“The sea level rose at nearly all U.S. coastline measurement stations in 2019, leaving scientists to warn that the likelihood that heavy flooding will strike is becoming more likely.”

So wrote Sandy Fitzgerald in Newsmax February 3. But never fear.  The facts and some solid reasoning will show that that outcome is unlikely, even as a worst case.

This narrative has long served as an ace in the hole for the climate alarmists. What Ms. Fitzgerald failed to tell her readers is that long-term tide gauge data shows a 6 to 7 inch average rate of sea level rise — PER CENTURY — since about 1850. There is nothing particularly new here.

… Gulf of Mexico measuring stations marked the largest rises, with Grand Isle, Louisiana, showing a 7.93-millimeter annual increase, followed by the Texas cities of Galveston and Rockport. …

This admission undercuts any notion that there is a problem stemming from mean eustatic ocean level rise.

The problem for shorelines along the Gulf of Mexico and for distant Venice, Italy, is the subsidence of the local land. Galveston and New Orleans are constructed on recent sediments (deposited during the past 10,000 years). Those underlying sediments are in the process of consolidation (water being squeezed out of loose layers of mud and sand). As the sediments contract, the land above necessarily settles downward and becomes vulnerable to flooding.

Grand Isle, LA, is located near the mouth of the Mississippi River and at the very extreme end of a growing river delta. Its sediments are among the most recently deposited in the US and the most vulnerable to subsidence and consequent flooding during storms.

The US West Coast does not share the same problems. There the coast is rising in the continuing uplift that created the Sierra Nevada and Coast ranges.

Predictions of an 8 to 10 feet of sea level rise by 2100 are considered exaggerated by many coastal experts who have invested their careers in the subject.

The outlier predictions are products of climate change models that have never been validated and are consistently being contradicted by time series analysis of reliable temperature records.

Photo by Sean O. on Unsplash.