Sea levels not surging despite years of climate activists and corporate media freaking out, study finds

One recent study compiling sea level rise data shows oceans are not surging as much as the scientific world previously projected and corporate media has repeatedly sounded the alarm over.

The Journal of Marine Science and Engineering published the peer-reviewed study on Aug. 27, authored by Dutch engineering consultant Hessel G. Voortman and independent researcher Rob De Vos. The study concluded that the average rate of sea level rise in 2020 was well below other widely cited analyses, and that when projections were compared with local data, there was little evidence climate change was driving the acceleration seen in a few regions — a finding energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation challenges mainstream climate change orthodoxy.

“Overall, this study indicates that in most places, sea levels are not rising unusually quickly. In the relatively few locations where sea levels are rising faster than average, the cause is almost certainly local factors such as land subsidence or ground compaction,” Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, told the DCNF. “Global sea levels are currently rising more slowly than they have for much of the time since the last ice age ended — a period during which seas rose more than 400 feet. Any possible increase in the recent rate of rise compared with the past century is small, within the margin of error, and not outside historical patterns.”

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

Though the report doesn’t account for sea level rise everywhere, Voortman told journalist Michael Shellenberger on Tuesday that he was surprised no one had compiled such a study before, noting it is the first to compare projections with recorded local data from the past century.

The two data sets the researchers drew from did have some gaps, which meant that most sections in the world with usable data were in the Northern Hemisphere, with several of the “selected stations” spanning North America, Europe and Japan. Gaps in the data included regions around Australia, the northeast of Latin America, East Asia and most of Africa.

“The average rate of sea level rise in 2020 is (only) around 1.5 mm/year (15 cm per century)” Voortman said Tuesday. “This is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media.”

The report notes that in the data sets the researchers used, “approximately 95% of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise,” and that regions that did see a spike in sea level likely “local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause of the accelerated sea level rise observed at the remaining 5% of the suitable locations.”

“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 said Tuesday. “I had to do a lot of programming and automate data imports and data management. I organized it by using databases so that I really knew what I was doing. It was very structured because I was dealing with 150,000 locations and, on average, 100 years of data. That made one and a half million lines of data. I found myself for days working on things that I felt, ‘This is more computer science than civil engineering.’”

Steve Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told the DCNF that “there are a lot of additional factors that can affect tide gauge measurements including geological changes, groundwater withdrawal, and land use. But climate alarmists falsely chalk up all changes to polar ice melting caused by emissions-driven ‘global warming.’”

A few other studies have been published of late that also challenge climate change hysteria, with one widely reported study showing that Arctic Sea ice melting has slowed in the last 20 years. Another recent report found that a 2024 climate change study — heavily cited by legacy media for projecting up to $38 trillion in global damages by 2050 — relied on inaccurate data.

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