Climate Change Denial Myth #2: Are Sea Levels Rising?

Yesterday I started a new misconception series on the topic of climate change.  The first post looked at the "climate change is real, but the Sun causes it" myth.  Today we look at the "it's not real at all" myth that claims sea levels are not rising at all.

Are sea levels rising?

This question can be answered by measuring sea levels and charting the data over a long period of time, which has been done.  I pulled the graph below from Popular Science, but the data itself comes from NASA.

Data showing rise in sea levels.

A 3.4 mm rise in sea level may not seem like much, but over 30 years this works out to 8-10 cm.  Again, this may not seem like a lot, but when much of the world is at or near sea level, even a few centimeters makes a large difference to people living in coastal regions and their economies.  Effects in local economies can reverberate to the world economy which affects all of us. 

It's also important to chart sea levels over long periods of time to avoid cherry picking the data.  It's possible, due to local weather conditions, for overall sea level to decrease in any given year, as you can see above.  But the long term trend is continued sea level rise.

Sure, one could argue that NASA is lying, but to what gain?  The argument that sea levels are not rising is nonsense and easily disputed by the data.