Sea level has been rising steadily at an average rate of about 7 inches per century, notes Singer. Most researchers attribute this rise to factors unrelated to climate fluctuations or to any human influences.
Singer points to an offsetting factor.
This would come down over the polar regions as snow, thickening the ice caps of Greenland and the Antarctic and transferring water from the oceans to the ice sheets. It wasn't known, however, which mechanism would be the most important. Singer decided to do a statistical analysis of the available data on sea level, and to compare it with sea surface temperature and global temperature. What he discovered was a strong anti-correlation that held over the entire record, since the beginning of this century. But what the data show is that when temperatures get warmer the rate of rise slows considerably.