Reader John Smith writes in with this interesting photo essay.
Dear Anthony —
Back in November 2010 you did a post ( Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history) about sea level rise and its effects on Manhattan Island. The post started with this picture from an Armageddon Week special on the History Channel, showing what lower Manhattan would supposedly look like after one hundred feet or so of sea level rise.
You then included historical information about Manhattan, showing how, despite some sea level rise over the centuries, the dry land of Manhattan Island had actually increased greatly, due to ongoing landfill by the inhabitants.
Your readers may be interested to know that the process of landfill in lower Manhattan continues to this day. This has nothing to do with global warming or sea level rise. The latest project, taking place literally in the shadow of the new One World Trade Center, involves construction of a riverside park in the very spot where the debris from the old World Trade Center was loaded onto barges to be shipped away. Lots of new soil is arriving to serve as a home to the plants and trees to follow.
This first picture was taken along the bike path approximately 2500 feet North of the World Trade Center construction site, looking West. The large piles of soil have been trucked in over the last several weeks. Behind the soil is the Hudson River, and the tall buildings in the background are in Jersey City, New Jersey.
In this second picture we are looking Southwest from the same spot. These piles are mostly gravel, presumably for subsoil. The large plastic bags are what the soil arrives in. There looks to be plenty of landfill here to raise the level of the area under construction by at least several inches.
Looking due South from the same spot along the bike path, the tall building in the center with cranes on top is the new One World Trade Center under construction. It is currently at about 65 stories, a little over half of its final height. Since the building will be 1776 feet high, and this spot is about 2500 feet away and just West of due North, this spot will be in the shadow of the new building between about 11 AM and 12 AM during much of the colder half of the year. The building immediately next to the One World Trade Center construction is Seven World Trade Center, also visible at the upper left of your History Channel picture.
Finally, another part of the construction project involves raising the sea wall that forms the shore line of Manhattan. As far as I can tell, this part of the project has nothing to do with protecting Manhattan against sea level rise, but rather is an esthetic matter to make the sea wall in the Tribeca segment of the park transition smoothly to the sea wall surrounding the Battery Park City neighborhood immediately to its South. The Battery Park City wall had been built several feet higher, so previously there was a large step up where one ended and the other began. This last picture is taken from the North side of Battery Park City (less than 1500 feet from One World Trade Center), looking East back to the sea wall of the island just North of Battery Park City. This is actually the spot where the debris from the old WTC was loaded onto barges some nine and a half years ago. The lower, dark portion of the wall pre-existed, and the upper, white portion was built approximately one to two years ago.
This should provide plenty of protection against any potential sea level rise for the next century or two!
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I’ve added this Google Earth map to help readers locate the place – Jim Hansen’s office is further North near the West Side Highway. Click image to enlarge.
Oh, Dr. Hansen! I hope some enterprising judge lists all of his failed predictions before tossing his glurge lawsuit out of court.
[snip – inappropriate comment – Anthony]
Interesting post. But it shouldn’t be used to go down the slippery slope of conceding that much, if any sealevel rise is a sure thing.
The region is still rising from isostatic rebound following the Wisconsin Glacial advance.
We have repeatedly heard about such sea level rises in Hawaii. All the while the sea levels have remained more constant than they have in millenia. You can simply go to pilings, etc. and view the evidence. We have issues with erosion, etc. But that is primarily caused by man made interference. Actual measure of sea level seems to indicate that Maui and the Island of Hawaii are s l o w l y sinking while the smaller islands are rising. It is attributable to mass.
Hawaii has reef residue etc. more than 200′ above current sea level. Albeit placed a while ago. Now that is scary. And it has not nothing to do with CO2 levels that anyone can ascertain.
I thought the Stern Report said that people could only sit there and be drowned?
That new wall looks more proportional, and nicer. If it helps calm the nerves of risophobes – or whatever people living in fear of sea level rise are called – and its in a new construction area, why not?
Great to see that new WTC going up.
Steven Rosenberg says:
May 17, 2011 at 9:55 pm
“Interesting post. But it shouldn’t be used to go down the slippery slope of conceding that much, if any sealevel rise is a sure thing.”
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Nothing in “climate science” appears to be a sure thing — except lots of strange science and weird analysis from both sides. But there is 120+ years of tidal gauge data backed up by 20 years of satellite measurement that says that sea level has been rising at about 20 cm (8 inches) per century since 1880 or so (and probably before). The satellite data shows a bit higher rate — 30 cm per century (a foot). A reasonable person might — and I emphasize might — choose to use the satellite rate despite the rather short timespan. Satellites have better coverage. Even the folks at Alarmist Central (the IPCC) could only conjure up a maximum of 48cm (19 inches) in the 21st century in AR4. I personally have concluded over time that IPCC projections are similar to China’s notoriously bizarre economic statistics — dubious analysis of iffy data to obtain quite likely biased results. Note that the IPCC manages to find an increase in rate of sea level rise around 1940 that is missing from the Wikipedia chart. I can’t think of a single reason to prefer IPCC data to data from any other remotely credible source.
