Wait, What? Climate Scientist Says Sea Level Rising at Nowhere Near the Level They Claim

You know the drill—according to doomsdayers Al Gore and Greta Thunberg, we’re all about to be swallowed by the rising seas, and our civilization will soon be underwater.

It's a woefully sad outcome, but it’s not the one that Dutch researchers found in their studies:

A new study conducted by a Dutch engineering consultant found that the average sea level rise in 2020 was around 1.5 millimeters per year, "significantly lower" than the 3 to 4 millimeters often projected by climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Hessel Voortman and researcher Rob de Vos checked actual observations of more than 200 tide stations against projections and models.
"It is crazy that it had not been done. I started doing this research in 2021 by doing the literature review. 'Who has done the comparison of the projections with the observations?' And there were none," Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

Climate change will make oceans rise 3 - 10 feet by the end of this century, said scientists and the media. Nonsense. A new, first-ever global study of real world data, not models, finds no evidence climate change accelerated sea level rise. This is a massive scientific scandal. pic.twitter.com/1hd1Hug5kF
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 2, 2025

Voortman noticed that his observations weren’t exactly gelling with what the “international climate community” was claiming, so he decided to put his theories under the microscope:

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.

For over a quarter-century the world’s leading climate scientists and news media have warned that human-caused climate change has doubled the rate of sea level rise and is thus putting civilization in grave danger. “We will see at least four feet of sea level rise and possibly… pic.twitter.com/DmMBJkLmL3
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 2, 2025

“We will see at least four feet of sea level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century,” wrote The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells in 2019. “The oceans we know won’t survive climate change,” claimed The Atlantic that same year. The author, Robinson Meyer, quoted estimates by Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer that sea levels would rise by more than 34 inches by 2100.

I've Got Bad News for Leftists - Drama Has a Shelf Life

Voortman says the existential threat predicted by so many of our scientists simply isn’t occurring:

The vast majority of mainstream scientific studies have pointed to a dramatic acceleration in sea level rise over the past three decades following the introduction of satellite imagery.
But Voortman claims that sea levels were in fact in a “trough” in 1993 and a “peak” in 2020, and that once these fluctuations are taken into account, there is no detectable rise in sea level.
Of the stations Voortman studied that did point to a notable rise in sea level, most were located near others that showed negligible changes in recent decades, “making it unlikely that a global phenomenon like CO2-driven global warming is the cause,” Voortman reportedly said.

We should be of course be cognizant of the effects of the ever-changing environment, and do what we have to do to ensure the continuation of our species. But time after time, these climate hysterics’ wild predictions are proven to be overblown—even as they rake in millions of dollars in green energy projects and “consulting” gigs.

As our Ward Clark often points out, the climate is always changing—it has been for billions of years and will continue to do so. The best thing we can do is not listen to the frenzied doom and gloom crowd, but look for ways to deal with whatever is coming down the line.