I am shocked — shocked — to report that global sea levels are not rising due to climate change.

What is shocking is what had never been done before: actually going out and measuring ocean levels against projections instead of warning about catastrophic rising based on computer models.

Computer models dictate an awful lot of climate alarmism, in fact, but like Artificial Intelligence, those models are only as good as the data put in. Far too often, it’s garbage in, garbage out.

In a peer-reviewed paper titled “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes,” Dutch researchers Hessel Voortman and Rob de Vos compared projections from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change against real-world measurements. Astonishingly, they note, “That comparison, to date, has not been made.” It’s not a comprehensive measure, as they admit “Latin America and Africa are severely under-represented” in both their data set and the IPCC’s. However, researchers did collect data from more than 200 tide-gauge stations globally.

They write in the report’s abstract, “Approximately 95% of the suitable locations show no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise.” Where there has been measurable sea level rise, “local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause.”

In their conclusion, they state:

The statistical procedure detects accelerating sea level rise in a few isolated locations. This pattern is inconsistent with sea level acceleration driven by global phenomena. Further investigation of a subset of locations revealed that local phenomena are often a plausible explanation for the locally observed pattern of sea level rise. The majority of the local causes of rapid sea level rise (or drop) appear to be geologic.

In other words, even where there is a rise in ocean levels, it’s not human-caused.

Furthermore, the increase is a far cry from alarmist projections, and they say IPCC models “significantly overestimate local sea level rise.” The median increase was just 1.5 millimeters per year, which Voortman notes “is significantly lower than the 3 to 4 mm/year often reported by climate scientists in scientific literature and the media.” He said the IPCC’s models for 2020 were “systematically too high, on average about 2 mm/year higher than the measured values, with significant regional variations.”

He also marveled over the fact that this kind of study had never been done before. “It is crazy that it had not been done,” Voortman told independent journalist Michael Shellenberger. “I started doing this research in 2021 by doing the literature review. ‘Who has done the comparison of the projections with the observations?’ And there were none.”

What else was different about this study? It wasn’t funded by the usual “green.” It’s pretty tough to get a climate research grant unless you plan to prove that climate change is human-caused and happening at alarming rates. If you don’t share that red-on-the-inside agenda, you won’t get green-on-the-outside cash for research.

Voortman actually produces real-world projects as opposed to making a living off of research grants at a university. According to the New York Post, he “has spent the last 30 years as a hydraulic engineer working with flood protection and coastal-infrastructure adaptation projects around the world.”

“From practice,” he said, “I had already encountered the situation that sea level projections were exceeding sea level observations.”

This research doesn’t mean we don’t need models, he said, or that climate change isn’t happening. Yet his work is critical in proving that the alarmists are grossly overstating things, and, more importantly, they’re doing so in order to justify governments seizing more power over and money from citizens.

The alarmists have been wrong about sea levels. They’ve been wrong about Antarctic sea ice. They’ve been wrong about so many things that I don’t have the space to hit them all.

Finally, however, speaking of money for the Great Climate Grift, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Donald Trump’s EPA on Tuesday, saying the agency can cancel $20 billion in taxpayer money awarded to climate alarmists by Joe Biden’s administration. That ruling will be appealed, no doubt, but it’s a welcome overturning of another activist lower-court ruling by Trump-deranged DC District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

“EPA terminated the grants because of concerns about the integrity of the grantmaking process,” wrote Judge Neomi Rao for the DC Circuit Court. “Concerns” is putting it mildly, given that Biden’s EPA consciously spent as quickly as possible, throwing billions of dollars to leftist middlemen to prevent the Trump administration from using the funds.

“Get the money out as fast as possible before they [the Trump administration] come in,” former EPA advisor Brent Efron was caught saying in an undercover video captured by Project Veritas. “It’s like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

Come to think of it, if the ocean is rising a little, maybe it’s because statists keep throwing gold bars overboard.

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