Sea Level Rise in the U.S.A. | Open Mind
Posted on August 11, 2025 |
I’ve already blogged about the lame treatment of sea level in the new DOE report. It has attracted some attention from those who want to know how the Trump administration is butchering climate science. But — unlike the authors of the DOE report — it seems my readers also want to know what’s really happening to sea level along the coasts of the USA.
If global sea level is accelerting (and it is), then it’s no surprise we see statistically significant acceleration on the east coast and Gulf coast of the U.S., by why not on the west coast?
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Sea Level Mis-information from DOE | Open Mind
Posted on August 3, 2025 |
Here in the USA, the Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a report titled “ A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” It is a product of the “Climate Working Group,” five Ph.D.’s with one thing in common: a history of climate denial. They were commissioned by DOE director Chris Wright, previously chairman and CEO of the fossil fuel company Liberty Energy.
It’s a long report covering a lot of topics. They devote chapter 7 to sea level rise, and here is their “chapter summary” (I have highlighted, in bold, its final sentence):
Chapter Summary
Since 1900, global average sea level has risen by about 8 inches. Sea level change along U.S. coasts is highly variable, associated with local variations in processes that contribute to sinking and also with ocean circulation patterns. The largest sea level increases along U.S. coasts are Galveston, New Orleans, and the Chesapeake Bay regions – each of these locations is associated with substantial local land sinking (subsidence) unrelated to climate change.
Extreme projections of global sea level rise are associated with an implausible extreme emissions scenario and inclusion of poorly understood processes associated with hypothetical ice sheet instabilities. In evaluating AR6 projections to 2050 (with reference to the baseline period 1995-2014), almost half of the interval has elapsed by 2025, with sea level rising at a lower rate than predicted.U.S. tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.
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Acceleration of Sea Level Rise | Open Mind (wordpress.com)
Posted on February 25, 2025 |
First the good news: in my opinion, the rate of sea level rise did not double during the past three decades, as was reported by Hamlington et al.
Now the bad news: in my opinion, the rate of sea level rise increased by 50% during the past three decades.
We’ve been measuring sea level with satellite altimetry for over 30 years, and there are many different reductions of the data (i.e. translating it into GMSL, Global Mean Sea Level) but they all tell essentially the same story. The graph above shows the time series from NASA (I’ve removed the annual cycle).
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30 Years of Sea Level Rise | Open Mind (wordpress.com)
Posted on December 20, 2024 |
In the last post I estimated the expected sea level rise along the eastern USA from the year 2000 to the year 2050, based on extrapolating the present trend forward in time. But I incorrectly stated that this 50-year period is the one referred to by NOAA when they project sea level rise of 10 – 12 inches. In fact, as you can see on their website, that’s what they project for the 30-year period from 2020 to 2050.
To estimate the 30-year rise 2020 – 2050, I simply re-set the “zero point” so that the mean value is zero in the year 2020. For Wilmington, NC it gives this:
Wilmington can definitely expect over a foot coming soon. |
