Arjay, you say that 'gravity will make the water levels around the planet average out' - but there are different sorts of gravitational pull on the oceans. For example, the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet exerts a gravitational pull on the nearby ocean - if the ice sheet goes, the ocean will indeed even out a bit, rising in areas nowhere near Antarctica. This is why one predicted outcome of the melting of the Greenland ice is a lowering of sea level close to Greenland, but a rising sea level around England as the water 'pulled in' by Greenland ice flows south. Its not just all moon and spin.

So people who actually study things like sea level rise and try and tease out it's true complexity are dismissed outright as wrong by the armchair experts - after all anyone who says, after actually studying the problem, that it could be worse for much of the world than previously understood must be considered wrong by those with their quaint old fashioned belief that what humans do can't change the climate - or ocean levels. One more out of a continuous string of scientific papers showing good reason for real alarm and for doing something before the problem reaches an unstoppable momentum gets the automatic thumbs down without even looking at tide guage or satellite data let alone such considerations as gravity and geological implications of shifting a couple of major ice sheets of mass around. And most especially not the consequences of increasing emissions.

All the shaking of the climate science "house of cards' just seems to see it settle more firmly on it's solid foundation. Must be frustrating for the true disbelievers that their efforts haven't managed to have a single leading scientific institutions come out in support of their "it's all biased, group-think based incompetence with a socialist civilisation-undermining agenda" accusations or can produce real science that offers a credible alternative explanation for recent warming that actually stands up to close sceptical scientific scrutiny.

The moon gravitational pull already increases the depth of the water it's called tides.Also the earth's rotation etc causes the water to bulge in the centre as it is.To now suggest that there might be variations depending on other forces is hardly unreasonable, in fact is would lake sense.

If any of these doubters had bothered to track the source down I think they might be surprised that is actually backed by real data.
But hey why let the facts get in the way of contrariety. After all being a sceptic means one still looks for the truth, not assume that things can't change well that would be ah um Denial.