BTW, the Wikipedia article on sea level rise appears to be excellent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise And despite my low opinions of IPCC credibility, their treatment of sea level rise in AR4 doesn’t seem to be really awful. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-5-1.html
pat says:
May 17, 2011 at 10:33 pm
“Actual measure of sea level seems to indicate that Maui and the Island of Hawaii are s l o w l y sinking while the smaller islands are rising. It is attributable to mass.”
You are possibly aware, the Hawaiian Islands are the highest points in a chain of volcanos (the Emperor Seamounts) that stretches from slightly SE of the island of Hawaii to the Aleutian trench. What we’re pretty sure is going on is that there is a hotspot volcano currently located under the island of Hawaii and the Lo’ihi seamount. As the Pacific Plate moves NW, volcanic islands are built over the SE end of the chain. As the islands move NW, their source of lava is eventually cut off and the islands then both erode and sink until they eventually no longer make it to the surface. I believe that the most Westerly island that still has some lava above sea level is French Frigate Shoal about half way between Oahu and Midway. The most westerly island of any sort is Kure atoll.
So, overall, the Hawaiian islands other than possibly Hawaii are probably all sinking very slowly.
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“Hawaii has reef residue etc. more than 200′ above current sea level. Albeit placed a while ago. Now that is scary. And it has not nothing to do with CO2 levels that anyone can ascertain.”
Some of those have been reinterpreted as tsunami debris. Not sure that some of them might not be legitimate reminders of higher sea levels in the relatively recent geologic past (when? Surely, no more than a few million years?). And no, the evidence does not seem to me to implicate CO2 as the primary agent in sea level rise and fall. I could easily be wrong. But so could the climate scientists. Or — and I think this most likely — we could both be wrong.
“The region is still rising from isostatic rebound following the Wisconsin Glacial advance.”
thank you Dr Ball.
AR4 Table SPM 1 (once they corrected the incorrect figures originally published), rate of sea-level rise between 1961 & 1993, 1.8mm/yr +- 0.5mm/yr. Between 1993 & 2003 3.2mm/yr +-0.7mm/yr. Nils-Axel-Morner reckons average global sea level rise for last century was 2.3mm/yr. 1.8mm + 0.5mm = 2.3mm/yr, 3.2mm – 0.7mm =2.4mm/yr. Call me mister picky but to all intents & purposes these numbers are identical, & who’s worried about a 1/10th of a millimeter increase in sea-level rise?
As reported in March on WUWT a new paper showed decelerations in the rate of sea level rise around the US coastline.
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1
[pdf]
Just 17 years to go before the Hudson River overflows into the streets of denying NYC. Where will Hansen be in 17 years time?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/
An excellent post, and nice to see the sunshine and fresh air of reality. Whatever mad and bad people do, most of us get on with whatever is important to us. As the old WWII poster, popular as a reprint in the UK right now puts it “Don’t Panic. Carry on.”
Sea levels were lower during past ice ages, as we all know, and they were also higher in times past. During the Cretaceous sea levels were much higher and flooded the central states of the US. (Proof- look at the Book Cliffs in Colorado and Utah. Cretaceous coals in Utah, mined at Kenilworth and shipped out on mile+ long trains from Helper with up to eight big diesel engines up the long steep track to the west). Reasons for this rapid, geologically, and extreme rise lies in a speeding up of the tectonic plate system resulting in a shallowing of ocean depths. Certainly not climate change.
I’m just waiting for the AGW study that suggests blowing up the moon to stop sea level rise.
I recently made a stunning discovery that involves no new original research, but merely observation of official tide gauge data in a wonderful archive that I found listed on the Real Climate data sources page: the vast majority of long-running (century old) single site sea level records show no trend change whatsoever in the modern era, and unlike thermometer records they are not very noisy on the decadal scale, so a historical pre-emissions-boost trend can readily be seen after only one instead of two or three centuries. The site plots them and offers a Google map of nearby records too (if you zoom out a bit). Logic dictates that claims of suddenly surging global sea level, more than predicted, should certainly show up at least a bit in a large percentage of single site records but it does not! There are dozens of century old records too, whereas the required multiple century long thermometer records only exist is a single dozen or so sites, and only in the US and Europe, all large cities.
Here are a few examples: http://oi53.tinypic.com/35b9g08.jpg
I find it hard to believe that this simple argument doesn’t feature prominently in this great debate. Searching through the archive at http://www.psmsl.org/ gives me that old feeling that I felt when I first started to become skeptical about three years ago of “my god they are just lying”. The longest records take hours to find on there though, so that’s what I recently did. Many show steady decline but very few overall show even a hint of a recent upswing away from a linear trend.
Is my logic somehow flawed? So far after a week of posting my graphic far and wide the only “criticism” I’ve received is that I’m just spouting “denialist talking points” that have been debunked long ago. That, and just pure vitriol. Or I’m accused if cherry picking by those unwilling to have a look for themselves. Real arguments are not offered since thus claim is not covered on their favorite AGW enthusiast sites.
