Sea Level and Us

If you are any kind of sentient being, a reader of literature, especially as a resident of western Pennsylvania, you know about Rachel Carson and her “The Sea Around Us” (1950). The New York Herald Tribune said of its publication: “It is a work of science; it is stamped with authority. It is a work of art; it is saturated with the excitement of mystery. It is literature.” And you also know of Ernest Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952), a novel about a man’s struggle to catch a giant marlin. Books, if you do not live on the sea, or near it, or depend on it, are how you know the sea. And you, like me, have probably taken the apparently simple term “sea level” for granted, whether reading fiction or listening to the climate scientists on record since the latter 20th century. …