Three years ago, YaleEnvironment360, published by the reliably climate-alarmist Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, ran “Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat,” by Nicola Jones, a freelance journalist specializing in chemistry and oceanography.

The article followed the standard formula of warnings about climate change and its catastrophic consequences: present a scary hypothesis as if it were a fait accompli.

“Ninety-nine percent of the planet’s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the next, flooding many of the world’s populated coastal areas” was the teaser at the start.

But that prediction depends entirely on models, not on empirical observation. And empirical observation is the hallmark of science.

Now, though, a new study that is based on empirical observation gives the lie to the whole scare.

In “Pacific Sea Levels Rising Very Slowly and Not Accelerating,” in the February issue of Quaestriones Geographicae, by Albert Parker and Clifford Ollier, reports the hard data from long-term sea-level measurements.

What do the data show? Here’s the abstract (emphases added):

Over the past decades, detailed surveys of the Pacific Ocean atoll islands show no sign of drowning because of accelerated sea-level rise. Data reveal that no atoll lost land area, 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, and only 11.4% of islands contracted. The Pacific Atolls are not being inundated because the sea level is rising much less than was thought. The average relative rate of rise and acceleration of the 29 long-term-trend (LTT) tide gauges of Japan, Oceania and West Coast of North America, are both negative, −0.02139 mm yr−1 and −0.00007 mm yr−2 respectively. Since the start of the 1900s, the sea levels of the Pacific Ocean have been remarkably stable.

I.e., sea level rise is slowing, not accelerating, and Pacific islands are mostly growing or holding steady, not shrinking.

Further along the article indicates that an average rate of sea-level rise for the Pacific is from 0.08–0.79 mm per year. At the high end, it would take over 2,300 years for sea level to rise the 6 feet Jones predicted for this century; at the low end, nearly 22,900 years. And how much, at the empirically observed rate, would sea level rise this century? Not 6 feet but about 3 inches at the high end, or about 1/3 inch at the low end.