Sea Level Rise: Less Alarmism?

From MasterResource

By Kennedy Maize — June 5, 2025

“… model-observation discrepancies can arise from three causes: the observations could be wrong (unrealized biases etc.), the models are wrong (which can encompass errors in forcings as well as physics), or the comparison could be inappropriate…. [I]t may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development … Or not….” – Gavin Schmidt, Real Science, May 31, 2025.

One of the most enduring themes of the popular discussion of a man-made warming globe has been sea level rise as a result of the melting of ice from the planet’s two frigid poles.

Former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” featured images of icebergs calving off the Antarctic continent. He proclaimed that if the world proceeded to warm at its current rate, worldwide sea levels would rise “20 feet.”

On Oct. 16, 2009, then Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and later presidential candidate and secretary of state, proclaimed, “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.”

Last year, an Antarctic iceberg named A23a, floating in the southern ocean since 1986, the size of the state of Rhode Island and weighing a trillion tons, threatened to smash into South Georgia Island (site of explorer Ernest Shakleton’s grave) before it harmlessly spun away and melted. Catastrophe avoided.

New Data, Research

Is the apocalyptic scenario an unavoidable future? Two new scientific studies have found that melting ice in Antarctica has reversed and slowed in the Northern Hemisphere’s Arctic. It’s too soon to reach any overarching lessons from this new data, but worthwhile acknowledging that few scientific “facts” are immutable.

At the South Pole, a team of Chinese researchers led by Wei Wang of Tongji University of Shanghai found that ice on the Antarctic ice sheet increased from 2021 to 2023, following 19 years of decrease starting in 2002.

Published March 19 in the peer reviewed Springer Nature journal Science China Earth Sciences, the research team found that Antarctica’s melting glaciers caused the “global mean sea level” (GMSL) to rise by “5.99±0,52 mm ( milllimeteres) by February 2020. Then the ice began accumulating in the followed three years, “ultimately resulting in a total GMSL contribution of 5.10±0.52 mm by the end of 2023.” 

Moving to the North Pole, a March 29 analysis by four researchers led by Mark England from the University of Bristol, published in the ESS Open Archive research platform wrote, “Over the past two decades, Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005. This pause is robust across observational datasets, metrics, and seasons.”

What to make of these surprising findings that contradict the popular notion of the impact of climate change, long promoted by some researchers who appear to have more interest in advancing policy positions than science? Researcher England titles his team’s research paper as “Surprising, but not unexpected, multi-decadal pause in Arctic sea ice loss.”

The Arctic paper, in typical low-key scientific language, says, “The modelling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades, although possible contributions from changes in the forced response remain uncertain. Overall, this observed pause in Arctic sea ice decline is consistent with simulated internal variability superimposed on the long term trend according to the bulk of the climate modelling evidence.”

The Wang Antarctic paper concludes modestly, “Overall, the study presents the mass change characteristics of the [Antarctic Ice Sheet] over the past 22 years, highlights the instability of four important glacier basins in the [East Antarctic Ice Sheet], and provides valuable scientific insights for related polar research.”

Pielke View

U.S. climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., wrote in an op-ed in the New York Post, “When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.”

Taken together, says Pielke, “the two studies remind us that the global climate system remains unpredictable, defying simplistic expectations that change moves only in one direction.”

Writing in The Honest Broker, Pielke observes that “climate research is not a scoreboard in a Manichean debate, but instead offers certainties, uncertainties, and even areas of total ignorance that establish a nuanced context for developing robust mitigation and adaptation policies.”

He adds, “Humans affect the climate system in many ways, including greenhouse gas emissions, but also through land management, air pollution, and vegetation dynamics. At a planetary scale the net effect of these changes – driven by carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil – is a warming of the planetary system. Anticipating regional and local consequences is far more challenging.”

Pielke recalls the lament of the late, great climate scientist Steve Schneider (1945-2010) in 2002: “I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems.”

Conclusion

What is supposed to be in the world of unsettled climate science cannot substitute for data. And climate models cannot rescue theory or data. Climate modeling is hope-in-process. Gavin Schmidt states:

models are always wrong, but the degree to which they can be useful needs to be addressed – by variable or by model generation or by model completeness etc…. an accumulation of improvements – in physics, resolution, completeness, forcings – have led to a gradual improvement in skill (not just in the sea ice trends!)…. The history of Arctic sea ice comparisons shows that it might be premature to conclude that any specific discrepancies imply that something is fundamentally wrong, or that climate modeling is in a ‘crisis’ (Shaw and Stevens, 2025), it may well be that these discrepancies will resolve themselves in the course of ‘normal’ model development (and as the observed signals become clearer). Or not ;-).

Only the future will tell…. or not.