Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don't pay attention to history

Hey Mr Watts; Sir
One thing we badly need is resource showing all the predictions made regarding the effects of climate change.
Searchable by year of prediction; year prediction is supposed to occur and the predictor; and whether the prediction was met (within experimental constraints..) or not (three outcomes :- Proved; Falsified; Indeterminate)
Can you appeal to your readership to collate this somewhere ? It’s one of those things that engineers; technicians & scientists love. And of course if CAGW predicted in 1999 that Manhattan would be under 2 metres of water then it is patently obvious that prediction is a busted flush.
It would be interesting would it not ?

Am I correct in thinking Google are devout believers in the religion of warmism ?
And Al Gore is a major shareholder in Google ?
Seems to fit together somehow. Apart from Al Gore’s house at Fisherman’s Wharf.
Don’t quite get that bit.

If you live in California, your tax dollars are funding studies like this one by the Pacific Institute:
http://www.pacinst.org/reports/sea_level_rise/index.htm
where the California coast is shown with a 1.4 meter sea level rise along with scary projections of biblical proportions. (Where is Noah now that we need him?)
One amusing truth that the authors of the study conveniently ignored is that in Northern California at Crescent City, the sea level is actually falling because the land mass is rising faster due to uplift than the sea is rising.

Will you guys please knock off this sea-level-rise-panic knocking? I am hoping to buy a waterfront property to retire in and I need sea-level-rise-panic to drive the market prices down so that I can snap up a bargain from the gullible.

Murray, good one. However, on a serious note, let me direct you to some pictures of potential lots (see above) like the one you want. To buy from the gullible this marginal fake land, is to be only slightly less gullible than the motivated seller.

Sea level is dynamic, in some areas the water level will “appear” to have risen, while in others it will again “appear” to have receded. Many, many factors are constantly at play, including erosion, silting, land depression and uplifting. Some areas of land will be under erosive loss due to currents while other areas will receive the eroded deposit. The measurement is relative. I keep asking myself, who has decided what the exact level is supposed to be, like co2? As it was last year, last millennia, 1000 yrs ago, a million????

Bangladesh has been gaining land mass over the past 30 years. See graph. While new islands appear and vanish all the time. [pdf paper]
As for coral Atolls in the Pacific ocean:

New Scientist – June 2010
“For years, people have warned that the smallest nations on the planet – island states that barely rise out of the ocean – face being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite: most have remained stable over the last 60 years, while some have even grown….During that time, local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres, or 2 millimetres per year on…”
The dynamic response of reef islands to sea-level rise [2010]

It’s all scare and no substance in the face of flattening sea level rise since the last Meltwater Pulse.

peter_dtm says:
November 28, 2010 at 10:32 am
Here is a starting point.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

You’d think that the geo-engineers might be looking at that Cumbre Vieja slab for potential action. The problem, as I understand it, is that this mass will fall into the ocean all at once; what I don’t understand is why they aren’t working on ways to bring down parts of this unstable mass in a more controlled manner. Seems to make more sense to me than the hyperventalating over MM Climate Change – which we can’t do anything about even if it were a problem.

They recently found ship remains in the World Trade Center site. The site is about three blocks from the water.
On the other side of the Wall Street area, the water line used to run at today’s Water Street, two blocks from the East River.

Hansen has transcended well beyond science and has entered into the early stages of being a raving lunatic. Unfortunately he is pulling along with him hysterics of every creed.

Murray;
Fear not. The panickees from whom you will be buying at bargoon prices are no more likely to read WUWT than they are to count starspots on Betelgeuse.

Doc;
your solution has a problem, which is that you will be spreading that much schmutz over everything each year, culminating in burying the city in ash instead of water. Why not fuse it into a seawall, and just hold the water back?
😉

I’m digging on the idea of “water lots”. The Right Solvent State of Florida holds fee simple, absolute sledloads of “water lots”, I see revenue.

Guess who owns the History Channel? Why, it’s GE, the multinational that’s going to make billions in profit from measures to stop AGW.
Soon, Comcast will be taking over as they’ve sold controlling interest to them, but that shouldn’t let GE off the hook for their media pandering- and one wonders how much control GE can still exert with what’s left of their stock holdings.

