In the Winter 2016 Coastal Forum, I noted that all U.S. agencies accept carbon dioxide and global warming projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but paradoxically do not accept IPCC sea level rise projections (Houston 2016). Instead they select sea level rise projections from a variety of publications written by authors not expert enough to be among the 71 sea level rise experts who made the IPCC (2013) projections. This has undercut the IPCC, providing ammunition to climate-change skeptics who question the credibility of sea level rise projections that differ among U.S. agencies and with the IPCC, the international agency whose mission it is to provide sea level rise projections. Adding to the confusion, individual states (e.g. California, Delaware, Maryland, New York) and regions (southeast Florida) have developed their own projections, which are combinations of projections from different publications. These projections do not agree among themselves, with federal agencies, or with the IPCC. This fragmentation contrasts with Europe, where the European Environment Agency (2019) uses IPCC projections for all 16 coastal countries in the European Union.
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