This post on sea level reality came up in comments, posted by the author of the Climate Sanity website, Tom Moriarty.
Tom did an excellent job of visually illustrating the history of Boston Harbor and man’s plight in dealing with it, so I thought it would be worth sharing here for WUWT readers. In fact I’m so impressed, I’ve added Tom to the WUWT blogroll.
Of all the talk about sea level rise, it is interesting to point out that at least in Boston, man has easily outraced the sea. The worry about sea level is real, but the ability of man to adapt is clearly illustrated in the comparative maps. Just a note, I’ve modified the original blink comparator animation to make it a bit easier to watch. – Anthony
From Climate Sanity:
Boston, you have been warned. Sea levels are rising , and if one of the IPCC’s five scenarios is correct, the world’s oceans will rise somewhere between 18 and 59 cm (7 to 23 inches) by 2100. If that isn’t terrifying enough for the people living on the New England coast, the Boston Globe now tells us that the ocean near Boston will rise 8 inches more than the world average. How will the hapless rubes of Boston cope with this onslaught of Atlantic water?
I wouldn’t lose to much sleep worrying about the folks in Boston when it comes to pushing back against the ocean. Excerpts from the following maps were used to make an animation of the changing coastline in Boston:
- A 1775 map showing the Boston area with the rebel military works. Note especially the isthmus, known as Boston Neck< that connects the town of Boston to the mainland.
- An 1838 George W. Boynton engraving of Boston area from a Thomas G. Bradford atlas.
- USGS map of Boston area.
- A 2009 satellite image from Google Earth
The top of the animation shows the maps after photoshopping to make the land and water more obvious. The bottom of the animation shows the unaltered excerpts of the maps or images.
The panic prone will argue that our Bostonian ancestors dealt with a static ocean, not a rising ocean. Not so fast. Check out the NOAA graph below (click inside graph to see it in context at NOAA site). It shows a sea level rise rate of 2.63 mm/yr for the last 100 years in Boston. At that rate it will rise 23.9 cm (9.4 inches) by 2100.
Boston sea level rise data from NOAA. Click in image for view in context.
Anyone who panics over the IPCCs 100 year projections of rising sea levels does not understand the perseverance and ingenuity of free people. Then there are others, like James Hansen, who enjoy the feeling of panic so much that that they exagerate the probable sea level rise for this century to get their thrills. But that is a story for another day…
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Someone needs to put that neck on a diet. It got very thick didn’t it.
Heartfelt thanks AW.
Fascinating! My home town has survived 100 years of catastrophic climate change! Not only that, Boston has risen *above* the rising ocean! Indeed, all along the waterfronts of Cape Cod one can see active resistance of home-owners against rising, weather-driven seas. They build breakwaters. They build sea walls. When erosion wins the battle, they move to higher ground and build again.
One can imagine ol’ Paul Revere now: “If the seas shall rise, so too shall we. One if by land, two if by sea!”
And then, from high Earth orbit:
“Golly Zandoor, these humans are more resourceful than we thought!”
REPLY: It’s all just a matter of time and dirt. – Anthony
” does not understand the perseverance and ingenuity of free people”
who used to have lots of money. Tell me how much money it cost Boston to reclaim that much land and what the total cost is for the affected coastal regions of the world. Dubai seems to be good at it, but not all countries are as rich as them. In fact they probably will be cutting back soon given real estate prices their soon.
The piece above seems to be be saying “Let them eat cake” in the best traditions of hiding from anything possibly unpleasant.
Regards
Andy
Boston’s not alone.
http://www.racontours.com/archive/coastline_anim.php
There’s a reason neither “Water” St. nor “Front” St. is currently on the shoreline in downtown Manhattan.
Of course, the environmental [opposition] will oppose any attempts, such as jettys, bulkheads, landfill, dredging, levies and dikes to abate coastal changes. Thus making the prophecy self-fulfilling.
Can you imagine what these … these … critters [I had a couple other choice words, but settled on a tame one] would be saying if an Ice Age was beginning and sea levels were falling?! They’d be calling for dredging operations to commence immediately so ports would not be left high and dry — in a hundred years.
BTW, glad you picked up on this piece. Saw it in the comments as well and was quite impressed with the illustration of how well mankind can cope. A point for Hansen and his kind to ponder – unlike them, most of mankind isn’t sitting around bemoaning their helplessness and how the cruel fates conspire against them or imagined disasters that might come long after they’re dead and buried. Solve today’s problem today and we’ll deal with tomorrow’s problem when tomorrow gets here – if it’s still a problem. And as for a century from now – my great-great-grandkids can deal with it.
Known as Occam’s Razor. In other words, the simplest explanation is almost always the correct explanation. Unnecessarily adding new reasons to explain a natural occurrence is going down the wrong road. The sea level argument is directly connected with the CO2=AGW claim, as are all the other alarmist arguments [coral bleaching, polar temperatures, ice extent, glaciers, etc., etc.] And one by one, all the alarmist claims have been debunked.
Global warming alarmists add a minor trace gas, CO2, to the theory of natural climate variability, in which temperatures fluctuate around a moderately rising trend line going back to the LIA. There is no real world evidence that CO2 has a measurable effect. Adding CO2 to the theory of natural climate variability only muddies the waters.
Alarmists began employing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy [shooting a hole in the side of a barn, then drawing a bulls-eye around the hole] in earnest when temperatures spiked in the late ’90’s. They could have just as legitimately claimed that the decline in the number of pirates causes global warming. Adding additional, unnecessary variables is bad science.
Any effect from CO2 is so minor that it can be disregarded. As we’ve seen over most of the past decade, any effect from CO2 is swamped by other effects; as CO2 rises, the planet’s temperature has been falling.
