Fact check: Sea levels are already rising faster per year than Trump claims they might rise over ‘next 497 years’

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The day after their CNN presidential debate, former President Donald Trump cited a wildly inaccurate figure about sea levels to mock President Joe Biden’s debate claim that “the only existential threat to humanity is climate change.”

Trump said at a Friday rally in Virginia that “global warming is fine,” rejecting the view of the overwhelming majority of scientists. And he said of Biden: “He said it again last night, that global warming is an existential threat. And I say that the thing that’s an existential threat is not global warming, where the ocean will rise – maybe, it may go down, also – but it may rise one eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say. One eighth.

reported in March that the current global average sea level rise in 2023 was 0.17 inches per year, more than double the rate in 1993. And a World Meteorological Organization report this year said the rate of sea level rise between 2014 and 2023 was about 0.19 inches per year. In other words, sea level rise is already more than an eighth of an inch annually – and it is accelerating.

found a jump of 0.3 inches between 2022 and 2023. Gary Griggs, a University of California, Santa Cruz professor of earth and planetary sciences who studies sea level rise, said last year that Trump’s similar claims “can only be described as totally out of touch with reality” and that Trump “has no idea what he is talking about.” Sea levels rise by different amounts in different locations.

 

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