Report Inappropriate Comments

Erik, please note that the majority of projections of sea level rise are non-linear; they are exponential. In other words, you cannot simply project a simple linear rate of rise (the 3 millimeters that you mention) into the future. This makes sense when you think about the compounding effects and their interactions that contribute to climate trends, including our own exponential increase in rates of carbon emissions over the past century. more importantly: you are interpreting past data (1938 to 2015) to directly infer future sea levels. This is equivalent to saying that the past 100 years will essentially repeat itself, in spite of the trillions of tons of carbon that humans have released into the atmosphere, and its compounding (again, non-linear) impact over decades.

Climate scientists have reached consensus regarding the certainty of sea level rise. This is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of extrapolating trends evident in the climate data collected in recent decades (including sea level rise already witnessed), and their correlations to records of compounded carbon emissions. There are a range of scenarios with consequences that vary in severity, but they are ALL much more severe than anything that we have witnessed in the last decades or century. The degree of severity and its rate of acceleration are the only unknowns here:

http://cpo.noaa.gov/Home/AllNews/TabId/315/ArtMID/668/ArticleID/80/Global-Sea-Level-Rise-Scenarios-for-the-United-States-National-Climate-Assessment.aspx

As, a result, sea level rise is ultimately a risk management problem: what are the opportunity costs if we regulate carbon emissions, which are contributing to this problem? What are the risks if we don't? Scientific consensus suggests that the risks are orders of magnitude greater than the short-term cost.