Sea level rise in the past two decades has accelerated faster than previously thought in a sign of climate change threatening coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, a study said on Wednesday. The report, reassessing records from more than 600 tidal gauges, found that readings from 1901-90 had over-estimated the rise in sea levels. Based on revised figures for those years, the acceleration since then was greater than so far assumed. The report said the earlier readings were incomplete or skewed by local factors such as subsidence. The new analysis "suggests that the acceleration in the past two decades is 25 percent higher than previously thought," Carling Hay, a Canadian scientist at Harvard University and lead author of the study in the journal Nature, told Reuters.