Over 700 low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans have coasts that have been stable to expanding in size since the 1980s. The relative sea level rise has only been +0.46 mm/year in these regions with “almost trivial acceleration of +0.0091 mm/year²”.
The claim that sea levels are rising so fast that low-lying islands have been uniformly sinking into the sea worldwide is wholesale myth.
Actually, the opposite has been observed via satellite. A 2019 global-scale analysis of 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans revealed 89% were either stable or growing in size, and that no island larger than 10 ha (and only 4 of 334 islands larger than 5 ha) had decreased in size since the 1980s (Duvat, 2019).
Image Source: Duvat, 2019
As Dr. Alberto Boretti asserts in a new paper, one of the main reasons why Pacific and Indian Ocean islands have not been mercilessly submerged beneath the sea as a consequence of today’s “catastrophic” climate change is that sea level rise has only been rising “very slowly” in these regions: 0.46 mm/year in recent decades. The acceleration is “an almost trivial” 0.0091 mm/year².
Succinctly, “absolute sea levels are rising much slower than in climate model predictions.”