National Geographic’s Junk Science: How long will it take for sea level rise to reach midway up the Statue of Liberty?

Count me in as one of those others who found out long ago how biased Nat Geo is and dropped the subscription

The term “grasping at straws” in a marketing/agenda sense comes to mind….

My question would be entirely different, and as usual, more philosophical than scientific. Assuming that this would be a global event, with water at the same level everywhere, is there actually that much water on Earth?

The depicted level is pretty darned close to the absolute maximum possible if all ice in all places (Greenland + Antarctica) were melted and ended up in the oceans.

I haven’t read the story because I knew it would be nothing but propaganda after reading the following in the Editor’s Note on Page 4 of the issue: “Because there are no computer models or scientists to tell us with certainty how fast and how much the seas will rise, it is a challenge to illustrate this story. You could say it requires a leap of imagination. . . “

@ cynical scientist
Are you basing that on some formula that estimates the total volume of ice (on land) of Greenland and the Antarctic?

my sub is expired or expiring – if I get that issue I’ll send it back asking them to stop trying to get p*rn in this house, climatic or otherwise

Generation dumb.
I don’t blame National Geographic, they have long since realized that their target audience crave science fiction, the target audience are pop idol fans with limited thinking capabilities. They want a quick scare story to retweet, facebook or share.

Strange coincidence, if as they claim they just made some sort of guess, that their picture depicts almost exactly ALL of the world’s ice melted – no more no less. Since Antarctica started glaciating millions of years before the current sequence of ice ages started, they are portraying a climate something like back in the cretaceous. Even the most rabid alarmist hasn’t done that, have they? (But heck, why not? One lie is as good as another.)

Coincidentally I just wrote National Geographic a letter I’ll post separately, but first I want to correct what you report (by the way, before I even took the wrap off of my issue I was already doing the same calculation you did here regarding the length of time it would take to raise sea levels that high). They do make mention of how long it might take on the “If All the Ice Melted” supplemental poster (it makes the AIT animation look tame by comparison—Florida is reduced to several islands):
[N]o one really knows how long it would take to melt it all. Probably more than 5,000 years, some scientists say.
Followed immediately with this to stay on message:
But if we burn all the coal, oil, and gas, adding some five trillion tons of carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet.
Thought you’d also be interested to know that on the page following the poster is almost the exact picture of the moulin in Greenland you used the other day, minus the mention of soot of course. One more quote from the article:
In May the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts for million [actually, no it didn’t], the highest since three million years ago. Sea levels may have been as much as 65 feet above today’s; the Northern Hemisphere was largely ice free year-round. It would take centuries for the oceans to reach such catastrophic heights again, and much depends on whether we manage to limit future greenhouse gas emissions. In the short term scientists are still uncertain about how fast and how high seas will rise. Estimates [such as Hansen’s beauty regarding Manhattan] have repeatedly been too conservative.
And finally another from the poster:
The East Antarctic ice sheet is so large—it contains four-fifths of all the ice on Earth—that it might seem unmeltable. It survived earlier warm periods intact. Lately it seems to be thickening slightly—because of global warming. The warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which falls as snow on East Antarctica. But even this behemoth is unlikely to survive a return to an Eocene climate.
The map points out that East Antarctic contributions to global sea level amount to 175 feet. I’ll share the letter I sent next, where I, like Sully, also noted the “leap of imagination” called for by the editor. I wonder if he’ll answer. Cheers!