The simplest explanation is the most likely to be the right explanation: the climate cycles naturally around a slowly rising trend line. And CO2 has little, if anything, to do with it.
“REPLY: It’s all just a matter of time and dirt. – Anthony”
And Tea from the East Indies, via your colonial ancestors. Huge grin!
Any relation Anthony? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt
Please keep up the excellent work.
Best wishes,
Perry
I live on Long Island and I’ve noticed the same sort of changes in the coastlines in and around NYC over the past century (or so) by comparing current maps to survey maps here (perhaps the source of the 1903 map in the animation):
http://docs.unh.edu/nhtopos/nhtopos.htm
So, you’re arguing that all we need to do is use fill to stop the ocean? That works for a small area like Boston — do you have any idea how much shoreline the Mississippi River has? We can’t hold it back now. The Iriwaddy? The Mekong? The Indus? The Thames?
This guy’s drunk too much of the “dirty water” in the River Charles.
REPLY: Thanks for the kind words and the inspiration Ed. At least you didn’t say I drank the dirty water out of Millard Filmore’s Bathtub. 😉 Cheers, Anthony
“REPLY: It’s all just a matter of time and dirt. – Anthony”
The trucks are busy, busy, busy filling in those shallows to make more city.
Heck, they even made new islands somewhere in Saudi Arabia just because they had the money to do it. Landfill is big business. Just don’t plan on getting your Earthquake insurance settlement when your building gets sucked into liquified goo when the big one hits.
AndyW (10:56:13) :
I live in a Third World country. No, unlike Dubai, we don’t have a lot of money, but we also have reclamation projects over here. It’s all a matter of priorities.
Ed Wrote – “So, you’re arguing that all we need to do is use fill to stop the ocean? That works for a small area like Boston — do you have any idea how much shoreline the Mississippi River has? We can’t hold it back now. The Iriwaddy? The Mekong? The Indus? The Thames?”
Britain built flood gates on the Thames to hold back the ocean. This is not a problem that can’t be fixed by simple ingenuity and sweat.
More on sea level rise 🙂
http://news.aol.com/article/sea-level-rise/483569
Thank you for that blink comparator, its a real eye-opener. In the war of the worldviews, the worldview that has mankind as both ignorant perpetrator and helpless victim needs reality checks like that once in a while.
It demonstrates the opposite worldview: our industriousness allowed us to employ natural resources to lift mankind out of poverty and into the modern age, and that same industriousness enables us to easily adapt to changes in our environment, manmade or otherwise.
Great topic, Anthony. I have always been so fascinated by it that I wrote my own text about it.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/05/boston-landfills.html
“Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”
~ William of Ockham [1285-1349]
Smokey (11:12:24) : Known as Occam’s Razor. In other words, the simplest explanation is almost always the correct explanation”
I can not longer let this misconception pass. Occam’s Razor does not mean what you state here. It means that the simplest CORRECT explanation is always the BEST explanation. It does not guarantee that the simplest theory will be correct.
I would add that anyone who thinks the lands and oceans are, or ever have been static need to take off their rose-colored glasses. No place on Earth is “safe” to live. Eventually something “bad” will happen regardless of what humans do, or the amount of trace gases in the atmosphere.
I don’t remember where I read that rising of sea levels affect coral reefs. Perhaps it was somewhere from Science magazine pages. It’s a blatant lie because corals grow upwards as sea level rises. They feed on phytoplankton, which growth is determined by the inward photon stream from the Sun, and zooplankton, which depends on the abundance of phytoplankton, so the growth of corals follows the upper layer of the euphotic environment, where phytoplankton and zooplankton grow and develop better. A rising of ~0.007 mm/day is rather adequate for the corals adaptation, which grow upwards ~0.034 mm/day. A real problem for corals would be if the sea level went more than 1 mm/day down.
If corals easily adapt, lacking of science and technology, wouldn’t humans do it?
I could swear there was a fair amount of money involved, too.
Now, why didn’t London just fill like Boston did? Could it be that Boston’s filling of the Back Bay (for instance) was to create new land for new development, and that this technique isn’t particularly useful for protecting *existing* development? While Britain’s gating of the Thames was to protect existing development?
No one claims that we can’t protect infrastructure or move cities inland as sea levels rise. The claim is that it will be *expensive*, and the example of the Thames flood gates doesn’t seem to support any claim that it’s *cheap*.
I understand Boston has created an huge underground reservoir to store the overflow should it come to that…
I was in Wellington, NZ a few months ago. Walking along a busy street hundreds of metres from the waterfront there were tiles in the footpath marking where the waterfront used to be. The tiles had a year marked on them but I forget the year. I think it was in the 1800’s. I suspect a lot of cities have pushed back the sea.
AndyW
I would doubt that the cost was more than the economic activity that was made possible by the filling because I suspect that it wasn’t a rising ocean that engendered the work but, rather, the opportunity. Capitalism.
On human ingenuity, not to forget the Dutch.
The low lying regions that are on river deltas have little danger from such small increases. Deltas generate land, at worst populations would have to move, but there will be land there to move into.
There will be a problem with coral islands, but it would be cheaper to send them boatloads of dirt than spend trillions trying to control hot air.
It seems inexhaustible by WUWT to find examples of crazy things. This is just another.
For years, scientists have talked about rising sea levels due to global warming – both from warm water expanding and the melt of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica. Predictions for the average worldwide sea rise keep changing along with the rate of ice melt. Recently, more scientists are saying the situation has worsened so that a 3-foot rise in sea level by 2100 is becoming a common theme. Boston Globe
Wouldn´t it be that all this nonsense is backed by the UN this would be just an example of yellow press trying to sell more papers.
These kind of posts must be classified as FUN STUFF….remember that nuts don´t have any humor sense.