No. of Recommendations: 19
Current sea level rise has been very linear, in the range of 3mm/year. Doesn't seem like much, but it does add up.
Even if CO2 concentration stopped rising today, sea levels will still be rising 1000 years from now.
And at a glance, recent rates are pretty linear but not quite linear.
https://www.climate.gov/media/15200A big change in the rate any time soon is pretty unlikely, but even a very slow rate of acceleration can make a big difference over time, like an ion thruster.
The rate of change was about 3.34 mm/year in the last 10 years (comparing 10 year average of observations to the 10 year average from 10 years earlier)
The rate of change was about 3.02 mm/year in the prior 10 years
The rate of change was pretty linear at about 1.76 mm/year in the 70 years before that.
Slightly different rate measurement methods will give slightly different numbers, but there's definitely a speed-up.
So I doubt that the recent rate is the peak rate that will be seen.
Of course I don't have all that many more decade stretches to worry about personally, but I presume the acceleration itself will continue at least until CO2 concentrations stop rising.
And I personally doubt CO2 concentrations will ever stop rising until it is exogenously forced to happen. A shortage of affordable things to burn, or a shrinking of the global society that finds, transports, and burns them. In short, politics will fail utterly ever to bring about "net zero" by setting rules and incentives and subsidies and penalties and laws, but eventually economics (and demographics) will force it. Probably too late and in a bad way.
Jim
