From Yale Climate Connections: According to a new study, one of the first estimates of sea level rise made by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change closely matches what actually happened over the past 30 years. Torbjorn Tornqvist of Tulane University: "What we found was that they did remarkably well." In the 90s, the IPCC released a report with different scenarios for carbon emissions and what each would mean for global sea-level rise. Tornqvist's study found that real-world emissions have closely tracked one of the report's middle-of-the-road scenarios; global sea levels have risen about 9 cm " very close to the 8 cm the UN report predicted. Those early predictions were made without today's advanced computer models, and they over- or underestimated the impacts of some drivers of sea-level rise.