All right. So here’s the letter I sent to National Geographic a while ago. I know they would never publish it in part or in full (the lead paragraph offers a nice synopsis though), but I feel better for having sent it. Needed to get some of that off my chest…again. Contents:
The irony is fathoms deep in your ‘alarming’ “Rising Seas” cover depicting the Statue of Liberty half-submerged in the Atlantic, a fantasy piece of such low probability that even the most climate-anxious scientists agree such an outcome would be several millennia away. The only true threat to Liberty is immediate and comes in the form of the relentless surge offered by overzealous propagandists who enthrone the political dictates of activist post-modern pseudoscience to implement an open agenda that aims to control and punish humanity. 
Under the guise of the innocuous-sounding Sustainable Development banner, this edict to de-develop developed nations and cripple the growth of developing nations will do nothing to affect climate but much to promote poverty, wealth destruction, loss of national sovereignty, energy and resource rationing, restriction of property rights, further environmental degradation, and a general continued withering of Liberty. 
Perhaps National Geographic could turn its attention upon that global phenomenon instead of wasting any more of its valuable pages advocating a misguided political and economic philosophy anchored in anti-science, anti-human sentiment, and above all else, abject failure. It is far beyond time that your once-proud society returned to its roots in the scientific method. What passes now for climate ‘science,’ and specifically those issues concerning attribution, is nothing more than a falsely heralded consensus of unfalsifiable ignorance. Even more objectionable is the wanton promotion of this manufactured consensus as robust and unequivocal. It is a farce and a dishonor to those who established the long-standing scientific principles that, like our Liberty, wither as a result. Richard Feynman is rolling in his grave.
One must look no farther than page 127 of the “Rising Seas” issue to understand at least a small portion of what is at play here in the article by Hannah Bloch titled “Failure Is an Option.” She says:
Scientific researchers are reluctant to own up publicly to flops. Reputations and future funding depend on perceptions of success.
Indeed, but the stakes in this case are so much higher than the simple protection of a funding stream, by several orders of magnitude in fact. What is at stake is no less than Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That is no exaggeration when one objectively considers the reality that would be delivered through Sustainable Development.
Before continuing down that road, I did want to also touch upon the Editor’s Note, Sea Change, by Chris Johns. I surmise he was speaking tongue-in-cheek when he said “A catastrophe is playing out in slow motion.” Certainly true Mr. Johns, though not quite as slowly as I’d like. And there is in fact a man-made catastrophe unfolding, we agree, just not the same catastrophe. Yours is a crystal-ball catastrophe comprised of many a could, maybe or might. Mine is a crystal clear catastrophe-in-the-making equating to economic suicide. As is of cue you added this:
Because there are no computer models or scientists to tell us with certainty how fast and how much the seas will rise, it is a challenge to illustrate this story and telegraph the problem’s urgency. You could say it requires a leap of faith in imagination that is grounded in fact. 
Can I translate? 
I confess that the entropic nature of climate requires the concession of great uncertainty, or as Kevin Trenberth put it privately, “We are not close to balancing the energy budget,”  but this will not keep us from using scare-mongering imagery and uncorrelated circumstances to foster anxiety regarding the rise in sea level that has been occurring for millennia and will continue to occur until nature flips the switch back to the next age of glaciation. Despite our knowledge that mitigation will be far costlier than adaptation in regards to efficacy, environment, and economy, we are forging ahead with the mitigation agenda regardless. To keep this agenda on course we must continue to “offer up scary scenarios” and ignore the empirical evidence that points more and more strongly toward natural variability with each passing year. We choose to instead substitute empirical evidence with model-based projection that hinges upon a leap of faith in imagination rather than a foundation in sound science.
I know it is an editorial page with a statement by a photojournalist, but regurgitating unscientific phrases such as “ever more destructive storms” and a “leap of faith in imagination” is an insult to your readership. I am willing to bet that your audience is a far more skeptical bunch than you are willing to concede. Matters as contentious as anthropogenic global warming are best presented from a balanced rather than biased viewpoint, and the attempted stifling of dissent that has been the cornerstone of AGW proponents is a wholly unscientific endeavor that must be abandoned. National Geographic could lead the way were it to choose to do so, and, were it to do so, would assist in restoring faith in modern science tarnished by the stain of activist climate science.
Finally, to lend weight to my previous statements of fact, not conspiracy, regarding the impact of Sustainable Development, I offer figures derived by the UN, its chief promoter. If we continue upon this deviant course instead of the natural course we were following (the UN termed it the Golden Economic Age), by the year 2100 the global GDP will have contracted by $200 trillion ($350 trillion vs. $550 trillion). That equates to a 40% decrease in per capita income for developed countries and a 50% decrease in per capita income for developing countries. Read that again. Eighty percent of humanity lives in developing countries and this agenda aims to cut their projected wealth in half. Please keep that in mind whenever you hear it parroted that these efforts are primarily meant to help the poor. They do the exact opposite and instead will ensure that poverty is unforgivably sustained for the world’s poorest. I conclude with my earlier premise that those propagating this agenda wish only to control and punish humanity. When enough people awaken to that reality, this backward opposition to humanity’s natural course of development, this Golden Economic Age, will be swept aside. My advice to you is to join us to that end, or step aside.

Ric Werme says:
August 20, 2013 at 10:25 pm
davidmhoffer says:
August 20, 2013 at 10:19 pm
> That’s assuming the statue still exists there at all.
Copper thieves.
*
LOL. Thank you, Ric, you’ve made my afternoon. 🙂
Good article, Anthony, this info should be out there for all to see – and it will be, thanks to your blog and others like it. The warmists have nowhere to hide, and no lie escapes detection.

Did not the UN at one time have a post on their website stating there would be 50 million sea level rise by 2012? Since been quietly removed.