If a more database savvy soul could send me a list of these sites in order of length of record, I’d appreciate it since the index only lists end dates (NikFromNYC@yahoo.com). It took me six hours to browse manually all those that carried past 2003 instead of ended before that and I didn’t bookmark them all, regretably. It might be fun to make a video of all the old ones.
There are also three very old (back to the 1700s) records listed under “other long records” but the data offered ends long ago too and I haven’t had time to try to extend them.
NikfromNYC
I looked into these and other tide gauges for my series ‘historic variations in sea levels.’
It is instructive to read Chapter 5 of AR4 and especially the graphs and the stuff that comes after the references.
In essence made up (sorry interpolated) tide gauge data from a century ago is spliced onto modern tide gauge material then spliced onto satellite records. There are only seven ‘historic’ tide gauge sites in the world that haven’t moved and many of those have had construction going on around them. In that respect the tide gauge record as used in Ar4 gives a very misleading view of what is going on with its artificial up tick and its precise measurements.
As you remark there is really nothing going on from our observations of actual sea levels whilst taking into account land movements. However the tide gauges are an even more flawed measurement matrix than historic temperature stations and the way they have been manipulated in Chapter 5 is an insult to science, as is the lack of historic context-we are still around 15cm below the peak during the MWP according to Moberg and Jeff Masters
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1240
tonyb
During the run-up to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen, Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute, speaking at Oxford, UK, said that the important thing about rising sea level is that it starts slowly, but once it really gets going it becomes “unstoppable.” He went on to say that when this stage is reached, even reducing human emissions of greenhouse gases to zero [all this presuming these emissions were really responsible for rising sea levels] would be insufficient to stop a global five-meter increase in sea level over the next 300 years. Reuters describes Dr. Rahmstorf in 2009 as a “widely recognized sea level expert.”
I do not know if anyone has ever refuted this claim which appears to be a call for a worldwide emergency effort before it is all too late. The Climategate scandal may well have “unsettled” the science on this issue and robbed this clarion call of much of its force.
The UN sitting right on the East River has been doing a $2Billion renovation project for the past 3 years to be completed in 2012. Why aren’t they running for higher ground?
John Marshall says:
May 18, 2011 at 2:39 am
“Sea levels were lower during past ice ages, as we all know, and they were also higher in times past. During the Cretaceous sea levels were much higher and flooded the central states of the US.”
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Yes, but … it was a different North America in the Cretaceous. For starters, there were no Rocky Mountains and the central lowlands very likely extended all the way to the Sierra Nevada — which may or may not have resembled the modern Sierra Nevada. The Appalachians were possibly a bit higher as they have probably eroded a bit (It’s not easy to explain why they are still around). I don’t think one can meaningfully compare sea levels then and now although the consensus is that there was very little permanent ice back then so sea levels were probably pretty high.
Up ’til about five years ago, the consensus was NO permanent ice in the Cretaceous, but a substantial sea level change (25 meters or so) in the late Cretaceous that is very hard to explain without invoking ice has recently been identified in Cretaceous marine sediments in New Jersey. http://geology.rutgers.edu/kgmpdf/04-Miller.GSAB.pdf
A quote from that paper “Either continental ice sheets paced sea-level changes during the Late Cretaceous, or our understanding of causal mechanisms for global sea-level
change is fundamentally flawed.” I wouldn’t rule out the latter option entirely.
Alexandria (Egypt) have been a major port for 2000+ years, without any obvious damages due to rising sea levels.
So, essentially, man fills the sea to stop the rise that, according to climatological pseudo science wording might possibly, happening due to filling the sea. :p
Bengt Abelsson says:
May 18, 2011 at 4:38 am
Alexandria (Egypt) have been a major port for 2000+ years, without any obvious damages due to rising sea levels.
No obvious damage? Cleopatra’s palace at Alexandria is ~20 feet below the sea!
I find it hard to believe with tides (and variable moon and Sun distances), wind changes, currents, water temperature changes and other factors, 1 mm of sea rise or fall could even be measured.
Not on topic, but as Don K was wondering why the Appalachian Mountains were still around, I thought I’d jump in as these are “my” mountains that I studied quite a bit for my degree in geology.
The Appies are formed from folded sedimentary rock layers, the result of the collision of Africa and North America, causing the mountain-building episode named the Appalachian Orogeny, which lasted from the late Silurian to the late Permian (approx 420-250 MY ago). They were awfully big mountains when it was all over — perhaps larger than today’s Himalayas. They were also formed from some very tough sandstones and limestones, which in regions close to the collision line were metamorphosed into even tougher rocks.
Granitic mountain chains will no doubt last even longer — but the nearly unimaginable time scales of geology is one of the reasons you don’t see many geologists on the CAGW bandwagon: we know how long these processes have been running, and how they ebb and flow over the ages.
tonyb wrote: “There are only seven ‘historic’ tide gauge sites in the world that haven’t moved and many of those have had construction going on around them.”
Which seven are these? The lack of big kinks in in the vast majority of long records is what surprised me the most, actually, so I don’t see a lot of evidence of wildly misbehaving site maintenance in the results, like I do very much see in randomly sampled thermometer records, but oddly enough not in the very oldest ones of those either.