The myth of flooding Florida & the climate nonprofits selling it

Al Gore and many climate nonprofits want to scare us with images of Florida vanishing under the waves. The truth is a lot less exciting.

In An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film that won him an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, former Vice President Al Gore proposed the Greenland ice sheet might melt, causing a 20-foot rise in sea levels. “They can measure this precisely,” Gore claimed, as he showed images of Florida getting devoured by the sea.

A 2007 New York Times report about the film, a 2009 British court ruling, and other sources soon demonstrated the claim to be absurdly exaggerated.

Persistent Myth

But within the carbon alarm movement, the myth of flooding Florida has persisted. A 2015 headline from Climate Central warned: “Coastal Nations, Megacities Face 20 Feet of Sea Rise.”

The World Wildlife Fund website still makes this claim: “Glacial melt of the Greenland ice sheet is a major predictor of future sea level rise; if it melts entirely, global sea levels could rise 20 feet.”

And then there’s the NASA “Climate Kids” page:

If the ice keeps melting, global sea level could rise more than 20 feet. That would put a lot of coastlines under water. Whole islands could disappear!

NASA even added this map, so children on the Gulf Coast could imagine their homes under the waves:

Sea Level plus 20 Feet. Credit: NASA Climate Kids.

And yet, from January 1993 through January 2025, NASA’s satellites have captured a cumulative sea level increase of . . . four inches. The current rate of increase, according to NASA, is 0.17 inches per year.

That’s the thickness of three pennies stacked atop each other.

At that rate of increase, it will take 1,400 years for seas to rise 20 feet. The 35th century is so hard to imagine that it is 300 years beyond the most remote of current Star Trek storylines.

The seas have been rising since before we had cars. And the Dutch have lived below sea level for centuries yet literally kept on top of the situation. To find out how, please finish reading this report (no paywall, no sign up required) at the Capital Research Center:

The Rising Seas

Before you run off to the Capital Research Center, please “like” this post and forward to friends. If you don’t, then Al Gore might take a private jet to your house so he can discuss who REALLY won the 2000 presidential election.