Latest Science Exposes Lies About Rising Sea Level

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The scientific truth is simple:

Sea levels are rising, but the rate of rise has not accelerated.

A new peer-reviewed study confirms what many other studies have already shown – the steady rise of oceans is a centuries-long process, not a runaway crisis, triggered by modern emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂).

SOME HISTORY

For the past 12,000 years, during our current warm epoch known as the Holocene, sea levels have risen and fallen dramatically.

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For instance, during the 600-year Little Ice Age, which ended in the the 1850s, sea levels dropped quite significantly.

The natural warming, that began about 1690 got to a point, where loss of land-based ice in the summers of the 1800s began to exceed the winter gain.

As a result, the glaciers began to recede and shrink and sea levels rose.

By 1850, full-on glacial retreat was underway.

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Thus, the current period of gradual sea-level increase began between 1800-1860.

That PRECEDED any significant human CO₂emissions by many decades.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2025 critical review on CO2 and climate change confirms this historical perspective.

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“There is no good, sufficient or convincing evidence, global sea level rise is accelerating –there is only hypothesis and speculation.

"Computation is not evidence and unless the results can be practically viewed and measured in the physical world, such results must not be presented as such,” notes Kip Hansen, researcher and former U.S. Coast Guard captain.

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New Study Confirms No Crisis

While activists speak of “global sea-level rise,” the ocean’s surface does not behave like water in a bathtub. Regional currents, land movements (up/down/sideways), and local hydrology all influence relative sea level. .

This is why local tide gauge data is important. As Hansen warns, “Only actually measured, validated raw data can be trusted. … You have to understand exactly what’s been measured and how.”

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In addition, local tide-gauge data cannot be extrapolated to represent global sea level. This is because the geographic coverage of suitable locations for gauges is often poor, with the majority concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere.

Latin America and Africa are severely under-represented in the global dataset.  

Hansen says, “The global tide gauge record is quantitatively problematic, but individual records can be shown as qualitative evidence for a lack of sea-level rise acceleration.”

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A new 2025 study provides confirmation

Published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, the study systematically dismantles the narrative of accelerating sea-level rise.

It analyzed empirically derived long-term rates from datasets of sufficient length – at least 60 years – and incorporated long-term tide signals from suitable locations.

The startling conclusion: Approximately 95% of monitoring locations show no statistically significant acceleration of sea-level rise.

It was found that the steady rate of sea-level rise – averaging around 1 to 2 millimeters per year globally – mirrors patterns observed over the past 150 years.

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The study suggests, projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which often predicts rates as high as 3 to 4 millimeters per year by 2100, overestimate the annual rise by approximately 2 millimeters, at least 100%.

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This discrepancy is not trivial.

It translates into billions of dollars in misguided infrastructure investments and adaptation policies, which assume a far worse scenario than what the data support.

Because we now know that local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause of the accelerated sea level rise measured locally.

Rather than pursuing economically destructive initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the basis of questionable projections and erroneous climate science, money and time should be invested in supporting coastal communities with accurate data for practical planning to adapt to local sea level rise.

Successful adaptation strategies have existed for centuries in regions prone to flooding and sea-level variations.

The Netherlands is an excellent example of how engineering solutions can protect 12 million coastal populations even living up to 6 meter below sea level, such as Rotterdam, with more than a million people.

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Slowly rising sea levels are real but not a crisis.

What we have is a manageable, predictable phenomenon to which societies have adapted for centuries.

To inflate it into an existential threat is to mislead, misallocate, and ultimately harm the communities that policymakers claim to protect.

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Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.