Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Various pundits and scientists keep talking about a threatened acceleration in the sea level rise. Here’s the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:

Anthropogenic forcing is also expected to produce an accelerating rate of sea level rise (Woodworth et al., 2004).

The usual font of misinformation says:

Church and White (2006) report an acceleration of SLR since 1870. This is a revision since 2001, when the TAR stated that measurements have detected no significant acceleration in the recent rate of sea level rise.

Over at the inversely named “SkepticalScience” blog, which is inadequately skeptical, we find:

The blue line in the graph below clearly shows sea level as rising, while the upward curve suggests sea level is rising faster as time goes on. The upward curve agrees with global temperature trends and with the accelerating melting of ice in Greenland and other places.

The Guardian gets in their licks:

Sea levels are already on the rise as a result of increasing temperatures, because the oceans expand as they warm up, but until now scientists have had a poor understanding of how quickly ice sheets such as those in Greenland and Antarctica will begin to disappear.

Meanwhile, back in the world of reality we have the latest satellite data up to September of 2010:

Figure 1. Satellite-measured sea level rise. Errors shown are 95% confidence intervals. Data Source.

The smaller trend of the recent half of the record is statistically different from the larger trend of the first half. Will this reduction continue into the future? Who knows? I’m just talking about the past, and pointing out that we sure haven’t seen any sign of the threatened acceleration in the satellite record. Quite the opposite, in fact.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled warnings of global inundation from accelerating sea level rise …

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