So essentially if them new yorker keep up their ludicrous additions to Manhattan not only will you guys displace the Atlantic body of water in the northern hemisphere (and talk about catastrophic anthropogenic climate change) but Manhattan will cover the whole of Atlantic in 26 000 years! OMFG, you guys’re trying to invade Europe under the guise of global warming! 0_O

“One thing we badly need is resource showing all the predictions made regarding the effects of climate change.”
Can I second the post by Peter_dtm for a Prediction Database with outcomes or current progress to predicted outcome. With links back to the original prediction and the predictor, this would be a powerful incentive to environmentalists and climate scientists not to scatter predictions like confetti in the knowledge that they will never be called to account. Perhaps the Guinness Book of Records could have a category for the worst ( and also the best) environmental and climate predictions. It could be as prestigious as the Ignobel prizes are.

The hyperbolic wailing about dramatic sea level rise has, to me, always been the most irritating of all the phony predicted catastrophes of the CAGW crowd. Despite all the money and effort invested we still have only a vague notion of what the real levels of the worlds oceans are. I say levels deliberately, because to assume that there is a singular MSL that applies across the planet is the fundamental implicit fallacy that makes the whole exercise a folly. The geoid is key component used in determining the present sea level data, especially the satellite altimetry version. In simplest terms it is an idealized abstract of the ocean surface with all variables other than variations in the Earth’s gravitational strength removed and all land masses assumed to be 100% permeable to the waters. Here is a depiction of the geoid model used calculate the the sat data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geoid_height_red_blue.png
You’ll note that the variation of surface height is on the order of 200 METERS. This is not the latest or only geoid model in use and the others I’ve seen generally have even larger variations. Then you must add lunar ocean tides, which are well, but not entirely precisely known, lunar tides in the Earth’s mantle, which are small but not negligible at the millimeter and sub-millimeter scale where the trends are quoted, wind driven surges, wave heights of 0-10 meters, temperature driven volume changes, variations driven by persistent high or low atmospheric pressure zones and numerous other factors. In the end, if the tolerances stack just right, you are looking at real elevation differences of 300 meters or more.
This would indicate that, other than within small regional zones, data from tide gauges are not comparable to gauges elsewhere on the planet. And even if the sats were miraculously able to create an accurate average anomaly for the ocean surfaces they attempt to measure, it would still tell us little that is meaningful about what is occurring at any individual points on the planet’s various coastlines.

K says: GE owns History channel…
And K, GE is buying a bunch of GM’s “greenie” cars just to stay on the “good” side of the present administration. Govt. contracts…hmmm?

Here are some coastal tidal gauge plots from the southern & eastern US coastlines. I choose these, as they seem to be away from the tectonic plate boundaries and other geodetic movements ( i.e. volcanoes). This was to reduce the “uplift” correction. Wonder how they computed “uplift” in the 1940’s, based on the instrumentation available. In addition these stations have data over relatively “long” time spans.
Two items seemed interesting, the gulf coast level station data seems to flatten over about the past decade. The second was that looking at the the increases prior to ~1950 are almost comparable to the past 60 years. Was AGW that severe back then, or is this a continuation of a natural cycle?
Have not had time to really analyze the raw data yet, so these are just first impressions.
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/n_amer_s_e_composite_4-har7A.jpg
The graphs came from:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/

Stephen Brown says:
November 28, 2010 at 2:51 pm
‘The Romans landed in AD43 and built this harbour. It is now two miles inland.
Some sea-level rise there, then!
http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/time/roman/art61315‘
Not sure about this necessarily having any direct relationship to sea level issues – my understanding is that Richborough was on the Wantsum Channel which originally separated Richborough from the Isle of Thanet (and provided a protected route around the North Foreland) . This channel silted up over the centuries and Thanet became joined to the mainland.
Having googled – Wiki thus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wantsum_Channel
‘From prehistory until the Middle Ages, the Wantsum Channel was joined by the River Stour, which entered it at Stourmouth close to its midpoint; it was a two-mile-wide (3.2 km) strait. The southern end of the channel met the sea at Richborough (Roman name, Rutupiae), downstream of Sandwich, while the northern end met the Thames Estuary at Reculver (Roman name, Regulbium). That the Romans chose both sites for forts indicates the significance of the route, which their shipping commonly used to travel between London and the continent; and which Vikings used to raid Canterbury in 839 CE.
Deposition of shingle at Stonar, at the southern end of the Channel, gradually caused it to silt up..’
and
http://www.wingham.org/Kent/History/HistoryIntro.htm

Consider
Vancouver Underwater and

To Anything is possible:
Click here to read what purports to be a debunking of your hypothetical rock rock:
<a href="http://www.lapalma-tsunami.com/&quot;
NOthing is as it seems, it seems…

Holy cow, that piture must show a 100 foot rise in a sort time span (modern buildings dont seem to last that long, I have driven across a road bridge build in the twelth century and the river is about what it was then., I dont suppose many modern structures will be standing in 800 years.

