the Netherlands, Norfolk Broads, Thames embankment, Teddington lock, Thames barrier, artificial islands off Dubai and in the South China Sea. Goodness knows what we’ll be able to do in the future (edit: your point 1) or even if we’ll choose to do that sort of thing at all. Dunwich has been eroded by the sea and rebuilt further inland several times as people stopped bothering with it when it became economically and politically irrelevant.

Edit2: People even choose to live in places prone to flooding. Housing estates built on flood plains. The Somerset Levels even. Valencia.

JXB
JXB
5 months ago

“The long-term change will be driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica…”

Except that ice is over land and compressing it. Much of the ice is below see level – Hi there Archimedes – and as the ice melts (it will over time just like periods in the last 4.5 billion years) that land will be subject to post-glacial rebound, the land decompresses and rises up above sea level – Archimedes again.

Great Britain is undergoing this process. Following the retreat of the ice sheet 20 000 years ago, the North of the island has been tilting up at the rate of 10mm per century, and tilting down in the South East by 5mm per century. (One of the reasons the Thames Flood Barrier was needed.)

In effect therefore, sea-levels in the North are getting lower, but in the South higher, the Welsh coastline in contrast has remained constant. That’s global warming for you and not a thing to be done about it.

And finally. For 70% of the time it has not been cold enough for polar ice caps to form, so Earth had none during these periods. Only for 1% of its history… Read more »

JXB
JXB
5 months ago

“Global sea levels could…”

”Could” – the last redoubt of the scientific charlatan.

Pigs “could” fly… if only they were much lighter and had big wings.

soundofreason
soundofreason
5 months ago
Reply to  JXB

…and were not pigs.

kev
kev
5 months ago

And yet the wealthy continue to build beachside properties, new hotels are built, and someone is more than happy to underwrite insurance on all these properties.

If “they” actually believed this BS was true, would any of that really be happening?

varmint
varmint
5 months ago

Seal Level Rise is a very difficult thing to measure and often has more to do with land sinking than sea rising. But there is no evidence of the rate of sea level rise increasing, which has been rising slowly in this warmer Interglacial period called the Holocene for 12,000 years. If humans were adding to sea level rise the rate of SLR would show signs of an increase, but it doesn’t. —-Almost all claims by the Climate Industrial Complex about climate change can be explained by natural variability, but ofcourse you cannot control every human activity if you cannot blame humans for everything that ever occurs.

Gezza England
Gezza England
5 months ago
Reply to  varmint

True. The British Isles is tilting as Scotland springs back from the melted ice sheets. The same is true of Scandinavia as back in the days when the BBC was not an ecoactivist propaganda outlet, there was a documentary that covered the Baltic Sea retreating at its northern extent as the land was rising. No chance of anything like that being broadcast today.

10navigator
10navigator
5 months ago

Jeff Bezos has recently spent $240M on three coastal properties on Indian Creek Island (Miami). Tiger Woods, $60m Jupiter Island property, Florida is between 5 and 10ft AMSL (above mean sea level). The sea level scare-mongers obviously didn’t warn them. I was in the Maldives (RAF Gan, now Equator Village) 50 years ago and it was 6ft AMSL. It’s still the same today.

DiscoveredJoys
DiscoveredJoys
5 months ago

I’ve often thought that there should be an even handed register of ‘expert opinions’. One for politics perhaps, one for economics perhaps, and one for climate change for certain.

Each climate prediction should be entered alongside hyperlinks to the source and the author(s) name(s). Any weasel words (might, likely, maybe) should be highlighted. And then the ‘result’ should be recorded.

It would be a solid task for anyone but perhaps the ‘experts’ might be less willing to make hyperbolic claims and cause less anxiety.

varmint
varmint
5 months ago
Reply to  DiscoveredJoys

But it is a highly politicised issue so do not expect truth, impartiality, facts, reason or evidence. —-What you will get is junk science, faith, emotion, guilt trip, morality, and government by press release and slogans urging irrational fear.

st27
st27
5 months ago
Reply to  varmint

Also, there’s a lot of money at stake. So much $weet government funding would dry up if this bubble collapsed. So we’ll just have to keep sucking up the lies, won’t we? (See also – COVID).

varmint
varmint
5 months ago
Reply to  st27

Often referred to as the Climate Industrial Complex.

lulu-b45
lulu-b45
5 months ago

One piece of good news in all this – the disappearance of much of Wales

BevGee
BevGee
5 months ago
Reply to  lulu-b45

Thanks so much.

WillP
WillP
5 months ago

The struck tidal marks, a good one being from 1941 in Port Arthur, Tasmania show half the increase claimed by NASA and no acceleration.

soundofreason
soundofreason
5 months ago
Reply to  WillP

No, no. Doncherno that Tasmania is floating?

Hardliner
5 months ago

Does anyone still take this seriously? The alarmist nonsense of this kind of reporting surely helps the cause of rational logic. No one can see water lapping at their windows, Net Zero is still a scam..

varmint
varmint
5 months ago
Reply to  Hardliner

Our silly Politicians certainly take it seriously. They are splashing out fortunes of our money on turbines, solar panels, smart meters, bicycle lanes, heat pumps, carbon capture, and even talk of blocking the sun for gods sake. They are ideologically driven dreamers that will spend huge chunks of cash on this phoney planet saving crap forcing millions into energy poverty and destroying what is left of Industry all to get a little gold star on their lapels from the UN and WEF

kev
kev
5 months ago
Reply to  varmint

Slight correction varmint – Our criminally insane Politicians certainly take it seriously.

varmint
varmint
5 months ago
Reply to  kev

Treasonous ones YES

st27
st27
5 months ago
Reply to  Hardliner

As varmint says, the problem is that the people who “matter” take it seriously. Or pretend to. Or have to pretend to, after they’ve spent £bns on the basis of taking it seriously, so that they’d look very stupid (OK – even stupider…) if they declared that it was all bullshit.

You and I are not in that club. That is the basic principle of modern “democracy”. Your opinion is not relevant because you (and I) are a deplorable pleb. We know What’s Good For You.

But there’s a strange corollary to this. Although our opinions are completely valueless and irrelevant, there’s a point at which they start to become very important indeed. That point is when people start to share them, and the elites face the horrific prospect of people realising that a vast majority of people agree with each other that the elites are talking nonsense. That’s the point at which opinions have to be censored, suppressed and made criminal. And it’s to try to prevent that happening that the Correct Facts have to be hammered home, in more and more ludicriously exaggerated ways.

Nice living in something like the tail-end of Communism, isn’t it?

varmint
varmint
5 months ago
Reply to  st27

Our opinions only become valuable to them when they look at the polls and see themselves PLUMMET in them. —–As Stevie Wonder sang on the Talking Book Album in the song “Big Brother”

Your name is big brother
You say that you’re watching me on the telly
Seeing me go nowhere
Your name is big brother
You say that you’re tired of me protesting
Children dying everyday
My name is nobody
But I can’t wait to see your face inside my door

[Verse 2]
Your name is big brother
You say that you got me all in your notebook
Writing it down everyday
Your name is I’ll see ya (Your name is I’ll see ya)
I’ll change if you vote me in as the pres
The President of your soul
I live in the ghetto
You just come to visit me ’round election time

soundofreason
soundofreason
5 months ago

Well I guess it’s one way of getting rid of Sir Sadiq.

Western Firebrand
Western Firebrand
5 months ago
Reply to  soundofreason

Short guys drown first?

Gezza England
Gezza England
5 months ago

Yes, when your foot is holding their head down.

soundofreason
soundofreason
5 months ago

Well he can’t escape the rushing waters without exceeding the 20mph limit.

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