I live directly across the street from the Mannington Meadows here in South Jersey and I've lived here for all of my 62 years and I can state with out fear that the tides and water level here are the same as they've always been. If anything they might be less as the house across the street that used to turn into an island with really high tides is high and dry these days. The road used to flood on a regular basis and never does these days. (Part of that may be due to several repavings that raised the road a bit.)
When it comes to rising sea levels, if they exist at all, you also have to factor in the billions of gallons taken from underground aquifers, the billions of gallons that get collected in storm drains and moved to the nearbyrivers/strea,m/creeks and ultimately back to the ocean.
Here in New Jersey we have the Kirkwood/Cohansey aquifer that holds about 17 trillion gallons of water. There are almost 958 high volume wells pumping an average of 400 gallons per minute from that aquifer. At 400 gallons per minute that's 576,000 gallons per day. Where does it go? Into municipal water supplies where it's used and then sent to waste treatment plants where it's treated and then dumped into nearby rivers/bays and ultimately back to the ocean.
So, from one aquifer serving just part of NJ we're dumping about a half million gallons of water a day into the ocean. That's 210+ million gallons of water per year from one small part of one small state. And guess what? New Jersey isn't the only state doing this! It happens all around the country and all around the world!
So, um, why aren't we all under water now? A funny thing happens when sea levels rise. They hit dry land. As hard as this is to believe for the "World is ending!" folk, water doesn't just pile up on dry soil. It gets grabbed by nasty old gravity and pulled downward, as far as gravity can pull it. There it pools and surprise! Becomes an aquifer.
A funny thing happens when water goes into the ground. It displaces the land above it. As it goes down, the land goes up! Whoa! Who could have seen that coming? Well, anyone with a basic understanding of physics, but that's besides the point.
Around here all the paved roads have storm sewers that dump rain water back to the river. Many homes connect their gutters to drain that funnels the water to the storm sewers. All the paved drvieways are sloped so rain water (and snow melt) end up going down to the gutters adn into the storm sewers and off to the rivers. This is a whole lot of water that should have been absorbed by the soil being diverted to the seas. Hundreds of millions of gallons per year. But just ignore that. It's not important.
The "We're all doomed!" crowd tends to ignore any sicence that discagrees with their beliefs. If the initial predicitons of rising sea levels from global warming back in the late seventies had been accurate, I'd be typing this with water up to my chin. Guess what? They were wrong. Oh, but now we know better! Uh, no.
As to Venice, I find it entertaining that people think Roman builders 1600 years ago made buildings that couldn't sink into wet, boggy soil on the islands they built them on, but now think no modern building should ever be built on such soil or they'll sink and collapse. Is the sea level in Venice rising or are the buildings sinking? Or is it a little of both?
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
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