Anthony, you have created a great post – again!
Much the same story line can be made for the Puget Sound Lowland (Seattle and Tacoma are the large cities that have built partially on fill).
However, the very serious threat is not the slow rise or fall of sea level. There exists the real possibility of a massive shift of the coastal area and a seismic event not experienced here for hundreds of years. The evidence for earthquakes along this plate margin of Magnitude 9+ is known.
See here about PANGA (Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array):
http://www.geodesy.cwu.edu/
The link on the upper left “Cascadia Earthquake Rupture Model” is part of the story. [Sunday evening 11/28/2010: the server seems a bit flaky – I’ll check with CWU on Monday]
Here is a Seattle Times story (one year ago):
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010284740_megaquake17m.html
Moral: Many serious problems worldwide are not getting the attention they deserve, while CAGW sucks money, political leadership, and action into a void.

Dave N says on November 28, 2010 at 6:05 pm

I thought everyone knows that alarmists have shifted from dramatic sea level rise to “extreme” weather events? Those are much easier targets, since they happen all the time. It’s like watching tribal elders blame heatwaves, coldsnaps, floods, drought and storms on angry gods. Pathetic.

More cargo-cult science.

No wonder sea level is rising, we keep throwing our garbage into it and then building on it!

timheyes says:
November 28, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Oh my. It really is worse than we thought. If Manhattan has got wider, that means the Hudson has got narrower and the water is running into the sea faster!! /sarc.
According to a program on the History or Discovery channel (I don’t remember which) that is exactly the problem that some engineers are worried about, since the increased flow rate will cause the bed of the river to wash out to sea, uncovering the trans-Hudson tunnels.

Ken Roberts,
Your first link is not working, but the second one is. Thanks – glad to have learned the truth about La Palma Rock and the insurance industry’s perfidy.

[snip – we don’t need vulgarity in your comments to push your point of view repeatedly. – take a time out ~mod]

Errata: “10 cm/yr movement from 1990 to 1993.”

Well that clearly didn’t work as expected.
Mike says:
November 28, 2010 at 8:30 pm
” Places such as Bangladesh and the Mekong Delta are very venerable. ”
So, apparently, is the Pope.

“The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water in 20 years” —with the sea level rising at about 3mm per year and the land still rising at up to 1cm (10mm per year) as post glacial rebound … see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound … it’s going to take a bit longer than 20 years for the highway to turn amphibious. Add to that, the reclamations and I don’t think New Yorkers, nor anyone else on the North Eastern seaboard from Hudson Bay south, has anything to worry about at all.

“Playing craps with our future is an option, just not a very smart one. ”
Once again, a warmist demonstrates that people in their religion never passed sixth grade. Reading comprehension is something you should have learned if you had. I have watched your posts here for about a month now. You have never read anything said by anyone here and chime in with rhetoric which is emotional, non-scientific, and snarky.
Fear and emotional appeals are what religions have been using for centuries to guilt and/or force people into doing things that they do not believe in. Everytime you repeat that, you make the smarter people distance themselves from you even more. So if we made a graph of believers of agw and intelligence, we would find it to be an upside down hockey stick. . . . . Ironic, I know…but you must admit the battle was lost a little over a year ago when the truth came out.

“You can even interactively freak yourself out[…]”
Quote of the decade!

Well I’ve looked at a number of these high rise water pictures and they all have one thing in common. All of the sea level rise takes place inside a bathtub; they just show the water going up the vertical walls.
How about showing all of the new beach front property that will be created; which will slow the rise rate down.
In fact my analysis suggests that the actual rise is consistent with it being a logarithmic function of the total ice melt rate; so all these disaster predictions; excuse me; projections; are highly exaggerated. There’s a fairly good chance that the sea level will stop rising; certainly by the time all the land is covered; or if not then shortly thereafter.
We have plenty of time to build boats, since my analysis shows that the time to inundation grows exponentially with the ice melt amount; so even though the sea level rise will evntually stop; we will never get to total inundation anyway; so that means we don’t need to build so many boats.

