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

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+