At the other end of the spectrum, Newsweek wrote: “The Ocean Floor Is Sinking Under the Water Weight From Melting Glaciers, and It’s As Bad As It Sounds”. With such lame reporting, it is no surprise that climate sceptics sharpen their knives.

The story is a storm in a teacup. The premise of the paper, that appeared in December in Geophysical Research Letters, is benign: ice mass loss results in heavier oceans and as a result, the bottom of the ocean elastically deforms and becomes deeper.

The researchers found that around the world over the last two decades, ocean basins have deformed by an average of 0.1 millimetre per year. “This is not much,” says Frederikse. “It is well within the error margins of satellite measurements of sea level rise.”