My wife has an aunt that will turn 100 next month. She still has all her marbles and has a very good memory. She can remember going to the train station to see off her dad as a soldier to France in WW. She still has the little Canadian flag she waved on that day.
I asked her what else she could remember from her early years, specifically mentioning New York City. Not a word came up about the water level in the harbor.
From the early years the only things that mattered was WW1, the depression and WW2. I figured I might as well ask someone who was around in those early years to see what mattered.

I can’t help but feel that so much of AGW has come down to some sick version of Pascal’s wager (religious philosophy). Pascal basically said that belief in God was a good idea logically because when the options were broken down into equal probabilities, only one choice allowed access to heaven and had no equivalent positive on the lack of belief side (Either there is a God, you believe and go to heaven or disbelieve and go to hell. Or there is no God and your belief gained you or lossed you nothing.) Problem being with Pascal’s wager is the same as with AGW today.
The greenies scream at you about Mitigation, because their calculations don’t take into account the same things that Pascal didn’t.
1) Is the belief you speak about even the right one? Pascal’s wager states that belief in God is the best bet, but how do you choose the RIGHT religion? His answer was based in his own biased worldview where Christianity was inherently right, but if the correct answer was the Mayan beliefs, then we’re all screwed today.
Similarly, the idea of mitigation only works if you pick the RIGHT future scenario of doom and gloom and mitigate appropriately. Presuppose that AGW is wrong, and in 20 years glaciation will already be advancing into inhabited areas of Russia and Canada, all your attempts to decrease carbon to offset warming was wasted and you’re now going to go desperately in the other direction to stave off as much damage as possible.
2) The wager ignores the damages done inherently by accepting that belief over disbelief/uncertainty. Assuming Christianity is wrong, you haven’t *only* made the wrong choice by believing, but you’ve spent numerous hours devoted to that cause. While with religion, many of the actions made in the name of your belief will be (hopefully) altruistic, what about the people who shoot abortion doctors over their belief in God? Did these people’s actions, assuming a world without God, make the world a better place for people? Were their actions, in the name of their religion, inherently good? Misdeeds performed, time/money wasted, and active suppression of REAL ideas in the name of the dogmatic laws of the belief structure can serve to stifle appropriate debate in the name of beliefs. Without AGW, maybe we’d have a better idea of what was really going on on this planet, climate-wise, and maybe the environmental movement would be involved stopping something people actually would care about appropriately.
Just like with religion, the unintentional attempting to resurrect Pascal’s wager as a AGW-belief cry (do it because not doing it isn’t logical since if I’m right we’re all screwed and if you’re right, nothing will happen and you didn’t waste anything) is wasting manpower, money, and credibility of the enviros. Mitigation for the sake of uncertainty, coupled with the economic suicide it brings is enough reason to send the AGW crowd back to the drawing board until they can actually produce some DECENT research.
Also, in relation to the Cumbre Vieja “mega-tsunami” concept. Believing in that is utter idiocy. First off, these rock formations, as a general rule, do not abruptly fall off, they generally slide in slowly. But assuming a catastrophic falling in like that, the simple physics of the situation doesn’t lend over to the propogation of tsunamis around the Atlantic basin. It’s a simple matter of not enough energy, due to not enough displacement. Tsunamis are usually not caused by large splashes made by big rocks falling into the ocean, but by suboceanic plate tectonics. While landslides can cause tsunamis, the waves don’t propogate as far or as dangerously, and there has never been an incidence of it.
Quite frankly, I can’t say that I really have the geological knowledge to determine the amount of potential energy that would be stored in that chunk of rock, but I have a feeling that given the kind of earthquakes that spawned the local Indonesian tsunamis, versus their overall ability to drown out shorelines thousands of miles away (effectively none, outside of the local areas, there was almost no tsunami damages), I’m guessing that the effect will very rapidly be dissipated, causing only minor disturbances to the US East Coast, and maybe only slightly catastrophic flooding along the African and European coasts.

Re: Quote from Hansen.
“REPLY: Oh puhleeze. Alleged quote? It’s in salon.com and a book:
http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html”
It is in a book! It is on line! Well then it must be true!! Please remember your Freshman English classes and relearn how to assess the reliability of sources. The quote was not from a recorded interview. The quote was something Suzy Hansen (no relation) remembered from a conversation that occurred a decade before. (She claims to have checked with him, but it is not clear which remarks she verified.) I have no idea if Jim Hansen said this and neither do you. I suggest you check with him before reproducing it again. Is there anything in Jim Hansen’s publications similar to these claims? And, yes I would level the same criticism at Salon.com.

Clear and sharp. Rien à demander de plus. A+