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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

It's a dynamic and complex system, not all metrics tracking the consequences of climate change will be evolving in perfect synchrony, and they will not change everywhere in the same way.

Also sea level does not rise equally all around the globe: "Sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average due to local factors such as land subsidence from natural processes and withdrawal of groundwater and fossil fuels, changes in regional ocean currents, and whether the land is still rebounding from the compressive weight of Ice Age glaciers." [1]

Looking at a single metric from a single place is quite shallow reasoning. Ask a Canadian if they are already seeing strong negative effects from warming and you will get the exact opposite reaction from you after what happened there over the last year.

[1]: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html

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Yet nobody seems to produce sea level graphs with an accelerating trend from anywhere. Yet for the The Netherlands we have 4 measuring stations which are consistent.

Your link only mentions 'and the rate has increased in recent decades' but then only talks about sea level rise.

Nobody is disputing sea level is rising : we have exited an ice age.

And before you accuse me of shallow reasoning : why don't you come up with the graphs?

> "And before you accuse me of shallow reasoning : why don't you come up with the graphs?"

Because that's irrelevant to my point? That sea level is rising or not, and specifically in The Netherlands at that, cannot reasonably be used as a proxy to decide whether or not we are globally starting to feel the consequence of global warming.

But here is a graph anyway: https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...

And here is another one: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

And here is a quote: "The rate of sea level rise has accelerated considerably relative to the pre-industrial era. Over the twentieth century, global sea level increased at an average rate of about 2 mm yr–1, which is substantially larger than the rate of the previous three millennia. Furthermore, evidence now exists for additional acceleration during the twentieth century" [2]

But I see you are pulling your climate facts from a website that states "The warming is beneficial for people and nature" and "Large-scale use of 'renewable' energy is bad for nature and the environment", so I don't really know why I am bothering arguing with you.

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49588416_Global_Sea...

I should have known everything would be used against me. That site was the first that popped up in zhe Google when I was looking for the graph.

In previous comments, I linked directly to the measuring stations feeds ( if only I could search my HN comments ).

The graph is the same, what does it matter which site it is hosted on?

How come the rise in the late 1800's and early 1900's is already 'substantially larger' ( how much? ) than the millenia before ( if true? ). The car was hardly invented.

And your graphs : if I squint really hard, I might see some acceleration in the last 10-15 years. But it could as well be statistical insignificant in the time frames we are talking about.

Your points are fair and it is always a healthy situation to be suspicious of ominous news. At the same time, it is important to keep looking for answers to our misunderstanding on the climate change. The good news is that the IPCC did a really great job for pointing all the resources in their executive summary. The main answer to your counter intuitive observation is that the internal variability of the climate is huge. For example, the European countries might know no warming during 10 years and then a sudden rebound in a few years. So it is important not looking at the small scale but only at the global scale. It is difficult to summarize the internal variabilities on a single comment, but you will easily find a lot of explanations about it on the iinternet .

> that site was the first that popped up in zhe Google when I was looking for the graph

I apologise for my tone then. I have too much faith in Google, and thought that this was the kind of site you would have to explicitly look for.

> And your graphs : if I squint really hard, I might see some acceleration in the last 10-15 years. But it could as well be statistical insignificant in the time frames we are talking about.

I have plotted what would roughly be a constant yearly increase of the sea level from both graphs here so it can be seen more clearly: https://imgur.com/a/Lts6MEU

The acceleration can very clearly be seen starting from around the 90s, especially in the second graph since this one goes to 2020s instead of 2010 in the first.

I have no idea why specifically the sea level as measured in The Netherland would not show that acceleration, it might be due to one of the reason highlighted in my first post, but sadly it's not something that holds globally.

Not just Canada. I'm the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany there were massive river floods this year leading to great loss of life.

The Netherlands had more physical mitigations so was spared the deaths but it was still a disaster

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