[jbotz]

> when I was a kid there were lots of news about global warming and the rising of sea level to life changing amounts in few years

No.

There was no such news, unless your only source of information were tabloid headlines.

It's a favorite strawman tactic of the deniers to say "20 years ago they told us the world would end before today and it didn't", when in truth nobody credible ever said that.

The truth is that since the near-term impacts of global warming became mainstream science and an international political issue in the late 1980s, the overwhelming majority of actual forecasts have steadily been getting worse, i.e. they were way too conservative at the beginning. Also the discourse has almost always used the "by the end of 21st century" time-frame; nobody credible ever said anything at all about (for example) sea-level rise over a couple of decades. Science is by its nature conservative, at least in official forecasts and predictions, and the political pressure was always greatest on the side of avoiding "alarmism". The result is that we're now already beginning to see real impacts (especially in the arctic) that only a decade ago were still being talked about as "by the end of the 21st century".

Sea-level rise isn't going to be fast... even in the worst case scenarios, it's still one of the global warming impacts that over the short and intermediate term we can most easily "adapt" to, by building dykes, moving people and cities, etc. Even if you turn up the heat, trillions of tons of ice just take a while to melt, and no sane scientist ever said it would happen in decades. Other global warming impacts are likely to cause global civilization bigger headaches in the next couple of decades. But over the longer term, sea-level rise is important because it is relentless, and if the last 15 years show us a trend, then it is only likely that we'll continue to see the scientific consensus lean further and further to, and beyond, the current "worst case" scenarios.

[singold]

I'm not a crazy conspirationist denier, but saying "no" to what I've experienced in MY life, is a little too much and is really not effective to convince anyone of anything, let alone a conspirationist that would think that you are a judeo-masonic-reptilian.

Nonetheless I'll tell you that my sources of information as kid were the 3 private TV news of my country and later some "science" shows from cable TV.

We can discuss if that was true science or not, but it was what lots of people were exposed to, and those "predictions" didn't happened. If your sources of information are peer reviewed scientific papers, good for you, but that is not what happens to the 99% of the population.

[flukus]

There's plenty of crappy science journalism out there, but odds are you're forgetting all the qualifying statements like "as early as" and "if emissions keep growing at the current rate". If you go check articles from 20 years ago I'd be willing to bet these qualifiers are in most of them.

Many people seem to mentally filter all these qualifying statements entirely.

[jbotz]

Well, I've lived on three different continents and during this time always read a wide range of news sources in several different languages, and MY life experience is that what you're saying didn't happen, and I don't believe that the media in any country are all that different. Oh, science reporting is atrocious and the media just love to sensationalize everything, but at the end of the day with respect to global warming what I've seen in the media from all over the world has been consistently downplaying the seriousness of it and including denier opinions "for balance".

I think that you're misremembering, and I'm calling you on it. If you want to insist, then show some evidence. Give us one link to a mainstream news source (from any country) which actually said during the last couple of decades that global sea-levels would rise by "a life-changing amount" by 2021. The Internet archive may help.