CRISISBOOM

If one man could hold back the sea, North Carolina wouldn’t need to worry about rising ocean levels. Neither would New York, Boston or Miami. (Photo: Reuters Photographer/Reuters)

The problem with reports about rising sea levels is that the damn thing—the world’s ocean—seems to creep up very, very slowly. In the past 21 centuries it’s raised an average of .07874 an inch every year, about the thickness of a nickel.

That doesn’t sound like much, right? Nothing to worry about! But what makes rising sea levels a deadly serious problem is that the ocean just keeps creeping up, up, up. And the average in recent decades is more like an inch a year.

In fact a new report from the National Academy of Sciences says the rate of Read more…