evidence: The world's leading climate scientists kicked up a storm in 2007, when they issued their best estimates of how quickly the oceans would swell as the globe warms. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that sea levels would rise by somewhere between 18 and 59 centimeters by the last decade of this century — an upper limit that seemed far too low to other scientists, given the pace of melting in Greenland and other changes. "We were hugely criticized for being too conservative," says Jerry Meehl, a climate modeler at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado and one of the authors of the IPCC's 2007 report. [...] This motion of Earth makes a big difference in estimating past events. Previous work, for example, in Bermuda and the Bahamas hinted that the coastline there was 20 meters higher than it is today during a warm period 400,000 years ago. In 2012, however, Raymo and Mitrovica calculated how the ground there had moved — and concluded that half of the apparent sea-level rise was attributable not to rising waters but to sinking land, cutting the sea-level-rise estimate in half.