If I fictionalized current events into another set of subjects, and posited huge numbers of professionals blandly engaged in grandiose lies about without any apparent sense of shame or anyone but a few isolated skeptics to oppose them, it would be seen as grotesquely implausible.
On the other hand, I’m sure I could make a SyFy Channel movie out of it.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/08/20/NPR-s-Folkenflik-Edits-Out-O-Keefe-Sting-from-History-of-CEO-Scandals The important bit is the last sentence: “[Gary] Knell, whose vision for NPR was profiled just last month in the Wall Street Journal, will take over at the National Geographic Society.”

Facinating thing about this is that satellite data supposedly tells us sea levels on average are rising some 3 mm plus per year.
Central east coast USA is one of the faster subsiding places on the planet (some 0.7mm/year I think?).
Yet somehow the Battery Point tide guage only gives us 2.77 mm per year…..
And then we may take into account the 0.7 mm per year of the sea rise we measure we get from pumped aquifer water reaching the sea.

The rise of sea level is likely not a linear function.
As sea level rises, it’s surface area increases thus requiring more melt to keep the rise linear.

This would not happen, as in 23500 years the Statue of Liberty will be knocked over by a thick ice sheet …

What kind of warming would create such a sea level rise for National Geographic’s image? During the warmer Eemian interglacial Greenland’s ice sheet showed only a modest response.
(Nature – 2013) “…a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian…”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/full/nature11789.html

I was fortunate to have grown up when National Geographic was devoted to the wonders of the world and telling of the wonders of science.
Now I wonder when National Geographic was taken over by shallow hucksters and fear mongers and became a glossy tabloid.

omnologos is on to something. National Geographic is in the Climate Pornography business.
Of course there is no surprise in this. Climate Porn is a very lucrative industry. Most politicians and others of easily misled judgement are addicted to Climate Porn. Climate Porn addicts are supporting it with billions of dollars a year. Climate Porn conferences are held in expensive locations annually. The UN has even set up a large organization to push Climate Porn and publishes a review of International Climate Porn every few years, which is highly anticipated in the tabloid press.

The owners of NG, since they are in the privileged world of tax free status, don’t give a fig for actually making something that increases readership, much less a profit. They are classic modern elites: extremely wealthy, and much more interested in their politics than actually doing something productive. The explosion of so-called non-profits that are all too often simply fronts for extreme wealth to hide money and assets and dole out favors, is damaging the real world where people work and pay taxes.

I agree that liberty are sinking fast!

Galileonardo, excellent letter!
I’d recommend that as a separate post, if possible.
I noticed one small set of typos: “As is of cue you added this:” I’m sure you meant “As if on cue…”
You might also add, where you refute their mention of increases in extreme weather, that the data solidly refutes that meme.

Far more likely in 23,500 years it will look more like this.http://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/statue_planet.jpeg?w=480

National Geographic makes the same deliberate error often made by climate alarmists by inappropriately comparing NOAA tide gauge sea level data with University of Colorado satellite sea level data and then claiming that the difference in these measurements demonstrates that sea level rise is accelerating. This conclusion is scientifically invalid because these measurements address completely different aspects of sea level rise. NOAA tide gauge sea level data is the only measurement available which applies to coastal regions which cannot be measured by satellite. Tide gauge sea level data is the most accurate coastal sea level measurement data available. Satellite sea level data represent ocean volume measurements. The two results cannot be compared but are independent measurement approaches which have no common terrestrial reference framework. Those who make this scientifically invalid comparison due so in any event to push climate alarmism with the usual attributes of deception, concealment and conjecture that always drives alarmist propaganda.

galileonardo says:
August 20, 2013 at 11:42 pm
All right. So here’s the letter I sent to National Geographic a while ago…………………………etc.
That is an excellent letter. But I doubt that NG will care, or print it.
Many of us are glad you sent it to them.

At this point Nat Geo is kinda like Playboy…you look at the pictures and skip the articles.

Thanks for this post, Anthony. We get copies of NG as my wife is on some list for professional office freebies (even though we closed our office two years ago), and this issue is sitting on the kitchen counter, where every time I pass I start calculating, “Let’s see, at 3 mm per year. . .” You saved me the trouble of actually looking up the dimensions of Liberty.
Blatant scare-mongering and irresponsible promulgation of falsehoods. The current editorial staff do a great disservice to a once-noble marque.
/Mr Lynn

TimTheToolMan on August 21, 2013 at 2:37 am
The baseline scenario is different and far more likely to happen – global nuclear war (it was close in 1962 …). The specific mutation that happened to the apes is not impossible, as this has already happened once …

@Galileoleonardo –
Excellent letter, as well said as anything.
It never ceases to amaze me how these people who claim to be “helping the poor” are the ones who will do them the worst harm There is clearly a lack not only of scientific understanding and method, but also of conscience, humanity and morality, in them. I don’t believe for a minute that they don’t know what their agenda will do, and I think they intend to do the most harm possible, out of some perverse notion that “gaea” or some other anti-deity wills it. I also believe this is tied up with both their disregard of evidence contrary to their meme and their utter unconcern over the suffering they will inflict.
These people are evil, and should be given no quarter. Whatever costs attend upon repairing the damage they do should come out of their hides, and they should pay ultimate penalties for their crimes.

