Repository file
Sea levels are rising
content/entries/sea-levels-are-rising.md
From Can’t Explain On GitHub
title: "Sea levels are rising" claim: "Low-lying inhabited islands will be lost to sea level rise." caption: "Twenty-two centimetres in a century. The atolls kept a different ledger." status: published example: false published: 2026-08-15T19:11:00+10:00 person: Torres Strait Regional Authority claimType: climate year: 2025 loudness: 8 tags: [climate, sea-level, islands, tsra, csiro, bom, tuvalu, "2025"] source: url: https://www.tsra.gov.au/the-torres-strait/climate-change/ date: "2025-02-05" publisher: Torres Strait Regional Authority title: "Climate change" quote: "Current understanding of long-term sea level rise indicates that most parts of the low-lying inhabited islands in the region will be lost to sea level rise." evidence: path: 2025/sea-levels-are-rising/source.md kind: html captured: "2026-08-15"
The Torres Strait Regional Authority, on its climate-change page: climate change is an “existential threat,” and “most parts of the low-lying inhabited islands in the region will be lost to sea level rise.” The Climate Council repeats the lost-islands line. BOM and CSIRO’s State of the Climate refrain is shorter: “Sea levels are rising around Australia.”
This card files that loss. It does not file “the sea is not rising.”
What did have a receipt:
- CSIRO, State of the Climate — Oceans: global mean sea level up just over 22 cm since 1900, half of that since 1970. The Climate Council writes the satellite rate as about 3.5 cm a decade. A century of rise is still measured in centimetres.
- Kench, Ford et al., Nature Communications 2018: all 101 islands of Tuvalu, four decades, local sea level up at about 3.9 mm a year — twice the then-global average. Net land area +73.5 ha (2.9%). Eight of nine atolls grew. 74% of islands increased in size. The paper’s own line: results “challenge perceptions of island loss.”
- The same agencies already distinguish king-tide flooding from an island disappearing. Inundation of a graveyard is a receipt. “Will be lost” is a forecast that the atoll-area series has not been writing.
Grammar: will be lost. Logic: a 22-centimetre century is not a sinking. Rhetoric: existential.