That statement was a red flag for me, because it compares the rise over the past twenty years with that over more than a century. The fact that three of the seven inches of rise since the dawn of the twentieth century occurred in the past twenty-five years does indeed seem alarming—but suddenly less so if you know that it also rose almost as much (6 cm, as opposed to 7 cm) in the twenty-five years between 1935 and 1960.
