I cannot find my exact source, but the following well-sourced article:
http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/dougla01/node3.html
provides a good discussion of the difficulties in determining sea level, and that many more years of data collection are required to determine the rate of sea level change.
Thank you. i'll take a look at that. I used the NASA, NOAA and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change web sites but this is way outside my field.. I only had threee courses total in atmospheric and oceanographic dynamics and its been 15 years so there is a lot I don't understand.