sea-level rise (h/t John from Daejeon)

I said I wouldn't write any more political or current-events-related posts, but commenter John from Daejeon just sent this bit about the climate my way, so...

Headline (article slightly edited):

Blockbuster sea-level study may turn climate-change orthodoxy on its head

Global sea levels have not continued to rise at the rates predicted by many scientists — and there is no evidence that climate change has contributed to any such acceleration, a new, first-of-its-kind study has claimed.

The research found that the average sea-level rise in 2020 was only around 1.5mm per year, or 6 inches per century, according to the paper’s authors, Dutch engineering consultant Hessel Voortman and independent researcher Rob de Vos.

“This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

“It is crazy that it had not been done. I started doing this research in 2021 by doing the literature review. ‘Who has done the comparison of the projections with the observations?’ And there were none,” he told Shellenberger.

The study was also unlike any of its kind in that it was carried out with no external funding, said Voortman, who has spent the last 30 years as a hydraulic engineer working with flood protection and coastal-infrastructure adaptation projects around the world.

In 2023, Voortman published a bombshell paper claiming that sea level rise across the low-lying Dutch coast hadn’t accelerated.

“From practice, I had already encountered the situation that sea-level projections were exceeding sea-level observations,” he said.

He decided to put his theory to the test worldwide, looking at 200 different tide-gauge stations with at least 60 years of data to study.

“For the vast majority of the stations, the differences between the two curves were not significant,” Voortman said, adding that this indicated no detectable acceleration in sea level rises.

The vast majority of mainstream scientific studies have pointed to a dramatic acceleration in sea-level rise over the past three decades following the introduction of satellite imagery.

But Voortman claims that sea levels were in fact in a “trough” in 1993 and a “peak” in 2020, and that once these fluctuations are taken into account, there is no detectable rise in sea level.

Of the stations Voortman studied that did point to a notable rise in sea level, most were located near others that showed negligible changes in recent decades, “making it unlikely that a global phenomenon like CO2-driven global warming is the cause,” Voortman reportedly said.

Read the rest. Meanwhile, here are two videos I'd slapped up about sea-level rise last year. Everyone needs to relax.