New Study Says Sea Level Not Rising Faster

I prefer OTP's headline, Study Finds Rise Of Global Sea Levels Wildly Overstated, to the headline at NYPo, 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.

 

Voortman was shocked that no researcher before had performed an analysis of real-world local data.

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. 

It's getting deeper!

No researcher before had done the analysis and published it for several reasons. First, most research is done at the behest of the government, with the unwritten goal of finding something that needs regulating, so the government can accumulate more power. Second, most scientists have internalized that, and believe, against available evidences, that sea level rise is accelerating. Third, there is a bias in scientific literature against papers that prove the null hypothesis. How boring is that? 

“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 data is widely available, and though I haven't searched for it, I think I recall a post by Willis Eisenbach at WUWT that did just that, and came up with the same answer. I like to pull out the long tidal gauge record from Baltimore:

I know, 3.2mm is more than the world average of 1.5 mm, but subsidence in the mid Atlantic region is well established.