Human Water Use Accounts For 42% of Recent Sea Level Rise

Except no one looks back at the 20th century and remembers the great sea level disaster.

Ever hear of Venice? Of course Venice is also subsiding, but seven inches on top of that has made a big difference to them.

The problem with sea level rise in the short term isn't that suddenly you're city is drowned every day of the year. It's with the increase in frequency with which rare catastrophic events occur. Every coastal city has a high water level below which flooding effects are marginal and above which they are catastrophic (e.g. a levee is overtopped). How close waters commonly come to that mark determines the impact of a marginal increase in sea level.

Cities like Venice or New Orleans which are already prone to flooding are certainly affected by an 18 cm rise in mean sea level, although that effect isn't necessarily seen every year. Boston on the other hand was built to withstand 3-4m tides and has never had a major flood from the sea, so the 18 cm rise in the 20th C. had zero effect on it. If at some point in the future sea levels rise by a meter or so, flooding might become a common event in Boston. At that point a further 18 a cm rise would be very expensive to deal with.

The effect of sea level rise is not linear, and it's not uniform throughout the world. The effect depends on how a city is constructed and situated.

Now as to "geologically stable tide guages", if you knew anything about surveying you'd know that rather begs the question. In any case you can get any result you want by arbitrarily throwing out data; *mocking* data you'd prefer not to exist doesn't count as an argument.

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