According to NOAA’s latest sea level budget report, sea level is increasing at ~1-2mm/year…4″ per century. And that’s with the usual caveats: 3mm uncertainty, .9mm ISA added in.
http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf

It is that kind hysterical hyperbole that created an economy in the UK that is deadly to elderly on fixed incomes. It should be a capital offense to publish rot like this. Within the time frame of the Holocene epoch, a blink in time, Ellis Island was once part of the coastal mainland and not an island at all. Where’s the picture of that?

I canceled my subscription to National Geographic a few months ago, after 30 years of being a subscriber.

How about a graphic that shows three more water lines, one that assumes the worst case IPCC projection, best case IPCC suggestion, and finally continuation of the current rate, all to the year 2100.

David Thomas Bronzich says:
August 20, 2013 at 10:29 pm
My question would be entirely different, and as usual, more philosophical than scientific. Assuming that this would be a global event, with water at the same level everywhere, is there actually that much water on Earth?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That was my first thought, followed by I wonder where they will be mining all that extra water from. Comets?
This cover puts National Geographic in the same category as the National Enquirer except the National Enquirer is more honest. It does not pretend to be anything but a sensationalist rag.
……
As I recall the pulse at the end of the Eemian had a high water benchmark of about 17 feet above present.

Abstract
The warmest millennia of at least the past 250,000 years occurred during the Last Interglaciation…
The average insolation during the key summer months (M, J, J) was ca 11% above present across the Northern Hemisphere between 130,000 and 127,000 years ago, with a slightly greater anomaly, 13%, over the Arctic. Greater summer insolation, early penultimate deglaciation, and intensification of the North Atlantic Drift, combined to reduce Arctic Ocean sea ice, allow expansion of boreal forest to the Arctic Ocean shore across vast regions, reduce permafrost, and melt almost all glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. Insolation, amplified by key boundary condition feedbacks, collectively produced Last Interglacial summer temperature anomalies 4–5 °C above present over most Arctic lands, significantly above the average Northern Hemisphere anomaly…. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379106000990

Another paper says:

During the last interglacial period (the Eemian), global sea level was at least three metres, and probably more than five metres, higher than at present1, 2. Complete melting of either the West Antarctic ice sheet or the Greenland ice sheet would today raise sea levels by 6–7 metres. But the high sea levels during the last interglacial period have been proposed to result mainly from disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet3, with model studies attributing only 1–2 m of sea-level rise to meltwater from Greenland4, 5. This result was considered consistent with ice core evidence4, although earlier work had suggested a much reduced Greenland ice sheet during the last interglacial period6.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v404/n6778/abs/404591a0.html

Kevin K. says: @ August 21, 2013 at 9:54 am
At this point Nat Geo is kinda like Playboy…you look at the pictures and skip the articles.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
NAH, Just forget Nat Geo and read Playboy, the articles are good.

Did anyone read the article? NatGeo isn’t claiming sea levels will rise to that depicted on the cover. The cover photo is simply that: a cover photo. It grabs people’s attention, with the sole purpose of getting you to buy the magazine, read the article, and maybe learn something. The author cites the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at putting maximum sea levels at 6.6 feet and 5 feet (respectively) by the end of the century.
I enjoyed your calculations, but I think they’re irrelevant.

Hi Folks, I’m new here although Allyson (A.D. Everard), my wife keeps me informed of the latest goings on.
My question is related to the “what if all the ice did melt” (due to changes in insolation for instance)?
We know that sea ice melting would make no observable difference to the sea level but has anyone calculated the nett result of the land ice melting accompanied by land mass rising due to less weight on those land masses (mainly Antarctica and Greenland) and ocean basin deepening due to the additional weight of water?
My feeling is that as the land rises, the rising portion would be localised so the extent of the ocean basins would stay about the same but the basins themselves would get a little deeper as more water and thus weight collects in them and causes them to sink a little, my guess is that there would be a little increase in ocean level but not the sort of catastrophe NG was trumpeting.
It is a complex situation but I’d be interested in whether any measurements have actually been made to determine the overall effect?
Cheers
Greg
O/T PS I used to consider that GW existed although not much was anthropogenic but I always thought that attempting to modify climate was not likely to succeed and that, like fiddling with economic policy was more likely to cause greater problems than if left alone. Finally I always thought we should adapt to any changes in climate rather than just restrict all development by various means as appears to be happening at the moment.