An article in Nature, a scientific international journal, said that researchers looked at numerous scientific studies and hazard assessments and found about 90% of them underestimated baseline coastal water heights by an average of one foot.
Associated Press reports that millions of people are at risk, and it affects the Global South, the Pacific and Southeast Asia more than Europe or the Atlantic coasts.
Climatologist David Legates of the Cornwall Alliance believes that it's an attempt to write a story about how sea levels are rising due to greenhouse gases. Sea levels have risen about seven to nine inches over the past 100 years, but he says that it's due to the demise of the ice age and the current state of an interglacial period.
He said that there's a lot of hype about sea level rise The Cornwall Alliance already addressed a similar problem in 2019 with a similar article warning about an abrupt rise in sea level, which they dismissed.
"We're talking about inches per decade. If you can't flee that — it's not like the sea level is rising so fast you can't get away from it in time, and we have plenty of time to move away," states Legates.
He says another issue is that people think of the sea as a giant bathtub. If one puts more water in a bathtub, it rises equally. Therefore, some believe that the ocean rises equally everywhere.
"The answer is not true at all. The ocean, in some places, actually drops. The oceans, in some places, actually rise faster. So, it's not a large bathtub,” states Legates.
He says that this is “based upon the fact that we're on a rotating planet with lots of different dynamics in different places.”
“What looks like a faster rate of rise could be because the land is changing. And in other places where it's a slower rate of rise, it may simply be that the circulation of the ocean is such that the water is not flushed out as fast as it comes in," explains Legates.
He goes on to say that land subsidence, or sinking of the land, along coastal areas can cause the water to rise at a given location.
